Date: 23 October 2011 | Season: London Film Festival 2011 | Tags: London Film Festival
PHIL SOLOMON’S AMERICAN FALLS
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
‘Should anyone imagine that the art of alchemy died with the Middle Ages, Phil Solomon’s American Falls testifies to the contrary: both to the possibilities of photographic and digital transformation and to the magical emanations of their fusion.’ (Tony Pipolo, Artforum)
Phil Solomon, American Falls, USA, 2010, 60 min
In his sublime 16mm films, Phil Solomon chemically alters photographic imagery to create a thick celluloid impasto that infuses footage with profound emotional resonance. For American Falls, Solomon rifles through a collective memory fashioned from both fact and fiction, mixing elements from newsreels, actualities and narrative films in a monumental retelling of American history which draws parallels with and reflects upon the current state of the nation. Houdini, Harold Lloyd, Keaton and King Kong commingle with presidents, gold-diggers, railroad barons and the civil rights movement. ‘My project is ultimately one of great hope, stemming from a life-long love for this American experiment of ours … but it is also necessitated by my deepest concern for its present and future directions.’ Originally conceived as a 360-degree installation around the walls of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s rotunda, the work has been reconfigured for the cinema as a panoramic view in triptych, with surround sound mix by composer Wrick Wolff.
Screening with
Phil Solomon, What’s Out Tonight Is Lost, USA, 1983, 8 min
‘The film began in response to an evaporating relationship, but gradually seeped outward to anticipate other imminent disappearing acts: youth, family, friends, time … I wanted the tonal shifts of the film’s surface to act as a barometer of the changes in the emotional weather.’ (PS)
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles.
Also Screening: Tuesday 25 October 2011, at 4pm, NFT3
Phil Solomon will present screenings of his earlier films at Tate Modern on 24 & 27 October.
PROGRAMME NOTES
PHIL SOLOMON’S AMERICAN FALLS
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
PHIL SOLOMON’S AMERICAN FALLS
AMERICAN FALLS
Phil Solomon, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 60 min
Conception and Direction – Phil Solomon
Sound Design – Wrick Wolff & Phil Solomon
5.1 and Stereo Mixes – Wrick Wolff
Alchemy – Phil Solomon & Jessica Betz
Optical Printing – Phil Solomon & Jessie Marek
Technical Advisor – Christopher Osborn
Should anyone imagine that the art of alchemy died with the Middle Ages, Phil Solomon’s American Falls testifies to the contrary: both to the possibilities of photographic and digital transformation and to the magical emanations of their fusion. The work is epic in conception and form, with a surface texture that, as it refashions and transmutes archival footage from myriad sources, resembles something between a palimpsest of chemical and photographic strata and the impasto of a painter’s canvas. The incipient visions of Solomon’s previous labours in this style here burst forth, unleashed, with images from America’s collective unconscious.
Burnished bronze and pulsing forward through layers of idiosyncratic techniques, they flesh out a three-framed canvas with ‘monumental’ aspirations, sometimes invoking the nation’s war memorials. Images are conjured into transient visibility before dissolving back into the recesses of historical memory. This is as much about inviting instant recognition as it is about limiting exposure of the overfamiliar. Similarly, popular songs are gently deconstructed through the rhythmic protractions of an intricate sound design (co-created and mixed by Wrick Wolff) that freshens their nostalgic currency.
Opening with 1901 footage and a re-enactment of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, allusions to ‘falls’ pervade: of political and inspirational leaders (from Lincoln to FDR to JFK and King), and soldiers on battlefields (the American Revolution, the Civil War, both world wars, and Korea); from pratfalls of movie comics (Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin) to baseball heroes crippled by disease (Lou Gehrig). Disillusionment with America’s promise is palpable throughout. In one triptych, George Washington in the central panel is flanked by the text of the Declaration of Independence; but in another the Liberty Bell’s crack is visible in all three panels. Still later, the looming rule of capital, evoked by the credits of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, needs only the central panel to dominate.
It is impossible to do justice here to the juxtapositions and permutations of these images, or to the aching beauty and emotional resonances of this work. Much of the latter derives from the sheer physiological spectacle of each marble or bronze tableau throbbing into life through Solomon’s midwifery. More than any other independent film or video I can think of from the past decade, American Falls invokes the spectre of a nation whose present unravelling is all too rooted in its history. How sad it is to realize that Solomon’s masterwork, painstakingly crafted over thousands of hours, cannot hope to reach as many people as the lamest television commercial. Anyone still touched by the poetic viability of the avant-garde should not miss this opportunity to see it. (Tony Pipolo, Artforum)
WHAT’S OUT TONIGHT IS LOST
Phil Solomon, USA, 1983, 16mm, silent, colour, 8 min
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. The home we recognize is swallowed in the brume, the light barely penetrates; and the yellow school bus steals us away, delivering us into new clouds, embracing fear. The film has a surface of cracked porcelain and intaglio: the allergic childhood skin of cracks and bruises. This is a film of transubstantiations, the discorporation of human forms into embers. Air looms and blossoms into solidity and nearness … I hear it breathing. (Mark McElhatten)
What’s Out Tonight Is Lost was preserved by Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles.
Phil Solomon will introduce two different programmes of his earlier 16mm films at Tate Modern on Monday 24 & Thursday 27 October, 2011, from 7pm.
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