By Rushnan Jaleel
‘For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’
The Snowman, Wallace Stevens
The blizzard carries faces in its maw. They stare at us, frozen inside a tangle of skeins. A skeletal trace inscribes the darkness between instants. A child bends to meet the frost. As he drags his shovel across the snow, space splinters into ash. A body falls, then disintegrates, subsumed through a speck of dust by the ether it once was.
In Phil Solomon’s The Snowman (1995), water-logged home movies culled from an unknown archive are rephotographed to enhance their craquelure. The film evokes Wallace Steven’s eponymous poem and serves as a kaddish (a prayer of mourning) for the artist’s father. This would mark the second time that Solomon would memorialise a loved one through his work, with the first being Remains to be Seen (1998), which featured images of his mother on her deathbed. However there are almost no references to Solomon’s father (1) in The Snowman; he is buried in the emulsion of the film strip, under layers of corrugated memories.
The Snowman, elides depiction – of a nameable subject, of its author’s ideas, of its source material. The viewer is lost in a spectral deluge of faces, figures and things shorn of their names and forms, unalterably ravaged by the effacement of the emulsion. Repeat viewings allow the images to permeate, if indistinctly – a boy stoops towards the frost with a shovel, an approaching man flickers between frames, two silhouettes stand at a tree-lined path. Images that appear once linger long afterwards. At the beginning of the film – an infant in a cradle, a group of seated spectators – leave skeletal afterimages that are quietly absorbed by the dark. The body of the emulsion takes precedence to the bodies of the figures enmeshed within. The images are violently wracked by forms of variegated decay – most notably, intensely-woven fissures that resemble branches or skeins. More importantly, the disfigurement seeks to bury the image in abstraction. For instance – a few frames of unspoilt super8 will flash between otherwise mutilated images, leading to aftershocks of clarity. At other times, the erasure of the emulsion will suddenly snatch the spectre away from sight, making it known precisely at the moment of its disappearance.
The film functions through oppositions of this nature. The scarred, inscribed surface of the emulsion will create a false sense of depth in the image, across which a boy on a sled will descend across a ‘sea of [hiero]glyphs’ (2). At other moments, the imagery will create the impression of a work of impasto or bas-relief sculpture; the crimson figure of a child will rend itself away from the ground of the image like an apparition of coagulated blood. Ultimately, these effects work to asignify rather than convince. The ‘false depth’ within the image is a visible contrivance, and if the images contain a haptic quality, it is only to remind the viewer of the flatness of the screen. If in Paul Sharits’ 3rd Degree (1982) re-photography seeks to emphasise the material through annihilation, the material is merely a starting point for Solomon. Despite his materialist methods, Solomon felt that the material was not enough; the image was a purely spectral entity. ‘I wanted to create a film where the light would be so strong that it would come off the screen, along the z-axis, into the room and back toward the projector.’
Absence is at the heart of The Snowman. Absence created by erasure, absences created by relations of family and relations of images; absence of a subject, such that absence is that very subject. Stranded in a becoming without end, the spectres of The Snowman allude, ultimately, to nothing, beyond their effacement. Paradoxically, it is in their effacement that the figures insist that they once existed. Solomon’s immense film concerns nothing less than what Blanchot called ‘a general cataclysm in which, at the same time as the beings themselves, the distances that separate beings would be destroyed’ (3).
Notes
- Except for the soundtrack, which is sourced from a distant recording of the memorial service.
- Paraphrased from Solomon’s words.
- Thomas the Obscure, Maurice Blanchot.