Phil Solomon

Heading through Colorado Territory in search of gold and women, Alferd Packer and his group of bemused companions find themselves lost, starving and musically inspired by the obstacles they confront along the way, including a die-hard Confederate cyclops, a trio of surly trappers, a tribe of Japanese-speaking "Indians," and ultimately, each other.

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated by Solomon's optical printing; this footage was 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 film works of Robert Breer and Len Lye.

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].

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.

Colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the two began with strips of film Brakhage had painted on by hand, photographing them frame by frame with Solomon’s optical printer. They often printed two strips of film together, some of them containing images taken by Solomon, then chose from the images what Brakhage says “seemed to us natural phrases,” which Brakhage arranged into the final form. The result is a 40-minute silent film in which occasional hints of photographic images sometimes seem to peek through largely abstract shapes.

Phil Solomon's unreleased GTA film. Made in Grand Theft Auto V.

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated by Solomon's optical printing; this footage was 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 film works of Robert Breer and Len Lye.

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].

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.

Colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the two began with strips of film Brakhage had painted on by hand, photographing them frame by frame with Solomon’s optical printer. They often printed two strips of film together, some of them containing images taken by Solomon, then chose from the images what Brakhage says “seemed to us natural phrases,” which Brakhage arranged into the final form. The result is a 40-minute silent film in which occasional hints of photographic images sometimes seem to peek through largely abstract shapes.

Phil Solomon's unreleased GTA film. Made in Grand Theft Auto V.

This afternoon summer scene is very much how he worked (when painting directly on film) in the last several years – at various cafes and sports bars (usually indoors) on Pearl Street in Boulder (Boulder Blues and Pearls and…), amidst his taco salads, root beer floats, or Irish coffees…

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.

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.

The air swarms with hidden energies and engines, invisible broadcasts crackling ominously. History is written in midair, written on the wind, above the clouds or at Ceiling Zero. Secretly. A lethal murmur out of earshot. Scribbled in code. Voices drowned by the roar and the fog of war, spelled out in ruins. This film was originally made in the 1980s and never released until 2023.

The virtual landscapes of a video game are transformed into an existential tale of solemn beauty.

Part of Solomon’s acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series, titled “In Memoriam”, a body of work shot entirely within the virtual world of the Grand Theft Auto video game.

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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

Phil Solomon's fist attempt at a cine-nocturne.

“A meditation on memory, burial and decay – a belated kaddish for my father.” (Phil Solomon)

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.

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.

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.

A brief short of Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage going to the movies in the spring of 2002.

The many moods and shades of love, set in a virtual Hong Kong. Inspired by the films of Wong Kar Wai.

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.

"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

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”.

This was an unfinished collaboration with Stan Brakhage. This film was actually screened publicly at least a few times, including at Pacific Film Archive (11/15/1994, described as a premiere), MoMA (5/3/1999, also described as a premiere – probably a revision), and First Person Cinema, CU Boulder (4/24/2000). TBD, but it’s likely that Solomon probably screened a workprint or even spliced original of the film in these instances (as he had done with The Lateness of the Hour), and then withdrew the film to work on further. It was never ultimately completed or re-released.

Contents: Nocturne (1980) Remains to be seen (1994) The exquisite hour (1994) The snowman (1995) Psalm II : walking distance

"concrescence, principle of As a term from A.N. Whitehead's metaphysics refers to the drive things possess that impel them to actualization, the creative urge towards concrescence, for producing novel advances through the generation of greater interrelatedness. Many thinkers would deem this urge divine, so the principle of concrescence may be considered one of Whitehead's terms for God." - Bruce Elder

A film Solomon made for his wife on the occasion of their marriage.

Solomon uses chemical and optical treatments to coat the film with a limpid membrane of swimming crystals, coagulating into silver recall, then dissolving.

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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

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...

"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.

In celebration of his 80th birthday, here is: THE ETERNAL COURTSHIP (an ipad short) For Ken and Flo Jacobs, with love and affection from all of us out here who bask in the glow...

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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

"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

An alchemically treated lullaby to the end of cinema, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Half lullaby for the dead, half lamentation on the twilight of the cinema.