I sense a luminous transparency...

I came across a fantastic description of the final moments of Peter Rose's film SECONDARY CURRENTS, a film about language, in Scott MacDonald's book Screen writings: scripts and texts by independent filmmakers.

"The rolling credits may conclude the viewer's experience of film-as-perspectival-illusion, but-especially at 16mm screenings-this ending is often followed by the end leaders (with various kinds of language printed or written on them) that signal the conclusion of the film's material journey through the projector... Rose provides a reward for those viewers energetic enough to wonder if the text they see on the leader merely encodes the standard information common on film leader or adds to a film that has continually surprised our expectations of other forms of text. The reward is fittingly, one final text: 'I sense a lumionous transparency, a limitless linear aperture of indecipherable articulate intelligence-I sense arising, a silent perpendicular emissary unfolding from the invisible. It is becoming a vast, provotic, spectral. All is clear now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'"

A few more for good measure: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To see the film go here.

The Films of Phil Solomon | Baltimore City Paper

"Solomon's treated imagery becomes a symphonic remembrance of a life: The images themselves look ephemeral, like they're always about to dissipate into the ether, lending the viewing experience a curious preciousness- something about the fleeting nature of the images makes savoring them feel all the more meaningful." - Bret McCabe

Full review: The Films of Phil Solomon | Baltimore City Paper

Let's go to the cinema!

This would make a nice theater.

The Films of Phil Solomon

Magic Eye & Johns Hopkins University present

The Films of Phil Solomon

Thursday, April 8^th - 9pm - $9.50

The Charles Theater (1711 N. Charles St.)

Magic Eye and Johns Hopkins University are pleased to host an evening of film and conversation with acclaimed experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon. Visiting the east coast for the opening of his multimedia installation “American Falls” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Phil Solomon will make his Baltimore debut at the Charles Theater. The screening will include excerpts from “American Falls” and a selection of his films and videos, including his 1989 film “Remains To Be Seen” which Stan Brakhage named as one of his Top Ten Films of All Time for Sight and Sound magazine.

Solomon’s film work employs an array of chemical and optical treatments to explore the natural state of decay of 16mm film. The results produce a molten emulsion unique to his cinema, a visually mesmerizing struggle between a captured image and the materiality of the medium.

"Although part of a long avant-garde tradition, Mr. Solomon makes films that look like no others I've seen. The conceit of the filmmaker as auteur has rarely been more appropriate or defensible — The liberating effect of Mr. Solomon's work suggests a rather different realm: Film Meets Vision, Rejoice!" – Manolha Dargis, New York Times

His recent video series called “In Memoriam, Mark Lapore” operates in the genre of machinima. Appropriating scenes from the lawless world of Grand Theft Auto, Solomon quells the crime wave and creates a trance-like wandering through a desolate urban landscape. The trilogy, named as one of the Top Experimental Films of 2007 by the Village Voice, will close the evening’s program.

Phil Solomon teaches at University of Colorado – Boulder. He has participated in two Whitney Biennials and has had three Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art. He has won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1993) and The Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award (2007), as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Magic Eye's inaugural screening at the Charles was a success!
Here's the final line-up:

INFINITY FLOAT, Kari Altmann (2009)
SMOKE CIRCLE, Justin Kelly (2009)
ON THE SHORES OF LAKE SUPERIOR, Clarissa Gregory (2008)
LE MATIN, Karen Yasinsky (2007)
TURNED ON (Ecstatic Sunshine), Mark Brown (2009)
PROUD FLESH, Jenny Graf & Chiara Giovando (2008)
PINKY SWEAR/MAKE A WISH, Justin Kelly (2008)
PARAPETI’EM, Andrew Maussert-Mooney (2008)
10 MILE STEREO (Beach House), Kari Altmann (2009)
BITTERBITTERTEARS, Catherine Pancake (2010)
LASER BALLOON, Justin Kelly (2008)
BASEMENT BLEEDS, Jimmy Joe Roche (2009)
EVERYDAY BAD DREAM, Fred Worden (2006)
FIGURE SKATING II, Lauren Friedman (2006)
THE ENDS, Kristen Anchor (2009)
BREATH DEATH, Stan VanDerBeek, (1964)
VENETIAN BLIND, Fred Worden (1979)
T,O,U,C.H,I,N,G, Paul Sharits (1968)



More of Lauren Friedman's videos including FIGURE SKATING II, the darling of the night, can be found here.

Have you ever seen it rain teddy bears?

Some stills from Monday's show

Kari Altmann's Infinity Loop

Jimmy Joe Roche's Basement Bleeds

Clarissa Gregory's On The Shores Of Lake Superior

Catherine Pancake's bitterbittertears

Andrew Mausert-Mooney's Parapeti'em

Kristen Anchor's The Ends

" 'T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G' was the first film Sharits completed here in Baltimore. Like “Piece Mandala” before it, it is an overwhelming stream of flashing colors which obliterate each other in succession as the viewer’s eye hangs, as if suspended in the field of vision, within a brilliant approximation of the reality of the succession of frames past a light-beam. Within the field, votive-like, hangs the image of a young man (David Franks)’s bust. He gazes down at the pair of scissors he holds open around his out-stretched tongue. He seems forever about to slice the fucker off in a moment of ecstatic self-mutilation. Unlike the silent “Piece Mandala,” however, “T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G” has a soundtrack. Composed by David Franks, the sound component to “T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G” outdoes Steve Riech’s early tape-phase pieces in its raw, direct message: a singe word, spoken at the height of counterculture, at the height of the Love Generation, over and over on top of itself seemingly a million times so densely that the ear hears entire sentences spun from its single sound: DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY…" - Ian Nagoski, Frameworks Archives