Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Sunday, 7pm
The experimental cinema work of Phil Solomon is obsessed with
the dark, the night, the past, and the lost. Reworking found images, he
draws forth worlds that are epic and personal, historical and specific.
Though he has branched out in recent years to produce machinima videos
and multi-channel installation work, this selection of celluloid work
represents the best of his output from the '80s and early '90s. NOCTURNE
(1980, 10 min) remains a masterwork of post-structuralist film with its
attention to rhythmic editing and mix of distanced original and
personalized appropriated imagery. Often evoking the night bombings of
London during WWII, nighttime cinematography of domestic scenes creates a
landscape of America that is more Lynch than Brakhage. About THE SECRET
GARDEN (1988, 23 min), U. of C's Tom Gunning wrote, "there is the
shadow of a story here, one which deals with the passage from innocence
and experience and invokes equally terror and ecstasy." A maturing
cinematic voice is present in the abstraction here, blurring layers of
movement into a single stream of subconsciousness. In the start of what
would become a signature visual element of Solomon's films, THE
EXQUISITE HOUR (1989/1994, 14 min) and REMAINS TO BE SEEN (1989/1994, 17
min) are living, crackling, bubbling, blistering memories, growing off
the screen in a an almost tangible surface texture. Chemically treated
and optically printed, home movies both inherited and acquired become a
meditation on the passage of life, the pain of losing loved ones, the
cruelty of loss.
(1980-94, 64 min total, 16mm) JH
