"The films of Phil Solomon are centered. I feel, upon this aspect of ',':* child-abuse (in all its subtle particulars) is the subject envisionment of most of his film-making, and is implicit in almost all of it - from THE PASSAGE OF THE BRIDE, which views marriage as sacrifice of the bride-child, through to CLEPSYDRA which holds 'clock' itself (learned Time) as prime instrument of child torture and inevitable destruction.
"Solomon has mastered the step-printer (a machine which permits precise, and if one wants, automated rephotography, reversal of the motion picture image, photography within the frame. It can be said of both him and (James) Herbert, then, that they proceed a frame at a time: there the similarity ends. Solomon disintegrates the entire pictorial 'fabric' (of what is mostly found-footage, or a 'gift' as he calls it) of old movies in various states of emulsion rot. He utilizes the organic mold and dry crack patterns, the natural decay of the footage, until the original subject matter, its anima, crawls with the textural 'maggots' of its own chemical decomposition and dissolves in a beautiful display of multi-faceted light.
"As the subject most mattering to Solomon is children, the child's world, the effect of his various light textures (literally rung from the step printer's backlight as he bends every frame's illumination with his bare hands) is to re-create the photo-'dead' shadows of the lost world of childhood in direct opposition to every notion of the Romance of being young ... (most of his textural patterns appear to glow with aura, side-lit, back-lit, as if they were each rimmed with mirrors reflecting mirrors in a ripped skein-of-revelation ...)
"... It is the 19th century 'tissue of lies' about childhood which Solomon rips open: his visual beauty, a biological beauty, is an encouragement to embrace this transformative mulch, this aesthetic compost, and to give up all commas ',', of hesitation - to accept suffering even (as does most of the animal kingdom most stoically) and revel in the 'fire of waters' (as poet Robert Kelley put it) that we all are ...." -Stan Brakhage, "Time ...on Dit," Musicworks, 1995
*Donald Sutherland, in his great book On Romanticism characterized:
". (classical) ; (baroque) ," (romantic)
"Solomon's work - some of the best of contemporary experimental film - is difficult. Its optical and moral density eludes language, as if the films, which are often dark and cracked, were a palimpsest of obscured meaning. His PASSAGE OF THE BRIDE is dedicated to Duchamp's alter ego, Rrose Selavy - the title recalls Duchamp's 'The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even' - and is itself a ready-made, composed entirely from a 100-foot roll of wedding footage and what appears to be the honeymoon. BRIDE is hypnotic, dreamy. Solomon compulsively repeats recognizable images until they melt like distilled essences of the originals: The bride's run across a lawn, her climb into a car, a man (her husband?) emerging from a swim all become undulating black and white swirls of grain, ripples of water ...." - Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
1979-1980, 16mm, b&w/si, 6m, $20
Finding similarities in the pulses and shapes between my own experiments in night photography, lightning storms, and night bombing in World War II, I constructed the war at home.
"A screaming comes across the sky." - Gravity's Rainbow
"NOCTURNE strongly evokes one of Brakhage's most exquisite films, FIRE OF WATERS (1965). Its setting is a suburban neighborhood populated by kids at play and indistinct but ominous parental figures. A submerged narrative rehearses a type of young boy's nighttime game in which a flashlight is wielded in a darkened room to produce effects of aerial combat and bombardment. A sense of hostility tinged with terror seeps into commonplace movements .... Fantasy merges with nightmare, a war of dimly suppressed emotions rages beneath a veneer of household calm .... In NOCTURNE, found footage is worked so subtly into the fabric of threat that its apperception comes as a shock ploughed from the unconscious." - Paul Arthur
1980 (revised 1989), 16mm, b&w/si, 10m, $35
The film began in response to an evaporating relationship, but gradually seeped outward to anticipate other imminent disappearing acts: youth, family, friends, time .... I wanted the tonal shifts of the film's surface to act as a barometer of the changes in the emotional weather. Navigating the school bus in the fog, the lighthouse in disrepair ....
"Adopting its title from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, WHAT'S OUT TONIGHT IS LOST is an elegaic film sifting through the unrecoverable. The film is a reflecting pool where vision breaks up. The home we recognize is swallowed in the brume, the light barely penetrates; and the yellow school bus steals us away, delivering us into new clouds, embracing fear. The film has a surface of cracked porcelain and intaglio: the allergic childhood skin of cracks and bruises. This is a film of transubstantiations, the discorporation of human forms into embers. Air looms and blossoms into solidity and nearness .... I hear it breathing ...." - Mark MacElhatten
1983, 16mm, color/si, 8m (16fps), $25
"No filmmaker reveals the faith in the multiple layers of visual images that the eighties have re-affirmed more than Phil Solomon. Solomon continues the Brakhage tradition of creating a succession of images whose logic comes from a number of sources, rhythmic, formal, and associational, and whose coherence constantly switches from one source to another. As with Brakhage, one must abandon oneself to the trance-like authority of a Solomon film, and be sure-footed enough to follow a structure that relies on overtones as well as melody, on sudden flashes of metaphor as much as narrative line. THE SECRET GARDEN is one of Solomon's most exquisite films. As with Thornton and Khlar there is the shadow of a story here, one which deals with the passage from innocence and experience and invokes equally terror and ecstasy ...." - Tom Gunning, Mecano Touring Program Catalogue
1988, 16mm, color/si, 23m, $70
Partly a lullaby for the dying, partly a lament at the dusk of cinema. Based on the song by Reynaldo Hahn and Paul Verlaine.
"Mourning and melancholia. In REMAINS TO BE SEEN we hear the rhythmic scratch of a respirator and we see an elusive figure crossing a bridge. Death is bolder, more cruel in THE EXQUISITE HOUR. It's in the slacked mouth of an aged patient who's spied through a window, in a young girl's plaintive Hebrew song, in painfully vivid home movies from the '20s, in lions attacking. These films cut to the bone." - Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
Top Ten films of 1989, The Village Voice.
Exhibition: First Prize, Experimental Category, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Juror's Prize, Onion City Film Festival; Independent Focus, (WNET), 1991.
1989 (revised 1994), S8mm and 16mm, color/so, 14m, $40
Using chemical and optical treatments to coat the film with a limpid membrane of swimming crystals, coagulating into silver recall, then dissolving somewhere between the Operating Theatre, The Waterfall, and the Great Plains.
"In the melancholic REMAINS TO BE SEEN, dedicated to the memory of Solomon's mother, the scratchy rhythm of a respirator intones menace. The film, optically crisscrossed with tiny eggshell cracks, often seems on the verge of shattering. The passage from life into death is chartered by fugitive images: pans of an operating room, an old home movie of a picnic, a bicyclist in vague outline against burnt orange and blue .... Solomon measures emotions with images that seem stolen from a family album of collective memory." - Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
Top Ten Films of 1989, The Village Voice.
Award: First Prize, Oberhausen Film Festival
1989 (revised 1994), S8mm and 16mm, color/so, 17.5m, $55
Clepsydra is an ancient Greek water clock (literally, "to steal water"). This film envisions the strip of celluloid going vertically through a projector as a sprocketed waterfall (random events measured in discreet units of time), through which the silent dreams of a young girl can barely be heard under the din of an irresistable torrent, an irreversible torment.
"Solomon has evolved his technique so that in his latest work ('Clepsydra' - 'waterclock') the textures are constantly changing and are often appropriate to each figure in metaphoric interplay with each figure's gestural (symbolic) movement. He has, thus, created consonance with thought as destroyer/creator - a Kali-like aesthetic 'There is a light at the end of the tunnel' (Romantic); and it is a train coming straight at us: ... (and, to balance such, perhaps, with a touch of Zen) ... it is beautiful!" - Stan Brakhage
Award: Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1993
1992, 16mm, b&w/si, 14m, $45
A meditation on memory, burial and decay ... a belated kaddish for my father.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pinetrees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- Wallace Stevens
Awards and Exhibition: Juror's Award, First Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Sydney Int'l Film Festival; SF Int'l Film Festival.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $40
In 1999, I embarked on a feature-length series of films entitled The Twilight Psalms, a group of seven short films that can be considered to be a personal ‘secret’ history of these last 100 years of photographed moments of public and private time; a series of painterly audio/visual tone poems looking back at century’s end, closing time. This project was originally intended to be a millennial film, but I now realize that it can only be completed with the hindsight afforded by living in the rather dark ages of the early 21st century. Each Psalm will focus on a particular key cultural and historical moment in the 20th century book of tales, and will revolve around a single individual as the metaphorical pivot point Each Psalm derives its title from a particular episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, 1959-64
Inspired by Kiefer and Ryder, dedicated to Stan Brakhage.
Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph/Star, a Griffith/Méliès co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not be to fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable... Walking Distance is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore...
"Mr. Solomon's supremely lyrical PSALM imagines a movie extracted from a rusted medieval film can left over from the Bronze Age. What unfolds on the screen suggests an ancient abstract painting encrusted with rust and sand behind which human faces half-form and disappear, suggesting eons of time and civilizations rising and falling. As the film's hues metamorphose in tandem with a shifting abstract soundtrack, PSALM evokes not only rust and sand but fire, wind and oceans as well, a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction." - Stephen Holden,New York Times
1999, 16mm, color/so, 23m, $85
(In Memoriam, Anne Frank)
It is Berlin, November 9, 1938, and, as the night air is shattered throughout the city, the Rabbi of Prague is summoned from a dark slumber, called upon once again to invoke the magic letters from the Great Book that will bring his creature made from earth back to life, in the hour of need.
A kindertodenliede in black and silver on a night of gods and monsters...
from In Germany, Before the War
I’m looking at the river,
but I’m thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea
I’m looking at the river,
but I’m thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea,
-- Randy Newman
Juror's Award (First Prize) Black Maria Film Festival
2002 16mm, b/w, sound, 23 minutes $80 Rental