Philip S. Solomon

Quote:
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.Read More »

Synopsis
In memoriam – Mark LaPore. Darkness at the edge of town, light at the end of the tunnel, a stalled hearse and fires on the plain.Read More »

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

Synopsis
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 ArthurRead More »

Synopsis
Machinima film made by Phil Solomon and MarK LaPore briefly before his death.Read More »

Synopsis
Pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston’s reading of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.Read More »

Journal of Film and Video
Response to Phil Solomon’s WALKING DISTANCE
By Albright, Deron

“Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph/Star, a Griffith Melies co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, and they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable. . . WALKING DISTANCE is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore. . . “Read More »

Letterboxd wrote:
Brakhage’s hand carvings directly into the film emulsions are illuminated and textured by Solomon’s lighting and optical printing.Read More »

Made in remembrance of Anne Frank, Solomon’s fragile and haunting film evokes Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertodenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). Stan Brakhage wrote memorably of Solomon’s filmmaking craft that it “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 multifaceted light.”Read More »