Phil Solomon
Birth : 1954-01-03, Manhattan, New York, USA
Death : 2019-04-20
History
Phil Solomon (M.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art) was an internationally recognized filmmaker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at CU since 1991. Professor Solomon’s work has been screened in every major venue for experimental film throughout the U.S. and Europe, including 3 Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art and two Whitney Biennials. Professor Solomon’s films have won 10 first prize awards at major international film festivals for experimental film (including six Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival). His films reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Massachusetts College of Art, Binghamton University, Hampshire College, The Chicago Art Institute, San Francisco State University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Oberhausen Film Collection. Professor Solomon collaborated on three films with his colleague and friend, Stan Brakhage, who named Solomon’s Remains to be Seen on his Top Ten Films of All Time for Sight and Sound.
Director
An alchemically treated lullaby to the end of cinema, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Director
Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow, pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston’s reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead”.
Director
Phil Solomon’s immersive triptych film installation American Falls, which was originally commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., transforms the Museum’s 4,000-sq. ft. third floor gallery into a panoramic and artistic journey through the cataclysms of American history.
Director
Believe it or not, esoteric film sages, i.e., Phil Solomon, are open to the possibilities of working with video — and even video games. This is a film that takes images from the notorious wanton car-jacking shoot-em-up Grand Theft Auto video game.
Director
A re-make of Andy Warhol’s Empire from high atop the Manhattan Island of Grand Theft Auto IV (“Liberty City”), far from the madding crowd of thieves, cops, prostitutes and murderers down below. I hijacked a copter, leaped onto the rooftop of an adjacent building, spawned a scooter out of the thin air and then gingerly drove it to the very edge of the precipice in order to roughly approximate that familiar view from July 25-26, 1964.
Director
The virtual landscapes of a video game are transformed into an existential tale of solemn beauty.
Director
Part of "In Memoriam", a body of work comprising several videos, shot entirely within the virtual world of the Grand Theft Auto video game. Solomon transformed Liberty City, the ersatz metropolis based on New York City in which the game is set, into a reflective space of stillness: devoid of players, full of melancholy, nostalgia, loss, grief, and instances of compelling poetic beauty. This work was created in response to the passing of Solomon's lifelong friend, Mark LaPore, at the age of 53, on September 11, 2005.
Director
Phil Solomon: 'Mark and I made this for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a get well soon card... for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years.'
Director
In 2005, Phil Solomon collaborated with his best friend, the highly respected filmmaker Mark LaPore, on a short digital video entitled Crossroad, which they made as a get-well offering for a mutual friend [David Gatten].
Director
The film combines, through a variety of optical printing techniques, documentary archival footage, images from the The Golem (1920), and Solomon’s cinematography to evoke the legendary tale of Rabbi Löw’s monster in order to save the Jewish population of the 16th century Prague ghetto.
Director
Brakhage's hand carvings directly into the film emulsions are illuminated and textured by Solomon's lighting and optical printing.
Himself
A brief short of Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage going to the movies in the spring of 2002.
Director
A brief short of Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage going to the movies in the spring of 2002.
Director
"One week after 9/11, independent filmmakers Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi put out a call to over 150 experimental and documentary filmmakers asking for contributions to a collective film project (Underground Zero) addressing those tragic events and their aftermath. My five-minute contribution, Innocence and Despair, provided me with an opportunity to make my first digital video (with material culled from 16mm footage, both archival and my own) and to make something of a public work, something I had never done before. The title is copped from a favorite album of mine (The Langley Schools Music Project) that was originally recorded by Hans Fenger in 1976-77 with his grade school students singing popular songs of the day. I was meditating on ideas of before and after, of how the summering people in my little film could never have imagined looking up at the sky at a world such as existed on the day…" —Phil Solomon
Director
Imagine a rusted, medieval film can having survived centuries, a long lost D. W. Griffith / Georges Méliès co-production, a film left to us from the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, but free to form and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim.
Director
A little nachtmusick, a deep blue overture to the series. Breathing in the cool night airs, breathing out a children's song; then whispering a prayer for a night of easeful sleep.
Director
A film Solomon made for his wife on the occasion of their marriage.
Director
Avant garde short by Brakhage and CU-Boulder colleague Phil Solomon.
Himself
BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker’s genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on significant moments in Brakhage’s biography, the film celebrates Brakhage’s visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising. BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage’s films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.
Sound Designer
Glimpses and sparkles of childhood memories.
Director
This is a hand-painted step-printed collaboration between Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage.
Director
“A meditation on memory, burial and decay – a belated kaddish for my father.” (Phil Solomon)
Cinematography
'Blinking' 2D rendition of one of Ken Jacobs' Nervous System performances first presented in 1994.
Director
Experimental, paint on celluloid
Director
Clepsydra is an ancient Greek water clock (literally, "to steal water"). This film envisions the strip of celluloid going vertically through a projector as a sprocketed waterfall (random events measured in discreet units of time), through which the silent dreams of a young girl can barely be heard under the din of an irresistible torrent, an irreversible torment.
Director
Okay, well, this film started out as a punk Joke, made 10 minutes before class, in 8mm, shot Brakhage, camera jammed, used accident to shoot him down again, in order to move on, you know what I mean? But now... the whole thing is gettin' out of hand. I keep adding more chapters whenever I get pissed off, or incredulous at the whole Avant number, like when the Faust films came out, I knew it was time to go to work again...
Part I. Starman, Part II. The Umpire Strikes Back, Part III. Dog Star Man Returns, Part IV: Who's on Faust?
The whole series is dedicated to Jane and the kids...
Director
Using chemical and optical treatments to coat the film with a limpid membrane of swimming crystals, coagulating into silver recall, then dissolving.
Director
Half lullaby for the dead, half lamentation on the twilight of the cinema.
Director
"No filmmaker of the 1980s knew as much as Phil Solomon of affirming the importance of multiple layers in the visual production of images. Solomon perpetuates the Brakhagian tradition of creating a succession of images whose logic comes from a large number of rhythmic sources, formal, associative, and whose coherence passes from one source to another. Here, as with Brakhage, one must be spoiled in the trance offered by Solomon, and be sufficiently assured to follow a structure that is based as well on the melody, the harmonics and the flashes of metaphors as on a narrative plot. The Secret Garden is one of Solomon's best films. Like Thornton and Klahr, there is the shadow of a story here, which has to do with the passage from innocence and experience to terror and ecstasy." – T. Gunning.
Director
Adopting its title from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, What’s Out Tonight Is Lost is an elegiac film sifting through the unrecoverable. The film is a reflecting pool where vision breaks up.
Director
"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
Director
Nocturne evokes one of the most magnificent films of Brakhage: Fire of Waters. It takes place in a suburb populated by children playing and indistinct parental figures. The narrative plot might suggest that it was a boy's night-time plays; The flashes of a torch in a dark room evoke fights and aerial bombardments. An impression of hostility and a feeling of horror interferes in all the movements ... The fantasy is tinged with nightmare, a storm of repressed emotions hides behind the calm facade of this house. In Nocturne, found footage blends so well with the threat that its perception produces a discharge from the unconscious.
Director
Phil Solomon's fist attempt at a cine-nocturne.
Director
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.
