Curve the Night Sky

Phil Solomon’s found footage film THE PASSAGE OF THE BRIDE is radiant, re-dressed in granular splendour and bathed in pulsing light. Nathaniel Dorsky’s A FALL TRIP HOME was made by a young filmmaker in the throes of a bittersweet homecoming, reconciling with and separating from the life of the past. The film hints at solitudes gentle and fraught, secrets that will define the road forward. These very early films by Solomon and Dorsky are home movies of an exalted kind. CONCRESCENCE is a Stan Brakhage/Solomon visual duet. Jodie Mack’s WASTELAND NO. 3: MOONS, SONS is a memento mori, a scattered bouquet with a still beating heart. Peggy Ahwesh’s backyard observatory peers at the night skies in CURVE THE NIGHT SKY, “transfixed by the theatre of the stars and the dance of the fireflies.” In Brakhage’s FIRE OF WATERS, a modest home is subject to the bombardment of meteorological and psychological forces. TWILIGHT PSALM I: THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR slips us into a blue slumber of troubled enchantment, muted catastrophes and charms never to be remembered upon waking. Leighton Pierce’s THE BACK STEPS is an impressionistic spectral spray of children’s traces on All Hallows’ Eve. THE FOURTH WATCH occurs between 3am and daybreak. In Janie Geiser’s film, runaway characters from movies of the silent era act as somnambulists trespassing into a miniature house of tin, propelled by invading cathode rays. Nina Fonoroff’s DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR is a dialogue of overlapping polar superimpositions, a generational antiphon of misregistered declarations, echoes and missing voices, while in DETROIT PARK, a crumbling movie palace is reincarnated as a mediumistic parking lot, haunted with automotive and poltergeist oratory. ALTAIR: 16.7 light years from the sun, Altair is the twelfth brightest star in our night sky. The opiated calm of the lullaby from Igor Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu exhales into the blue fragrance of interstellar space, landing us in the drink, in Lewis Klahr’s dreamlike noir. (Mark McElhatten)

In the presence of Eve Heller (co-curator).
This film will be shown as part of the screening CONSTELLATIONS (THE BURNING ALPHABET).