Films by PHIL SOLOMON (Experimental)

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