Two Clips: Decasia and Spiral Jetty

I.
An excerpt from Bill Morrison's eerie Decasia. Morrison edits together found footage of decaying and damaged film and, overlaid with a creepy soundtrack, creates a strange experience. Why is this so unnerving?

It seems to me that the disintegrating film brings our awareness of the materiality of the film to the forefront (and thus an increased awareness of mortality), reminding us even more of the distance of time, heightening that "shock of discontinuity." This seems to confirm for me again that the image content is not nearly as relevant as the material in which the image is formed and presented. I'm not quite sure what that would mean for Visual Rhetoric as a discipline, however...


II.
Sontag writes ". . .photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed. In much of conceptual art, in Christo's packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist's work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). The photograph is not, even ostensibly, meant to lead us back to an original experience"(147-148). Here is Robert Smithson's film on his (in)famous earth installation Spiral Jetty, a work that is somewhat difficult to access in person. Here, Smithson plays on the idea that the "true" experience of Spiral Jetty can only occur on site, and that the "closest" we will probably get to the work of art is through this film--with Smithson playing the role of a half-serious surrogate.