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.

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 allegory, myth, and archetype.

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 nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

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.

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.

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.

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…

The second feature-length film directed by Scott Barley.

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.

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.

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

'Blinking' 2D rendition of one of Ken Jacobs' Nervous System performances first presented in 1994.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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”.

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

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