The Dream Machine: A Living Room Screening with Phil Solomon!
Nocturne Dream (Solomon, 1976)
Phil Solomon in Person!
Filmforum is delighted to host two evenings with Colorado-based master filmmaker Phil Solomon, as part of a multi-venue celebration of his work. In this first night, Solomon relocates his dream machine to the marvelous Velaslavasay Panorama for the sort of informal living room screening that we all dream of. It’s a night for rare super-8 films, even two that were never released, and a few joyful larks. Plus the Panorama’s garden welcomes everyone for the post-show conviviality.
In the other shows of Solomon’s stay in LA, Solomon’s epic installation, American Falls, and other works, are opening at Young Projects Gallery in the pacific Design Center on Thursday May 16. http://www.youngprojectsgallery.com/
Try to make the opening, and definitely see these works while they are on view. Filmforum has another screening night tomorrow, Sunday May 19th, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. And there is a third night of Solomon’s works screening at REDCAT on Monday May 20th. http://www.redcat.org/event/phil-solomon
Solomon will be present at all events!
Special Thanks to Steve Anker, Berenice Reynaud, Paul Young, Sara Velas, REDCAT, Cal Arts, and Young Projects
Phil Solomon has been making films since 1975 and is currently Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was recently awarded received a USA Artists Fellowship (2012), received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and has exhibited his films in every major venue for experimental film throughout the US and Europe, including 2 Whitney Biennials and three one- person shows at MoMA. He collaborated on three films with his friend and Boulder colleague, the late Stan Brakhage, who named Solomon's Remains to be Seen on his top ten films of all time list for Sight and Sound. Solomonʼs recent Grand Theft Auto series, In Memoriam, has received numerous awards and was named in the Top Ten experimental films of the year by the Village Voice. He has begun work on a book entitled A Snailʼs Trail in the Moonlight: Conversations with Brakhage, transcriptions of several years of Brakhageʼs film salons. His three channel installation, American Falls, was recently exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY. This work was originally commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and had its premiere as a six-channel installation in 2010. Solomon's 48 minute digital video “EMPIRE” (2008-2012) premiered at “Views from the Avant-Garde” at the New York Film Festival in October, 2012. In a recent poll taken by Film Comment of the top 50 filmmakers of the first decade of the new century, Phil Solomon was placed at number 5, tied with Stan Brakhage. (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/best-of-the-decade-avant-garde)
www.philsolomon.com
"Etched in black and vivid color and infused with melancholy, Mr. Solomon's stunningly beautiful films have an emotional power that might well attract more viewers, if not for the maddening divisions that find a few rarefied films classified (read: ghettoized) as art, while the vast majority are relegated to the commercial trough...Although part of a long avant-garde tradition, Mr. Solomon makes films that look like no others I've seen. The conceit of the filmmaker as auteur has rarely been more appropriate or defensible...Created in the shadow of the mainstream, films like these underscore the stultifying sameness of most movies, an industrial uniformity that reminds me of a film project Bertolt Brecht conjured up while living here titled "Boy Meets Girl, So What." The liberating effect of Mr. Solomon's work suggests a rather different realm: Film Meets Vision, Rejoice!" -- Manohla Dargis, An Artist Who Inspires New Ways of Seeing, The New York Times, November 18, 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/movies/18solo.html?_r=0)
Animated gifs from films by Phil Solomon:
http://expcinema.tumblr.com/post/47796141045/animated-gifs-from-films-by-phil-solomon
This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Nocturne 3 (The Dream Machine)
(1976, super-8, color, silent, 8 min.)
Los Angeles Premiere! After graduating college, I became very taken with shooting at night with long single frame time exposures on my super-8 Nizo. In the case of The Dream Machine, I found myself at a local drive-in theatre in Rochester, NY, and proceeded to make a raindance of light 'tween projection source and screen. If you look closely, you may spot Jordon Belson's special effects work for Donald Cammell's The Demon Seed on the drive-in screen… - PS
Nocturne 4
(1980, super-8, color, 10 min.)
Los Angeles Premiere! The Nocturnes were originally meant to be a series, but I never blew-up the initial super-8 films to 16mm for general release, and so I eventually went with the single 16mm Nocturne (1980) as the epitome of the form I was seeking. Nocturne 4 was in many ways my internalization of Stan Brakhage's seminal transition film, Anticipation of the Night, filmed at the amusement park across from my street in Seabreeze, N.Y., and some in Boston after I left the Rochester area. – PS
The Passage of the Bride
(1978, 16mm, silent, 6 min.)
"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
As if We
(1980, color, silent, 16mm, 15 min.)
Los Angeles Premiere! Musing on the past and the present, on roads not taken and the road I was already on. For Jeanine Hayden and her son Jeff, wherever you are. Restored by the Academy Archive, special thanks for Mark Toscano.
Remains to be Seen
(1989, Super-8, sound, 17 min.)
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
The Exquisite Hour
(1989, Super 8mm, sound, 14 min.)
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, First Prize, Experimental Category, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Juror's Prize, Onion City Film Festival; Independent Focus, (WNET), 1991.
The Eternal Courtship
(2013, digital video, sound, 1 min.)
World premiere! A one minute ipad portrait of Ken and Flo Jacobs. – PS
Rocket Boy vs. Brakhage
(1980-89, digital, 30 min)
Los Angeles Premiere! A rollicking comic parody of finding myself in the peculiar position of studying to be an avant-garde filmmaker in college during the "structural film" wars, Rocket Boy was originally reviewed in the Village Voice by J. Hoberman (co-reviewed with Burton's Batman, another "tacky super-hero," according to Jim). He referred to me at the end of review, quite presciently as it turned out, as possibly being The Under-Dog Star Man... - PS