Balagan is proud to be hosting a special evening of films and videos by Phil Solomon. Mr Solomon has travelled all the way from Colorado to attend the show and discuss his work.

In Addition to our Balagan show, Mr. Solomon will be presenting an additional program of works at Mass College of Art Film Society on Wednesday March 26th at 8PM. Contact Saul Levine slevine@massart.edu for more info.

Phil 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. -Stan Brakhage, "Time ...on Dit," Musicworks, 1995

Program:

Nocturne - 1980 (revised 1989), 16mm, b&w/si, 10m,

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

The Exquisite Hour - 1989 (revised 1994), S8mm and 16mm, color/so, 14m

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

 

 

The Snowman - 8m

 

Psalm III: "Night of the Meek" (23 minutes, sound, B/W)

A kindertodenliede in black and silver on a night of gods and monsters...

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…”

Innocence and Despair - DV, (2002, 5 minutes)
This a part of the Underground Zero Project organized by Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi in response to 9/11.

"An underwater lullaby for my hometown, in another time, an engulfed cathedral of innocence and
loss." PS

Seasons... by Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage (16mm, color, silent, 20 minutes - 1998-99)

Brakhage’s frame by frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes combined with paint, are illuminated by Solomon’s optical printing, then edited by Solomon into a four part ’seasonal cycle’. This film can be considered to be part of a larger, ‘umbrella’ work by Brakhage entitled “...” . Seasons... is inspired by the colors and textures found in the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the playful sense of forms dancing in space from the filmworks of Robert Breer and Len Lye.

Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes (3 minutes, 1999, sound)

A wedding present for someone now long gone...

Phil Solomon teaches both film history/aesthetics and all levels of film production at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was recently honored for his teaching with the first presentation of the Parents Association Award. Professor Solomon is currently working on a feature length series of short films entitled The Twilight Psalms , a cine-poem to the 20th century. The second film of this series, Walking Distance premiered at the 1999 New York Film Festival, and was hailed by critic Stephen Holden of the New York Times as 'supremely lyrical' and cited as one of the best films in the avant-garde program. Since arriving in Boulder in 1991, Mr. Solomon has produced, among other films, several collaborations with colleague Stan Brakhage, including Elementary Phrases (1994), Concrescence (1996) and Seasons... . He also released Clepsydra (1992), Remains to be Seen The Exquisite Hour (1994), and Snowman (1995). These films have been honored at many festivals, including First Prize awards at Black Maria (five times), Oberhausen and Ann Arbor. Over the last twenty years, Professor Solomon has exhibited his films in every major venue for experimental film in Europe and the U.S. over the past twenty years, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the Viennale, the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Stadkino Cinema, Anthology Film Archives and Millennium. He has had three Cineprobes at the Museum of Modern Art. Professor Solomon's work was prominently featured in theWhitney Museum of Art's "Second Half of the Century" film series, with five of his films presented in this prestigious program. Mr. Solomon received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship jn 1994 and an Artist's Fellowship form the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1996-7. Professor Solomon has also received two regional grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for his filmmaking. Professor Solomon is currently working on The Twilight Psalms and has recently received a commission from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. to do a one-man show, a six-channel digital installation to open in January 2004. The tentative title of this piece is called The American Falls.