Movies: Phil Solomon

The shadows of screams climb beyond the hills. It has happened before. But this will be the last time. The last few sense it, withdrawing deep into the forest. They cry out into the black, as the shadows pass away, into the ground....

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which n...

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

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 ...

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...

A would-be exile explores her Georgia O'Keeffe fantasies through customer support calls....

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 con...

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]....

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 flashe...

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....

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 cy...

In this handmade film, composed of more than four thousand collages, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. NIGHT HUNTER evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegor...

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 populatio...

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 s...

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 dow...

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

"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 ...

"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 interr...

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

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