This is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed collaboration between the filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon.
"The profound nature of this concept will be better understood, and the positive study of it more successful, if we think of such an organization, in its temporal aspect and scope, as corresponding exactly to what is called in music the phrasing; distinguished both from the melody (which is based on the differences of pitch) and from the rhythm (based on the repetition of an arsis-thesis system). Like rhythm it is based on facts of itensity (nuances) even while its form is extended over a dimension analogous to that of melody.
"Whoever distinctly grasps these ideas will feel the importance of what we must call the phrasing of a picture, and for example, the stylistic importance of the differences observable between the slow, full, majestic phrasing of a Veronese (that of Tintoretto is more suave with equal plenitude), the rugged phrasing of Caravaggio (powerful in its boldness, brutal, even a bit melodramatic), the essentially polyphonic and architectonic phrasing of N. Poussin, or again the pathetic and tormented phrasing of Delacroix. It is entirely reasonable to note a likeness with these characteristics in the music of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, or Berlioz." - "Time in the Plastic Arts" by Etienne Souriau, from Reflections on Art, edited by Susan K. Langer
1994, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
This is a hand-painted step-printed collaboration between Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage.
"concrescence, principle of As a term from A.N. Whitehead's metaphysics refers to the drive things possess that impel them to actualization, the creative urge towards concrescence, for producing novel advances through the generation of greater interrelatedness. Many thinkers would deem this urge divine, so the principle of concrescence may be considered one of Whitehead's terms for God." - Bruce Elder
"'Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the 'many' to its subordination in the constitution of the novel 'one' ....
"... An actual occasion is analysable. The analysis discloses operations transforming entities which are individually alien, into components of a complex which is concretely one. The term 'feeling' will be used as the generic description of such operations. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings." - A.N. Whitehead, Process & Reality
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 2.5m (24fps), $20
By Phil Solomon and Brakhage.
Brakhage's extraordinary hand carvings into the film emulsion illuminated and textured by Solomon's lighting, inspired by the woodcuts of Hiroshige. A subset of Brakhage's larger umbrella work entitled "...".
1998, 16mm, color/si, 16m, $50