Experimental

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 »

Quote:
A film about the time of the blast furnances – 1917-1933 – about the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction.

The essay from the Berlin filmmaker, Harun Farocki, on heavy industry and the gas of the blast furnace, convinces through the author’s cool abstraction and manic obsession and through the utilization of a single example of the self-destructive character of capitalistic production: “The image of the blust furnace gas is real and metaphoric; an energy blows away uselessly into the air. Guided through a system of pipes, the pressure increases. Hence, a valve is needed. That valve is the production of war material.”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 »

Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice. A castle is perched on a hilltop. Below it, a posh, modern villa. Meanwhile, far from Paris, two men with masked faces play dice in a bar. They decide to drive to Paris. Country roads, hills, fences. The posh “chateau” appears again: meticulous garden, fancy interior, odd sculptures. And at home? “No one, NO ONE.” For the next two days, masked figures play dice, frolic by the pool, perform exercises with a ball. Two new figures arrive. Masked. They search and find the dice. They dance. Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice.Read More »

Synopsis
[In Hick’s Last Stand] we witness yet another incarnation of a Last Bavarian Mohican, incoherently staggering across the badlands of South Dakota and Wyoming in white cowboy boots, black leather jacket, and a feather on his hat. Without dialogue, without other players besides Herbert Achternbusch, and with the most minimal narrative progression, the film consists only of an image track over which we hear Hick’s extended monologue, a declaration of love to the absent Mary, occasionally interrupted by songs by Judy Garland, Native American chants, and classical music. Read More »

This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as “Exodus”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Black Sunday”, “Little Drummer Girl”, and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.Read More »

LIGHT YEARS – The film diaries of Tim Cawkwell (1968-87 / 2015-18)

LIGHT YEARS brings together a series of short films made on 8mm between 1968 and 1987 to create a single diary film in 25 sections with its own narrative arc as a bildungsroman or story of self-education.

Between 2015 and 2018 this material was digitized, reduced and re-edited, and voice-over and sound added. LIGHT YEARS draws inspiration from the American Underground films reaching Britain at the time, and seeks to emulate the qualities of the diary, making the personal public and re-envisioning the world.Read More »