This letter was written by genius American filmmaker Phil Solomon, kindly, and in response to a vhs preview tape of my movie Panic Bodies (70 minutes 1998) which I’d mailed him just so that he could have a look at. And then his generous reply.
Dear Mike,
Please accept my apologies for not getting back to you any sooner – I have been utterly swamped and completely over my head with school, unable to do anything for myself until just this weekend… I also must tell you that I am always slow in correspondence (except on email, which makes me somewhat compulsive to answer immediately – are you online? do you have an email address? So please don’t misinterpret my lack of quick correspondence to anything in your (wonderful and welcome) letters or any stuff about a so-called Boulder aesthetic, film/video purist issues, or any such thing. I am honoured to correspond with you and hope to continue to send work, ideas, thoughts across the air, so please have faith that I am interested in your work and your thoughts and responses. I just now, today, finally, have time to watch your tape and respond to you. I wanted to wait until I could really watch it, listen to it, repeat sections, and take it in.
Part 1
The mix is beautiful, weaves the collage under one roof and the emotions complex, the juxtapositions light/heavy, fast/off the cuff yet on the mark, strangely formal and personal at the same time – the direct address was just the right tone for me to listen with clarity, the change in pronoun (you) displaces me, challenges me to empathize with your person and your narrative at the same time I am decoding all the popular cues (and they spark off the monologue in many ways, sometimes funny with a sense of self-parody, sometimes quite touching and particular to ME as I recognize many sites – don’t have time to reflect all of the implications, store them for later – such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, which I showed in my class last year (called Negotiating Rapture – I’ll send you the syllabus) – this film is about so many things, but mostly the affirmations and being at home between the infinite above and the infinitesimally small within (such as a virus, a stranger, being the host to unwelcome guests)… JUST THAT SET OF IMAGES was enough to make me reel (pardon pun) and spin into dozens of ways of speaking silently with images against words… my mind had just enough time to register the reference, imaginatively superimpose your text onto that one, and move on…
I know, from experiencing my mother’s illness from the outside (of body), that illness is the most private experience we may have – that, although loved ones empathize, there is no way to share this, no way for two to experience the same body – but you, using public images, home movies, and eloquent language and the gaze out into the room of the water, have allowed me a truly 4D experience, a semblance of feeling into form…
Part 2
Beautifully cut and toned – the brown providing the roof this time, the home movies again grounding the fantastic with the real, the past – using film to experience vicariously (and in this case, the pun on ‘projection (ZAP – you’re pregnant, as Kenneth Anger invokes), pregnancy as metaphor of invaded body – being ‘hooked’ (Jack Smith: “sex is a pain in the ass”… from Blonde Cobra), the flying cock matte hilarious and true (like the treatise on balls in the first section) – the return to psychodrama invokes The Memo Book, the gestures (like erasing oneself) literal yet not literal, embarrassing and touching, somehow just APT in this context.
The SHIVA masturbation – do you know the fantastic photographs of Pierre Moliniere? Have you seen SODOM by Luther Price?
The symmetries create cock/vagina/anus at once, create a hybrid body, himself as herself, the dream of the detachable cock (just bring it out when you need it, keep sane the rest of the day…) the matted cockcutout like a conspiratorial clue…
I have three more weeks until the end of this madness – then I’m taking a year off to do my work and tour with new films – to be an artist again… in fact, I’m hoping to come back to Toronto somewhere in the Fall of 1999, and I hope we can hang out a bit this time. Any suggests for a gig (besides AGO, which I assume will want to wait a few years…)?
Christmas Day
It is only now that I can get back to your work and respond with a letter that has any degree of sanity. This has been the worst ending to any semester of teaching, and I am completely wiped out. We are trying to have something of a holiday, and I am desperately seeking rest. Please forgive such a long delay, but I really want to look at the tape carefully, and not hurry my response.
Have you ever taught film production? How have you been making a ‘living’ all these years?
I didn’t really understand what you meant by a “Boulder” aesthetic in your letter, until I received the catalogue from Richard Kerr which has a statement by me about this subject. You should know that what was left out of the catalogue was that someone had asked me if there WAS such a thing to begin with – so the subject of the so-called Boulder Aesthetic was in response to a question, not my own idea. Then I tried to answer the question in terms of Stan and his influence. I don’t really believe there is such a thing, except for that issue.
Back to the work:
Brown section down by the waterfront, fishing the cock out of the waters, a witty inversion for me of Maya Deren’s pawn stealing from AT LAND (do you know the sequence?) – lots of dry, sardonic humour here, jokes on bait, etc. Interesting sound design…
This is a brave and painful work… I avoided seeing the whole piece until I knew I could deal with it… was up to it…
Text and waters, this form of address yet new again in this work, the shifts from narrative to second person (or Ed) deepen the work and the structure…
Jack Chambers comes to mind here, with the flashes of children in saucers… the world passing by in silence, overhearing a whisper between friends – the way the text interacts with the flares is quite beautiful – a stunning section…
The next section (1+1+1) left me quite speechless – here’s where I miss film on film the most as the textures of the processing are so beautiful, the frenetic rack and crazy mise-en-scene – like some lost Feuillade/Von Sternberg/Anger comic nightmare (a film unto itself, this section) – for me, this achieves what INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME did not – a true strangeness. Hard to know what to say and how exactly this fits to the whole piece…
I realize now I cannot do this – can’t keep up with the film, have to let it pass over me to the end…
I am profoundly moved… so many questions.. I will never forget this work (the girls on the boat, spied from the shore, so unspeakably moving)… I listened to Gorecki’s third every night while editing The Snowman.
This film has the vision and breadth of Hart of London, a wisdom that comes, I think, from an ultimatum, the ultimatum.
Mike, it is a masterpiece, a deep and strange lament upon the waters…
I need to stop, resee it, and write more another day. For now, know that I stand in great appreciation of what you have achieved, so naked in its honesty and profound in its breadth of images rushing by us, rushing us by…
Thanks for sending this to me and please forgive me for taking the time I needed to respond to it.
How is your health today, I am wondering… Are you touring with the work? Do you want to come to Boulder to show it? I can definitely line up a gig for you in the Fall..
For now, this is so inspiring to me… I am about to embark on the Twilight Psalms, which shares a lot of sensibility with your work (home movies, hi contrast, found footage, complex sound design) – I feel a kindred spirit – All of your life has led to the wisdom needed to make a work of this magnitude and largesse and… grace.
Phil
