FILMS BY PHIL SOLOMON
At a number of points in The Secret Garden we see an image of a small boy, usually in profile, possibly lying propped up in bed; one infers he is ill. An adult speaks to him; a subtitle reads “Once upon a time.” Intercut with these shots are images from several commercial films–The Wizard of Oz is recognizable–and a variety of other material. Through chemical modification of the emulsion and optical printing (the same frame-by-frame rephotography used in creating special effects), Solomon turns this imagery into variegated, unstable, shifting patterns of color and light. Whatever identifiable images appear are often on the point of breaking up, and in any case all the imagery ultimately becomes part of the film’s flickering, pulsating flow.
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The images of the boy strongly suggest that the film’s “garden” is the garden of childhood story telling, imagination, dreams, even feverish visions, as if the film were being seen through the boy’s mind’s eye. But the film’s first image is not of the boy–it appears to be from The Wizard of Oz. And the film’s other material takes on a life of its own. Near the end there’s a particularly stunning pattern of black-and-white abstract shapes and lines that rapidly shift and change, so that an area of the screen that had been black suddenly becomes white: the effect is of a great many tiny explosions of light. One possible interpretation of the imagery is that it represents the boy’s vision, but this is not a controlling interpretation. One might also–and only a bit fancifully–read the film as an essay on the decay of celluloid: old films seem to break up on-screen in a manner not unlike the way film decays.
But though Solomon seems to assert that his films fundamentally consist of the physical images themselves, and not what those images might represent, he doesn’t abandon representational imagery completely. Indeed, the imagery he chooses is often highly charged, referring to war, sickness, and death. This gives his films a powerfully divided nature, almost as if they were records of a kind of failure, of the filmmaker struggling to express feelings about the world all the while he believes that cinema’s ability to represent such feelings is highly limited at best. Occasionally this ambiguity, which must be precisely balanced in order to succeed, seems to break down. This is the case with the least successful film on this program, Nocturne.
All of this and more happens in The Exquisite Hour and Remains to Be Seen. Both films contain images that evoke sickness and dying; both are powerful meditations on loss (Solomon dedicated Remains to Be Seen to the memory of his mother).
Both Remains to Be Seen and The Exquisite Hour have sound tracks that, like the films’ images, are dense collages of recognizable and abstract elements. At times the sound seems to add depth and ambience to the image: shuffling accompanies a landscape, as if feet were treading over it; water sounds follow when the imagery shifts to water. But because this imagery constantly reminds us of its own filmic nature, it can never have the effect of transporting us to the places depicted–there can be no entry, and the ambient sounds simply heighten that impossibility.
