The Physical Anxiety of The Form Itself PDF

“The physical anxiety
of the form itself”

A Haptic Reading of Phil Solomon’s
Experimental Films
Hava Aldouby
Abstract: The haptic turn in film studies, which has been growing in currency
since the late1990s, is gaining support from recent studies in cognitive neuro-
science. This article draws on this convergence, as a productive route to inves-
tigating experimental cinema. Phil Solomon’s concept of “the physical anxiety
of form itself” is taken up as a point of departure for close analysis of three
films: The Secret Garden (1988), The Snowman (1995), and Walking Distance
(1999). The article investigates the artist’s optical, chemical, and manual work-
ing processes, as well as the specific choice of found footage. Relying primar-
ily on Embodied Simulation theory, the focal argument pivots on Solomon’s
“physical anxiety” as it is instantiated in somatosensory arousal. Solomon’s
films are analyzed as effective mediators of intersubjective engagement, of
the particular “haptic” type. Experimental cinema is thus approached from
outside the discursive frame of avant-garde poetics, drawing attention to new
perspectives that are currently opening up for moving image studies.
Keywords: avant-garde film, cognitive neuroscience, embodied simulation,

experimental cinema, found footage, haptic, optical printing, Phil Solomon
My whole gamble was that the roiling chemical soup, which

yields up and then swallows back the temporary iconographic
molds, would . . . be expressive of the contradictory nature of
my romance . . . through the physical anxiety of the form itself.
—Phil Solomon
The age of postphotographic moving images, argue Thomas Elsaesser and

Malte Hagener, entails an “ongoing reconfiguration of the film experience, i.e.
the cinematic body interacting with the spectatorial body” (2010: 172). Since
the mid-1990s, a growing corpus of moving-image theory has addressed bodily
and affective aspects of viewers’ engagement with moving images (Barker
2009; Bruno 2007; Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010; Grodal 2009; Hansen 2004,
2007; Marks 2000, 2002; Shaviro 1993; Sobchack 1992, 2004). Recent studies
Projections Volume 10, Issue 1, Summer 2016: 86–113 © Berghahn Journals

doi: 10:3167/proj.2016.100109 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print), ISSN 1934-9696 (Online)
“ T H E P H Y S I C A L A N X I E T Y O F T H E F O R M I T S E L F ” / 8 7
in cognitive neuroscience have paved the way for empirical work (Gallese and
Guerra 2012, 2015; Heimann et al. 2014; Raz et al. 2013; Raz and Hendler 2014)
and for a multidisciplinary approach to moving-image art as it interfaces with
the brain-body system.
These studies have looked primarily at classical narrative film, thus focusing
on emotional and bodily processes of empathy driven by affectively charged
scenarios. I look to experimental cinema as a key to expanding the scope of the
discussion, by turning particular attention to close-to-abstract experimental
films and the experience of space, texture, and motion. While Elsaesser and
Hagener point out the relevance of “avant-garde practices” (2010: 120) to the
discussion of embodied engagement with film—and notwithstanding Laura
Marks’s pioneering contribution to the haptic study of intercultural cinema
and independent film—experimental cinema remains largely uncharted in
this respect, especially in relation to recent neuro-affective studies.1
The Haptic and Related Theories of Film and New Media

The concept of the haptic originates from the writings of art historian Aloïs
Riegl (1858–1905). Riegl draws a line of progress from “objectivist” representa-
tions of distinctly delineated figures on a depthless plane, as in the Egyptian
bas-relief, to the perspectival or optical mode, which lessens the image’s ap-
peal to the sense of touch ([1902] 1988: 181–183). Walter Benjamin, in an in-
verse take on Riegl’s teleological account of art history, characterizes modern
perception as essentially tactile, or haptic, in respect to its fragmented and
distracted nature, owing to the continuous assault on the senses (Bruno 2007:
250). In the “Artwork Essay,” Benjamin posits film as the vehicle par excellence
for mass adaptation to the physical “shock effect” of the modern ([1936] 1970:
240–242).
The haptic resurfaces in Deleuze and Guattari, again informed by Riegl, in
association with the binary concept of smooth/striated space (1987: 492–500).
Smooth space involves spatial ambiguity and lacks coherent cues for perspec-
tive, scale, and orientation. In this condition, space is experienced via multi-
sensory engagement that exceeds vision and is thus conceived as primarily
haptic. In my discussion I adopt the concept of the haptic in film theory as
conducive to multisensory experience, following Giuliana Bruno’s account of
film’s “architexture” (2007: 250), and primarily Marks’s extensive discussion of
haptic cinema in terms of touch and tactility, kinesthesia and proprioception
(2002: 2).2
Through the twin notions of “haptic visuality” and “haptic criticism,” Marks
(2002: xii) has opted to reestablish critical consideration of this concept as ap-
plied to moving images. The promise of haptic criticism is extremely helpful in
the search for words that might tip the discussion toward the somatic. Further,
Marks has provided the basic tools with which to address viewer engagement
8 8 / P R O J E C T I O N S
with films that look up-close at textured surfaces, lacking coordinates for spa-
tial orientation or even mere object recognition, as in Solomon’s American Falls
(Figure 1). For Marks, moving images of the haptic brand are endowed with “a
quality of visual eroticism . . . the viewer responding to the video as to another
body and to the screen as another skin” (2002: 4). This means postulating a
way of engagement with the film itself as a material other, beyond or in place
of identification with a diegetic character. Film viewing is thus conceived as
a venue for dynamic intersubjective communication, involving the spectator,
the film, and the maker.3
In this article I highlight haptic apparatuses at work in Solomon’s films.
Beyond haptic film theory, I make recourse to recent studies in cognitive neu-
roscience, which offer new insights pertaining to the capacity of our brain to
cross-modally integrate various sense perceptions, and even simulate them
under certain conditions. I refer to particular studies that seem to support the
idea implied by the concept of the haptic, namely the double notion of “touch-
ing with the eyes,” and “being touched” by art. Any attempt at haptic analy-
sis, as in the present reading of Solomon’s films, may greatly benefit from the
synergism found between moving-image theory and the insights afforded by
these studies.
Embodied Simulation and Aesthetic Experience

The idea of mutual sensorimotor engagement, raised earlier in association
with haptic film aesthetics, receives considerable support from recent stud-
ies in the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and film. These studies focus
primarily on the apparatus of empathy, again perceived as driven primarily
by classical cinematic narrative. Their major theoretical premise is Embodied
Simulation (ES) (Gallese 2005, 2007), predicated on the discovery of mirror
neurons (Gallese et al. 1996; Gallese and Goldman 1998). In brief, ES implies
that observation of an action or emotion shares neural circuits with actual
firsthand experience of the same action or emotion. To quote Gallese, “to per-
ceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it” (2005: 36). In other
words, when we perceive the world around us, our brain-body system facil-
itates pre-conscious understanding of our perceptions through an appara-
tus of bodily identification, or simulation. The most radical implication of ES
theory is that it makes it possible to dispense with the dichotomous idea of
actual versus mediated experience, given the shared brain activity between
the two modalities. ES is thus of key importance in understanding appara-
tuses of multisensory, or haptic, engagement with visual art.
Raz and Hendler have taken ES a step further in the direction of film theory,
recently postulating, on the basis of a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI)
study, two distinct modes of cinematic address: one involving “automatic res-
onance of [a] visceral state,” and the other a “cognitively driven simulation of
another’s state” (2014: 96). The respective modalities are activated by eso- and
para-dramatic cues, the authors’ terms for formal cinematic devices (such as
camera movement), that either facilitate or weaken the automatic or cogni-
tively driven states. This seems to converge with a recent EEG study published
by Heimann et al. (2014) that addresses variations in motor cortex activation
in viewers, relative to different camera movements.4 This study implies that
while watching motion toward an object in film, a motor response arises in
relevant brain areas, though it is not fully actuated and is thus conceived as
simulated. In my discussion of Solomon’s films I rely on the general insight
offered by these studies, regarding the effectiveness of certain formal strate-
gies in catalyzing automatic arousal of concrete sensations, regardless of story,
character, or other narrative means.
Perhaps most pertinent to my argument are two recent studies from Gal-
lese’s lab that investigated the perception of abstract art (Sbriscia-Fioretti
et al. 2013; Umiltà et al. 2012). These intriguing works focused on arousal in
pre-motor cortical areas in response to the large brushstrokes in the paintings
of Franz Kline, and the knife slashes in Lucio Fontana’s canvases. The authors
surmise that ES drives subjects’ reactions to the traces of motion left on the
canvas, giving rise to unconscious simulation of motor action, as if mirroring
the original gestures of the artists.
Mark Hansen’s new media theory largely coincides with the above findings.
Hansen’s analyses of Virtual Reality (VR) art installations arrive at the conclu-
sion that VR is constituted primarily in the viewer’s body, and thus not prior to
the moment of engagement with the work. Consequently, Hansen plays down
the importance of perceptual illusionism in producing presence in virtual real-
ity. Rather, the brain-body system interfaces with VR to create a sense of reality
via simulated body sensations (Hansen 2004: 177). Driven by disorienting spa-
tial and proprioceptive cues, the subject’s inner state responds to the peculiar
“unreal” reality suggested by the artwork. Hansen’s concept of “the body brain
achievement of simulation” (2004: 174) is further supported by recent em-
pirical studies that highlight cross-modal integration of sensory perceptions
(Lacey et al. 2012; Tal and Amedi 2009; Wood et al. 2010). If, as some of these
studies indicate, we are able to experience (simulated) tactile sensation while
merely looking at an image, or even while processing verbal metaphors that
are texturally suggestive (Lacey et al. 2012), then the division between “actual”
and “simulated” may be put to rest.
The synergism arising from the conjunction of these theoretical moves is
invaluable to the study of aesthetic experience. As I demonstrate, it is most
helpful in analyzing abstract experimental cinema in terms of sensory and so-
matic engagement. I draw on Hansen’s postulation of “an entirely different re-
gime of visual experience, one that recurs to and expands the central function
played by the body, not in lending reality to a virtual, representational space,
How precisely Solomon’s films but in actually creating the image within itself” (2004: 39).
summon an inner simulation Coinciding with ES theory, Hansen’s notion of “affective au-
to-subjectivity” (2004: 177) applies quite strikingly to viewers’
of sensory experience is
experiences of Solomon’s moving images. How precisely Sol-
a question worth asking omon’s films summon an inner simulation of sensory expe-
through a haptic reading. rience is a question worth asking through a haptic reading.
Haptic Aspects of Solomon’s Process

Solomon relies primarily on optical printing, a painstaking, frame-by-frame
rephotography of found materials, mainly fragments captured digitally from
DVD editions of popular movies, in addition to old home movies culled from
various sources. Small bits of home movies from the artist’s early childhood
are embedded as well, albeit unrecognizably mixed with other found mate-
rials. The DVD excerpts are rephotographed onto 16 mm film using a digital-
to-film optical printer. In certain cases, the rephotographed films are chemi-
cally treated, the “bleaching” effects subsequently highlighted in the optical
printer. While some films are silent, others are further complicated by multi-
layered soundtracks incorporating music, various sound recordings, and sound
footage appropriated from cinematic sources. The end result comes close
to totally erasing narrative content and communicability (Figure 1). Direct
mirroring-empathy, of the kind based on observed action or expression, is thus
The cinematic image is caught in disabled. The cinematic image is caught in an unceas-
ing cycle of emergence and disappearance, enmeshed
an unceasing cycle of emergence in Solomon’s “roiling chemical soup” (2012). It is thus the
and disappearance, enmeshed “soup” itself that calls for attention.
in Solomon’s “roiling chemical While film has been culturally constructed through-
soup”. It is thus the “soup” itself out most of its history as a medium whose job is to trans-
mit narrative information (i.e., “stories”) while remaining
that calls for attention.
transparent, films are primarily material objects. It is
useful to recall James Elkins’s (2008) observation regarding our lack of critical
terms for addressing the materiality of visual objects. To quote Elkins, “it is rel-
atively easy to build theories about materiality, but relatively difficult to talk
about materiality in front of individual objects” (2008: 2). Yet while he advo-
cates attentiveness to “what [writers’] bodies tell them about artworks,” Elkins
remains skeptical about the feasibility of this very idea (2008: 3).
Although the primary subject of Elkins’s argument is painting, it pertains
in no lesser degree to the study of moving images. I thus concur with the prop-
osition that, notwithstanding the obstacles to successful conceptualization,
“there is no reason not to press on, taking physicality as seriously as possible,
spending as much time with it as possible, finding as many words for it as
possible” (Elkins 2008: 5). Meeting Elkins’s challenge would mean giving as
concrete and detailed an account as possible of Solomon’s films’ specific ma-
Figure 1. Phil Solo-

mon, American Falls
(2010), 3 channel HD
video, color, sound, 56
min. Image courtesy
of the artist.
teriality, noting how it calls forth haptic engagement. In what follows I offer
a close look at a corpus of DVD-to-celluloid works dating from the late 1980s
through the early 2000s. I look closely at three 16 mm films, The Secret Garden
(1989), The Snowman (1995), and Walking Distance (1999). All three films may
be perceived as sites of enhanced haptic intersubjectivity, binding the maker
and the observer in a sensory mesh of manual production practices, textural
excess, and finally, somatosensory arousal on both ends of production and re-
ception. Each film offers a different take on the haptic address and is analyzed
in light of the theoretical premises reviewed above.
I am particularly intrigued by Solomon’s evocation of a “physical anxiety
of the form itself” (2012), a poignant concept that seems to invite a haptic
reading. I ponder the nature of Solomon’s “physical anxiety of form” and opt
to identify it in the films’ capacity to elicit tactile, proprioceptive, and alto-
gether somatic intensity. I ask how the “physical” is instantiated and look at
the depths of collective and biographical anxieties that it probes. My discus-
sion pays particular attention to the artist’s working processes and related
accounts of sensory memories, which I deem essential to understanding his
films’ address and engagement of observers.5
The specificity of Solomon’s found materials is of key importance. My
discussion attends to this aspect of meaning making, while constantly ac-
knowledging the grounding of meaning in sensorimotor and somatosensory
registers. Barsalou’s concept of grounded cognition (2008), and the related
theory of Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS; Barsalou 1999), speak precisely to
this point. A perceptual symbol, in Barsalou’s nomenclature, is “a record of the
neural activation that arises during perception” (1999: 583). PSS and grounded
cognition highlight the perceptual (and thus sensory) basis for higher cog-
nitive elaboration, implying that meaning cannot be approached separately
from sensory and motor registers of experience. Conceptual elab-
Solomon’s films
oration, Barsalou suggests, is instantiated first and foremost in a
display a rich matrix retrieval of perceptual experience, recorded across the sensory mo-
of practices designed dalities of audition, tactility, olfaction, gustation, proprioception,
to augment somatic and introspection, or interoception (1999: 585).6
experience while Solomon’s films display a rich matrix of practices designed to
augment somatic experience while retaining a minimal degree of
retaining a minimal
availability to cognitive processing. Constant tension is thus main-
degree of availability tained between meaning effect and presence effect, to adopt Gum-
to cognitive processing. brecht’s (2004) terminology.
The Secret Garden (1988)

The Secret Garden, a 17:30 minute, silent, 16 mm film, employs a combined
manual and optical technique whereby the images acquire an unusual glow
that obscures contour and focus. The effect is one of refraction and multipli-
cation, endowing the image with a mysteriously voluminous presence (Figure
2). To achieve this, Solomon used a lens with an inbuilt aberration, which he
exploited to effect and enhance the unusual distortion (MacDonald 2006: 211).
This practice seems to follow the dictum of Stan Brakhage, Solomon’s
teacher, colleague and close personal friend, who advised “spitting on the lens
or wrecking its focal attention,” thus generally using lenses against specifi-

mon, The Secret
Garden (1988), 16
mm, color, silent,
17:30 min. Image
courtesy of the artist.
cation in order to achieve special distortions (Brakhage 1963). And yet, while
it may be tempting to align Solomon with Brakhage in the history of exper-
imental cinema, I note a substantial difference in the two filmmakers’ pro-
cesses. Brakhage’s practice, mainly in its earlier, formative stages, relied on
filming “out in the world.” He later developed diverse manipulations of the
film strip itself, ranging from scratches, to applied objects and hand painting,
which must definitely be considered a major point of convergence between
the two filmmakers. This said, the fact that Solomon has based his aesthetic
on found footage marks a significant distinction. Solomon resorts almost
exclusively to materials filmed by others, and only rarely uses footage shot
by himself. Putting an emphasis on this preference for the optical printer, and
for the protective seclusion of the studio as opposed to the outside world,
Solomon remarked that “Brakhage filmed physically . . . , he played the camera
like an instrument and he was there physically” (personal interview, August
2014).
Direct manipulation of the filmstrip, as well as the use of found footage,
have featured in avant-garde aesthetics from the outset. Man Ray’s short film
of 1923, Le Retour à la raison (The return to reason) may be cited as one of the
earliest examples of direct work on unexposed film. Among other objects, salt
grains were applied to the emulsion, affecting it with a suggestively textural
effect. In a curious way, Man Ray’s texture-in-motion reverberates in Solomon’s
The Snowman.
Found film footage, reedited to create either a lightly parodic or critical
tone, was used as early as the 1920s. A widely cited 1930s example is Joseph
Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), in which a popular movie, East of Borneo (1931),
starring the actress Rose Hobart, was cut and reedited to surrealistic effect
(Barefoot 2011: 152; Sitney 2002: 330–331). Found footage was taken up as an
aesthetic trope by the American avant-garde in the early 1960s, with Bruce
Conner’s Movie (1958) cited as an inaugurative example (Sitney 2002: 298).
In Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969), Ken Jacobs introduced optical printing—
rephotography in several repeated stages of found filmic materials, producing
diverse visual effects. Jacobs, who closely studied Cornell’s Rose Hobart (Sitney
2002: 331), mastered optical printing and effected its wide influence in the fol-
lowing decades. Solomon attributes to his years at SUNY Binghamton, study-
ing under Jacobs, as his own initiation in the late 1970s into the practice and
aesthetics of optical printing.
Having briefly traced the heritage of found footage in avant-garde film,
I now return to the distinctness of Solomon’s practice, particularly his treat-
ment of the found filmstrip as a material entity. In this context, the artist’s
self-reported feeling of disembodied authorship calls for consideration. “I don’t
feel a personhood behind them [the films]. . . . I don’t feel a corporeal sense
in these films, except for the film itself” (personal interview, August 2014; em-
phasis added). This quotation might seem to run counter to my argument,

were it not for the reference to the physicality of the film itself. While Brakhage
continually evoked a period of youth spent roughing it in the mountains, im-
plying physical prowess, Solomon reports a lifetime of bodily unease and self-
Compelled to engage the consciousness. “I am a person who has never been comfort-
able in his body” (personal interview, August 2014). Compelled
world through a mediating
to engage the world through a mediating (or protective) veil
(or protective) veil of double of double and triple re-photography, Solomon seeks a sense of
and triple re-photography, physicality in the film itself.
Solomon seeks a sense of Even more radically, he forges a unique procedure through
which he touches the very “body” of the projected image, dis-
physicality in the film itself.
regarding, or rather struggling against, its essential immate-
riality. As mentioned earlier, the process underlying the making of The Secret
Garden incorporated a manual feature, about which Solomon has hitherto
remained silent. This intriguing technique, about which the artist prefers to
remain vague even when questioned directly, involves “sculpting” with his
bare fingers the light streaming through the film at the gate of the optical
printer. Through this practice the projected image is engaged as a material
entity, which owes its “body” to physical obstacles barring the passage of light.
The ensuing diffusion and refraction of form render image recognition ex-
tremely challenging. Bypacking (i.e., superimposition of two or more frames)
literally and figuratively complicates the picture, adding layer upon layer and
intensifying the film’s visual excess. Finally, a rapid flicker occurs. Culminating
toward the climactic ending, this compels the spectator to actively engage—
or rather struggle—with the highly evasive, and at the same time aggressive,
film images. Frustration at not being able to “grab” and secure the image for
enduring contemplation alternates with a strong compulsion to look away
from the rapid pulsing.7 Very much there, and yet agonizingly absent, the flick-
ering images tread “the precarious thin ice sense of ‘presence’ in all cinema”
(Solomon 2011: 4869).
At this point it should be made clear that the film is not at all abstract. The
screen strobes with rephotographed fragments from 16 mm reduction prints
of two popular movies, The Secret Garden (Fred Wilcox, 1949) and The Wizard of
Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). These are intercut with excerpts from a home movie
of Solomon’s own sister in childhood. The film is interspersed with sequences
of light on water shot by Solomon himself and manipulated, optically and
manually, to simulate overwhelming curtains of light coming from a diffuse
and unrecognizable origin (Figure 2).
A fragile and barely readable narrative emerges, of an agonizing desire for
a lost Garden, of a mother’s death, and of a little girl who is “in charge of the
story” (personal interview, August 2014). Altogether these elements create an
unreachable, or rather untouchable, world of memory. It flickers on the screen,
building up gradually toward a climax of rapid strobes that render the expe-
rience physically trying, if not unbearable. “It’s physical on my eyes,” Solomon
says, “just like the Burning Bush . . . God would be so beautiful that you couldn’t
look at . . . , you could go blind. . . . I wanted that, like you were forbidden from
looking at this. . . . An expulsion, a literal expulsion, a visual expulsion” (per-
sonal interview, August 2014). The biblical scene of the burning bush, where
one would be powerfully drawn to look but banned from approaching, is thus
associated with the expulsion from the Garden. It is the secret garden of the
1949 film, and the Eden of childhood. In a conflation of early childhood memo-
ries with found cinematic materials, Solomon’s older sister, in the character of
Hodgson-Burnett’s Mary, or Dorothy in The Wizard of OZ, dances and tells him
fantasy stories.
Solomon astutely deploys the subtitled copy of The Secret Garden he had
at his disposal, retaining some of the subtitles to hint at dialogue. The phrase
“tell me a story” recurs a couple of times throughout the film, invoking a sem-
inal childhood memory in which the artist’s older (and only) sister tells him
stories about a fantasy land, “the magic world of Paloopa,” while pressing and
moving his face against the frosted bathroom window, in a sort of texturally
accented “magic lantern” show.8
But the secret garden is haunted by the absence of the dead mother (Fig-
ure 3). The illness and subsequent death of Solomon’s mother in the course
of the film is undoubtedly reflected in the choice of found materials, which
resonate with absence and loss.

mon, The Secret
Garden (1988). 16
mm, color, silent,
17:30 min. Image
courtesy of the artist.
What is at stake in this film is a pervasive anxiety of absence, pertaining to

contemporary culture no less than to the artist’s private loss. Solomon strug-
gles for a cinematic Eden of sensory immediacy, a bodily proximity with the im-
age as another being. The studies mentioned earlier (Heimann et al. 2014; Raz
and Hendler 2014) indicate the crucial role of physical production processes in
binding filmmaker and viewer, through film (or video), in a community of em-
bodied empathy. Solomon’s films afford a visuo-haptic reversal, whereby the
projected images are rendered intensely “touchable.” Rephotography, bypack-
ing, and the flicker, enhanced by Solomon’s insistence on manually processing
individual frames, bear crucially on primary somatic experience. Solomon’s
practice, I argue, reestablishes the “haptic continuum” between artwork and
perceiver that Rodowick deems lost for digital cinema (2007: 37–38). The ten-
sion between “wanting the garden” (or wanting to be in the garden) and the
painful sense of expulsion drives a paradoxical physical experience, being
pulled in and thrust backward by the light/dark strobe, craving access into the
flickering magic world.
Perhaps the most salient point is that the observer is compelled to bring the
image into being across the breaches or intervals of the flicker. I take the lib-
erty here of applying Hansen’s theory of VR to Solomon’s analog works, duly ac-
knowledging Hansen’s pronounced distinction between cinema and VR (2004:
194). I suggest that The Secret Garden relies on a “dynamic coupling of body
and image” (Hansen 2004: 167). The image comes into being in the course of a
dynamic engagement, especially during the rapidly recurring breaches in the
projection, where observers are called upon to mobilize “those bodily ‘senses’—
proprioception, interoception, affectivity—that allow us to orient ourselves in
the absence of fixed points or external orienting schema” (Hansen 2004: 195).
The image is thus at its most powerful in its gaping absence. The viewer—
or perhaps participant would qualify better in this case—is compelled to fulfill
an active role in bringing the image into being. An intensification of the sense
of agency ensues that works to mitigate, if only unconsciously, the acuteness
of absence and loss.
The Snowman (1995)

“[F]ilm and video become more haptic as they die,” writes Marks (2000: 2913).
In The Snowman (1995) Solomon relies on the haptic quality of “dying” home
movies, highlighting cracks and crevices on strips of mold-infected films. The
deterioration of the photographic image is pushed to its extreme.
Solomon refers to The Snowman as a Kaddish (Hebrew prayer of mourning)
for his father. A recorded sound fragment from the father’s funeral service is
in fact incorporated, reverberating deep within the film’s layered soundtrack
(personal interview, August 2014). The film’s title derives from Wallace Ste-
vens’s poem The Snow Man (1921).
In the film, a child, about three years old, is held in his parents’ arms or seen
playing in their proximity. The mother, in a red bathing suit, dances with the
child. The father and child stand on a diving board, the child preparing to jump
into the water. Father and mother each hold the child in their arms. The film
cuts between summer, when the family enjoys itself in an outdoor swimming
pool, and winter, when the child is seen digging in the snow with a red shovel.
In another recurrent fragment that seems to play a key role in this film, the
child slides down a snowy slope, away from father and mother. As Solomon
emphatically notes, the parents just let the child slip away. A theme of parting
and loss thus underlies the succession of found episodes, all of which derive
from home movies presented to Solomon by a former student.
But the film is more complex than this description reveals. The physical
decay of the found film fragments is amplified in the optical printer, to a point
where images are hardly legible (Figure 4). The figures become barely distin-
guishable entities, struggling to maintain a measure of integrity amidst an
unstructured thicket of marks and cracks. Solomon emphasizes that every sin-
gle frame is manually “worked” (personal interview, August 2014), revealing
the high value assigned to the process of physical engagement.
With the weakening of photographic legibility, the film’s material surface
gains salience. The Snowman may be usefully analyzed, in this respect, with
Marks’s (2002) prohaptic parameters in mind. The film presents the privileg-
ing of surface over depth, proximity over distance, and texture over image, a
tendency that Marks posits as characteristic of haptic cinema. The flicker is

mon, The Snowman
(1995), 16mm, color,
sound, 8:30 min.
Image courtesy of
the artist.
introduced toward the 6-minute mark, escalating in speed as the ending ap-
proaches. Solomon refers to the “pulsing,” (his preferred somatic term), as a
way for the film to become more present, or in his words “come out into the
room” (personal interview, August 2014).
In discussing The Secret Garden I speculated on the brain-body stimulation
activated by the pulsing appearance of the images. The Snowman offers an
added textural aspect, which begs separate consideration. My point of depar-
ture is Solomon’s evocation of a phrase from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not
Go Gentle into That Good Night (1951), which for him denotes the emotional
key of The Snowman. In conversation with MacDonald, Solomon directly as-
sociated the poem with the death of his father: “While I was working on [The
Snowman], the imagery called up a kind of ‘rage against the dying of the light,’
perhaps a repressed rage against my father for leaving me an orphan in the
storm” (2006: 217). I propose that “rage against the dying of the light” goes
well beyond the biographical reference spelled out by the artist.
The notion of “rage,” and the “dying of the light,” may be taken as a key to
the haptic aesthetic of The Snowman and its underlying note of physical anx-
iety. A case in point is the single shot of the boy digging with his shovel in the
snow. The scene recurs eleven times over the film’s 8:35 minutes (Figure 5). This
bit of found footage brings back for Solomon an emotionally laden moment,
when he used the shovel to pile dirt upon his father’s fresh grave, in line with
Jewish burial traditions (personal interview, August 2014).

mon, The Snowman
(1995), 16mm, color,
sound, 8:30 min.
Image courtesy of
the artist.
Through its 11 appearances, the image is visible for increasingly shorter

periods, starting with eight seconds on its first appearance and culminating
with one-second flashes during the ecstatic strobe of the film’s finale. In ten
out of eleven instances, the child is but a silhouette enmeshed in a thickly tex-
tured background. Viewers are afforded a single-second flash of the untreated
image only once, just before its final appearance, which makes it striking in
its incongruity with the rest of the film. Each time the image is shown, only
seconds elapse before it is wiped out by the densely layered marks. A forceful,
abrasive scrubbing away of the figure is thus suggested. In one case, Solomon
cuts to a black screen. The scene does not remain intact long enough to be
contemplated. Attempts at “grasping” it, whether literally or semantically, are
frustrated.
While the affective weight of the underlying memory of the burial scene
should not be underrated, my proposition goes beyond biographical facts
alone. Defying permanence, the photographic image wavers on the verge of
eradication. Etched in the emulsion, it gradually decomposes and “dies.” Yet
this failure catalyzes a shift to bodily registers, transposing the weight of
aesthetic experience to the material composition (or decomposition) of the
film image. With the “dying of the light,” “rage” translates into sensorimotor
arousal.
The film thus begs a look at the motor, sensory, and interoceptive registers
that feed its aesthetic “rage.” The Snowman catalyzes sensorimotor and so-
matosensory arousal through emphasis on surface, texture, and tactile sug-
gestion. Let us consider, for instance, the suggestion of abrasion, generated
simultaneously at the visual and auditory levels. Solomon capitalizes on the
peculiar impression of an intensely scratched surface, exacerbated by physical
mold on the film footage. At certain points the marks are so thickly layered
that the coating appears to have been scrubbed off the film altogether. The
suggestion of scraping or scrubbing is even more compelling with motion
across the frame. The mother and child (Figure 4), or the child in the snow (Fig-
ure 5), are by implication subjected to painful abrasion, albeit with no visible
agent of the action. In addition, at certain moments, all that the film affords
the viewer (if viewer is still a valid term here) are roughly textured surfaces in
agitated motion (Figure 6). These effects compel the experiencing subject to
interact with the crackling, scratchy surface, and to anticipate its feel on his or
her skin, or fingertips.
To further consider the repercussions of this suggested abrasion, it may
be productive to return to ES, with specific attention to the brain’s capacity
to simulate tactile stimulation. In his account of the “as-if body loop system,”
Antonio Damasio explains that “the brain can simulate, within somatosens-
ing regions, certain body states, as if they were occurring; and because our
perception of any body state is rooted in the body maps of somatosensing
1 0 0 / P R O J E C T I O N S

mon, The Snowman
(1995), 16mm, color,
sound, 8:30 min.
Image courtesy of
the artist.
regions, we perceive the body state as actually occurring even if it is not” (2010:
102–103). Ample empirical evidence indicates that mere observation of touch,
whether the object of the touch is animate or inanimate, activates a visuo-
tactile mirroring mechanism. First-person experience of tactile stimulation,
and observation of another person (or object) being touched, are mediated
through shared neural circuits (Ebisch et al. 2008, 2012; Keysers et al. 2004;
Wood et al. 2010). In an fMRI study, Ebisch et al. (2008) showed the visuotactile
mirroring mechanism to be active in all conditions of touch observation, even
in the absence of an agent intentionally applying touch. This is also the case
when an inanimate object is seen touching either an animate or an inanimate
target (Ebisch et al. 2008).
This finding is particularly relevant to The Snowman, where viewers are
not given any indication of intentional touch, and yet the film strongly insin-
uates abrasive contact, albeit through circumstantial suggestion alone. ES,
driven by the visuotactile mirroring mechanism, may thus play a key role in
forging a strong embodied response to the film’s “dying” images, regardless of
their gradually decreasing legibility. Through ES, (aesthetic) intersubjectivity is
forged between the film—as a “body” or material entity—and an embodied
viewer. As posited by Gallese and Guerra (2012, 2015), ES binds the creative sub-
ject with a third-person viewer via the body of the film.
The foregoing proposition may be usefully brought to bear on The Snow-
man as a site of “rage.” The struggle of the photographic image to maintain
“ T H E P H Y S I C A L A N X I E T Y O F T H E F O R M I T S E L F ” / 1 0 1
physical presence on the decomposing strip of cel- The struggle of the photographic
luloid is afforded to the viewer as intense somatic image to maintain physical presence
experience, with a particular bearing on tactile
on the decomposing strip of celluloid
sensation. Solomon is thus able to build up a “rage”
of somatic and affective intensity, in the face of the is afforded to the viewer as intense
void (“nothing himself”) implied by Wallace Ste- somatic experience.
vens’s poem, The Snow Man.
Dylan Thomas’s “Rage against the dying of the light,” as applied to Solo-
mon’s film, is not solely about personal loss, nor is it exclusively about the eva-
siveness of past moments. Biographical memory, preserved in sensorimotor
registers, maps onto physical engagement with the film image. Loss is medi-
ated by a reassertion of presence in somatic registers, propelling the observer
into sensory and affective intensity, even as she gradually relinquishes her at-
tempt to decipher the scene. Gallese’s (2012) concept of Liberated ES is salient
here. Liberated ES posits that film viewing releases the subject from the bur-
den of real-life vigilance and actual action, thus freeing sensory resources, to
the advantage of the simulation mechanism.
The more abstract parts of The Snowman, which do not suggest an object
of touch or a discernible agent, may be further approached with Barsalou’s
theory of PSS. PSS grounds cognitive symbols in the neural recording of sen-
sory perceptions, later retrievable as perceptual symbols. According to Barsa-
lou (see also Goldstein et al. 2006), cognitive processing involves a dynamic
retrieval of perceptual experience, originally recorded through sensory circuits.
Solomon’s textured surfaces may activate a similar mechanism of retrieval,
calling up sensory recordings of tactile experience, rather than activating an
amodal cognitive elaboration on the concept of texture.
I want to return to the imagery of the child digging in the snow. “Throw-
ing dirt,” or piling earth, as in Solomon’s memory of the burial of his father,
implies eliminating an object from sight. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the
piling up of matter forges a palpable “thingness,” or “thereness,” that begs
consideration. In a revealing remark, Solomon attributed this bivalence to his
haptic aesthetic. “I’m something of an archaeologist in reverse: I try to discover
truths in these artifacts by throwing the dirt back on them. I bury things rather
than excavate them” (Macdonald 2006: 219–220). Whereas archaeology is all
about digging up traces of presences long lost, “reverse archaeology” endows
the image with unprecedented materiality at the very moment of its “death”
(or burial)—both in the physical sense of optical and chemical decomposi-
tion, and in ceasing to exist as a legible semiotic entity. The image becomes
suggestively, though not semantically, “graspable.” It is presentified, to use
Gumbrecht’s terminology (2004), even as it disintegrates into the expanse of
“roiling” matter. Somatic “rage” defies “the dying of the light.”
1 0 2 / P R O J E C T I O N S
Walking Distance (1999)

Walking Distance (1999) presents yet another turn in Solomon’s process: shift-
ing to chemical manipulation of the strip of celluloid. When Solomon en-
hances these effects on the optical printer, a he creates a strong suggestion of
bas-relief (Solomon 2012).
Walking Distance is part of a trilogy, along with Night of the Meek (Anne
Frank) (2002), and The Lateness of the Hour (2001). The Twilight Psalms series
derives its title from the popular horror and suspense TV series, The Twilight
Zone (Rod Serling, 1959–1964). Solomon’s series to date consists of three 16
mm films, between 10 and 23 minutes long, and the more recently adjoined
digital work, Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (2013). All four pieces appropriate
titles of individual Twilight Zone episodes.
As described earlier, Solomon’s process involves several stages of optical and
chemical manipulation, exerted on source imagery culled in this case mainly
from DVD editions of popular films, besides found footage of an eclectic selec-
tion. Night of the Meek amalgamates fragments from three 1930s horror films:
M, by Fritz Lang (1931), The Golem, by Paul Wegener (1930), and Frankenstein by
James Whale (1931). These are intercut with footage from a documentary ad-
dressing the Kindertransport, the rescue of predominantly Jewish children from
Germany close to the eruption of World War II and their reception by British fam-
ilies (Jonathan Harris, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport,
2001). In addition, Night of the Meek presents embedded splinters from archival
documentation of the Kristallnacht pogrom, or “Night of Broken Glass” (1938).
Although the entire Twilight Psalms series is associated with the turn of
the millennium, Walking Distance is not as historically specific as Night of the
Meek. It primarily engages a single film, Houdini (George Marshall, 1953), a
melodramatic biopic following the life story of the renowned performer, with
Tony Curtis in the leading role. Other embedded fragments derive from three
films of an extremely diverse selection. The choice ranges from D.W. Griffith’s
Way Down East, starring Lillian Gish (1920), to Darby O’Gill and the Little People
(Robert Stevenson, 1959), a Disney film whose figure of death (the “Banshee”)
apparently haunted Solomon’s childhood. Perhaps the most somatically and
affectively laden is a single scene appropriated from Luc Besson’s 1988 film
Le Grand bleu (The Big Blue). The film revolves around a diver’s obsession with
the depths of the sea, and culminates in a metaphorical “rapture of the deep,”
connoting transcendence through death.
From “Midnight Sun,” an apocalyptic Twilight Zone episode featuring the
end of the world, Solomon appropriates a shot of a heat-affected painting,
dripping with melting paint. Another embedded fragment from Midnight Sun
portrays a young woman, apparently destined to die under the unbearable
climate conditions. Both Night of the Meek and Walking Distance incorporate
archival footage and Solomon’s family materials.
The sheer quantity of embedded materials is overwhelming. Solomon

mines a collective cinematic unconscious, which at the same time is also
highly personal, as evidenced by the idiosyncratic choice of footage. As in The
Secret Garden, a fragile narrative line strings together affectively charged mo-
ments. These keep emerging and disappearing, struggling for decipherability
under the heavy layer of chemically corrupted emulsion. Walking Distance is
thus constituted by the ongoing exchange of eruption and re-burial already
encountered in The Snowman.
The prevailing anxiety that Solomon’s “reverse archaeology” seems to alter-
nately dig out and suppress feeds on registers of meaning and presence (Gum-
brecht 2004), simultaneously. The sensory register underlies, and grounds,
higher-level cognitive processing (Barsalou 1999; Goldberg et al. 2006), which
builds on cinematic knowledge and general interpretive faculties. My discus-
sion pivots on the extent of equilibrium maintained between cinematically
“telling,” or photographically “showing,” and sensually “making present.” At
what points does the equilibrium break, and what is it about the individually
selected scenes that compels the artist to bury them painstakingly (frame by
frame, manually) in the bubbling chemical “soup”?
About 21 minutes into the film, Solomon appropriates a scene from George
Marshall’s film depicting Houdini trapped under the surface of a frozen river,
desperately seeking pockets of air to sustain his breathing. As is widely known,
Houdini was a performer who never tired of courting extreme situations of
confinement, mostly in airless containers, which Solomon overtly associates
with coffins. Houdini mastered the art of escaping unimaginable and often
dangerous situations by pure dexterity and intelligence. The connotation of
mortal danger, of regularly courting death, elucidates Solomon’s choice of
Houdini as the primary source of “found footage” for Walking Distance.
The original image of the scene (Figure 7) gravitates toward abstraction. The
frame is divided by an upper layer of ice and an expanse of water stretching
beneath. Houdini’s face, barely visible in the claustrophobic gap in between,
is the sole detail in this otherwise abstract composition. Solomon seems to
have seized on the haptic suggestiveness of this shot. As chemistry dissolves
the image, water solidifies into rock, sealing the “burial.” Houdini is now prac-
tically buried underneath a thick surface of molten emulsion (Figure 8). With
the photographic image virtually destroyed, the excessive feel of texture af-
fords an even stronger sense of physical weight and massive pressure than
that originally implied in George Marshall’s cinematic treatment. The burden
of generating affective intensity is transposed from the cinematic narrative
mode to sensory stimulation.
Solomon’s life-threatening lung condition, diagnosed in the course of
making the film, undergirds its distinct note of anxiety. Houdini’s repeated
rehearsal of life-threatening situations makes his persona all too relevant to
1 0 4 / P R O J E C T I O N S
Figure 7. George Mar-

shall, Houdini, 1953.
DVD screen shot.
Solomon’s private somatic experience. A decade earlier, Remains to Be Seen

(1989) already evidenced respiratory anxiety, at that time related to the termi-
nal illness of Solomon’s mother. Heavy breathing prevails on the soundtrack,
deriving according to Solomon’s report from the sound effect of a swimming
lesson found in a commercial depository of such effects. “In 1999 I went un-
der,” Solomon remarks on the emergence of his mother’s illness in his own life,
“and it was very much like that” (personal interview, August 2014).
The film’s recourse to Houdini invokes a multilayered note of anxiety. This
is indicated by Solomon’s remark that for him Houdini was none other than
a Jewish escape artist (Skype interview, 4 February 2013). Interestingly, in con-
versation with MacDonald Solomon chose to refer to Houdini as an ethnically
and culturally neutral “emblem of the twentieth century” (2006: 222). This
makes the later remark doubly striking in its expression of existential angst
based on a collective historical and ethnic trauma. Solomon is the grandson
of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States and was reared in Monsey,
New York, in the aftermath of World War II, in which his father participated as
an American soldier. His negotiation of twentieth-century history is invested,
in his own words, with “the sadness and lamentation about being a Jew, about
knowing the darker side of life—and often anticipating the worst” (email to
author, 7 April 2012).
Solomon chooses cinematic fragments that foreground liminal life and
death situations. Lillian Gish, who in Way Down East drifts to certain death
on an ice flow, is associated by Solomon with his mother’s terminal illness.

mon, Walking Dis-
tance (1999), 16 mm,
color, sound, 23:18
min. Image courtesy
of the artist.
About a fragment showing Houdini being dropped under the ice in a trunk
nailed shut, Solomon remarked that “he did not escape the last box” (personal
interview, August 2014). Finally, toward the end of Walking Distance, Solomon
inserts an enigmatic tightrope walker from an unidentified source, a graphic
emblem of the film’s pervasive concern with dangerous borderline situations.
Liminal existential conditions, and extreme physical distress, thus make up
the found-footage amalgam of Walking Distance. However, with the chemical
obliteration of the original film matrix, it is the “physical anxiety of the
form itself” that assumes a pivotal role. The bodily (often respiratory)
The bodily distress
distress predominating in the captured cinematic fragments trans- predominating in the
lates into material excess, enhanced texture, and eradication of depth captured cinematic
of field. The film experience tips toward haptic engagement, with fragments translates
abundant textural detail the exclusive substitute for photographic ac-
into material excess,
curacy. As cinematic referencing is divested of its effectiveness, somatic
engagement is augmented. Working with “the chemistry,” Solomon enhanced texture,
forges a distinctly non-cinematic notion of materiality, which speaks and eradication of
to the anxiety of entrapment and suffocation. In terms of PSS (Barsa- depth of field.
lou 1999), dynamic clusters of perceptual symbols related to matter,
mass, and texture are brought forth during this process. As Goldberg et al.
(2006) have shown, this involves activation of somatosensory and pre-motor
regions. While conventional cinematic denotation is disabled, the sensory and
affective potentials of the source footage proportionally increase, building on
the compelling materiality of the “rubble” left by the decomposed image.
1 0 6 / P R O J E C T I O N S
Solomon remarked on the palpability of chemically treated images and his

fascination with “the poignancy of that” (Skype interview, 4 February 2013).
Considering the etymology of the word poignancy as the capacity for convey-
ing a sharp or pointed sensation, I hold that Solomon’s words reveal a negoti-
ation of pain and anxiety, instantiated in haptic filmmaking. Hansen’s concept
of affective simulation, induced in the absence of visual legibility, explains the
power of Solomon’s images to promote acute bodily agitation. At the same
time, these images reestablish self-presence by mobilizing the entire sensory
gamut available to us as human subjects. Solomon seems to indicate this
when he states that he values aesthetic experience where “you remain you,
only more so. You are augmented” (Skype interview 4 February 2013).
Optical printing and chemical treatment enable Solomon to liberate his
cinema, not just from “the tyranny of the cut,” as he told MacDonald (2006:
223), but even more radically from the primacy of photographic communica-
bility. To return to Merleau-Ponty, I propose that Solomon’s “roiling” moving
images be conceived as “paintings . . . without the skin of things, but giving
their flesh” (1961: 218). The notion of skinning the image, that is destroying or
corrupting form to reveal a chaotic thingness, seems especially relevant to
Solomon’s aesthetic. Again we are dealing with the paradox of covering and
discovering in one move. “Forgetting the viscous, equivocal appearances,” Mer-
leau-Ponty writes in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” we “go through them straight to the
things they present” ([19450] 1993: 68). Solomon reverses the photographic
process, returning film to a state of “viscous equivocality” where, to quote from
Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological film theory (2004: 84), one “knows with
one’s fingers at the movies.”
In conclusion, I return to the dream (or hallucination) appropriated from
The Big Blue. A point of view shot reveals a surge of sea water gradually de-
scending over a room. The motion is upside down and in reverse, contrary to
gravity, lending it a disconcerting effect (Figure 9). With the loss of spatial ori-
entation also comes the shocking realization that the man on the bed actu-
Figure 9. Luc Besson,

Le Grand Bleu (The
Big Blue), 1988. DVD
screen shot.

mon, Walking Dis-
tance (1999), 16 mm,
color, sound, 23:18
min. Image courtesy
of the artist.
ally welcomes the surging mass of water, apparently willing the impending
submersion. While acknowledging Solomon’s description of it as a “deathbed
scene” (personal interview, 14 August 2014) and the (perhaps too easy) associ-
ation with respiratory distress, I insist that the hands are raised in welcome. A
couple of seconds later, the room dissolves into an underwater shot, mediated
by a free-floating viewpoint that strongly connotes transcendence through
weightless submersion in the infinite Big Blue.
Solomon’s twist in The Big Blue seems at first consideration to be the en-
hancement of the “deathbed” effect. The (al)chemical conversion of water
into rock underscores the connotations of suffocation, or burial under a mass
of matter, as if the scene were sealed behind an impenetrable stony surface.
Rather than allowing the gaze to float weightless in an infinite expanse, as in
Besson’s film, Solomon’s chemical manipulation blocks the gaze at the surface.
The effect is repeated in the four subsequent recurrences of this scene.
However, I want to claim that Solomon’s version in fact preserves the
inherent bivalence in Luc Besson’s scene. In other words, the rapture of float-
ing weightless in the expanses of the deep transforms into intense somato-
sensory engagement, called forth by the dynamically shifting textured sur-
faces. Motion “melts down” the solid surfaces and turns them into bubbling
pools of liquid matter, inviting touch and even suggesting the possibility of
submersion. An oscillatory experience thus finds the viewer rocking between
the film’s suggestion of resistant surface and pliable substance, or the alter-
nate smoothness and roughness of congealing matter. In addition to the an-
1 0 8 / P R O J E C T I O N S
ticipation of touch, motion elicits a simulation of motor engagement with

the film.
Solomon seems to respond to Besson’s “rapture of the deep” with an erup-
tion of somatic intensity, its anxiety notwithstanding. For in fact, anxiety is
crucial to the constitution of the ecstasy of sensory arousal, just as “hysteria”
is indispensable to painting, as hypothesized by Deleuze in his monograph on
Francis Bacon (2003). For Solomon, painting apparently holds a special appeal
with respect to textural suggestiveness and tactile s(t)imulation. Solomon
self-consciously relies on painterly texture in films such as Walking Distance
and American Falls. Thinking back on American Falls as “memories of paint-
ings,” (Solomon 2012), his visual references were in fact such textural painters
as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Anselm Kiefer, and Francis Bacon. I take the liberty of
applying Deleuze’s “hysteric” excess of presence to the somatic and affective
intensity of Solomon’s films. At stake is a quest for haptic (or hysteric?) pres-
ence, fed by existential anxiety.
Conclusion
Biographical fact cannot serve as an exclusive key to Solomon’s haptic film-
art. Yet two memories seem pertinent to his prevailing aesthetic concern with
texture. The first is the childhood memory where Solomon recalls his sister
pressing his face against the frosted glass of the bathroom window. With the
frosted window as a gateway to the Eden of childhood, texture assumes in
Solomon’s sensory vocabulary a quality of “material anxiety” layered with de-
sire, longing, and also physical rapture. Solomon’s “physical anxiety of form” is
indeed double-edged. As demonstrated throughout my discussion, in many
cases “the physical” resists “anxiety” even as it constitutes it and is constituted
by it, caught up in a recurring cycle of annihilation and reembodiment, de-
struction and reconstruction.
The second memory reported by Solomon touches on emotional pain and
bodily distress, associated with the severe dehydration of his sick mother’s
skin. Solomon associates certain textural film effects, obtained chemically in
Walking Distance, with his mother’s broken skin. Moreover, a shot of the moth-
er’s hands is embedded in the film. The adult experience of tactilely engaging
with an aging parent’s parched hand taps into a child’s sensory memory of
maternal youth and softness.
Because sensory memories are differently nuanced for different people,
a qualification of the argument is required if the discussion is to exceed the
filmmaker’s biographical “body.” The intensity and variation of textural sug-
gestion in the films under scrutiny renders them powerful engines of somatic
engagement, driven by individual apparatuses of sensory knowledge retrieval.
Solomon’s films vacillate between optical and haptic address, the first invit-
ing semiotic elaboration, the latter aiming at those rare but intense moments
where, to quote Gumbrecht, “we simply want the things of the world close
to our skin” (2004: 106). My discussion pivoted on somatic intensity, which in
conclusion I would like to associate with Gumbrecht’s concept of presence.
In Gumbrecht’s theory of aesthetic experience, moments of intensity play a
crucial role (2004: 97–99). However, as Gumbrecht insists, in a culture that is
“always already permeated with absence,” presence could only be experienced
in its eventness, “mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning” (2004: 106,
113). An oscillation or tension builds around the simultaneous experience of
presence and meaning (or rather presence effect and meaning effect), afforded
in aesthetic experience (Gumbrecht 2004: 108).
Solomon’s project is all about releasing presence from the formal constric-
tions imposed on film by cinematic culture. Envisioning a formless stream of
emulsion, “as if loosened up and molten and flowing down the filmstrip in the
projector” (MacDonald 2006: 223), he seeks to restore to film the “thingness”
that Gumbrecht desires us to rediscover in objects of aesthetic experience
(2004: 116). Solomon articulates an intriguing notion of “uncanning the film”
(personal interview, August 2014), playing on the Freudian uncanny. This fig-
urative breaking of a sheltering envelope—the “home” of Freud’s unheimlich,
the cinematic frame, or even more literally the can holding the filmstrip—is at
once ominous and enrapturing.
Playing the somatic against the semiotic, (re)embodiment against annihi-
lation, “archaeology” against reburial, Solomon is able to negotiate personal
and collective memory and its anxieties while relying on “the intelligence of
the perceiving body” (Marks 2002: 18). Drawing on the seminal question posed
by W.J.T. Mitchell’s book, What Do Pictures Want? (2005), I posit that Solomon’s
celluloid works restore to images—and viewers—the body they “want.” In the
process, filmmaker and viewer intersubjectively engage with
a stratum of “physical anxiety,” where presence is reasserted Filmmaker and viewer
through somatic intensity while simultaneously invoking the intersubjectively engage
pain of absence. with a stratum of “physical
Solomon’s works afford a new perspective on the consti- anxiety,” where presence
tution of the “cinematic body” postulated by Shaviro (1993),
is reasserted through
Marks (2002), Sobchack (2004), and Elsaesser and Hagener
(2010) . In looking closely at the “body” of Solomon moving im- somatic intensity, while
ages I have tried to meet Elkins’s challenging call for attention simultaneously invoking
to the materiality of aesthetic encounters. For this approach to the pain of absence.
be productive, it needs to rely on the synergetic convergence
between recent research in cognitive neuroscience and the haptic brand of
moving-image theory. There is a vast span of technical ingenuities yet to be
considered in contemporary moving-image making, as well as the full gamut
of sensory and other bodily modes of response. These call for cross-disciplinary
attention to new territories opening up for the moving image.
1 1 0 / P R O J E C T I O N S
Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was made possible thanks to the support of Da’at
Ha-Makom Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE), in the Study of Modern
Jewish Culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The author wishes to thank Phil Solomon for the time he generously ded-
icated to film viewing and several in-depth discussions of his aesthetic inter-
ests, creative process and biographical information, and for the access granted
to invaluable related materials.
The author thanks Vittorio Gallese for a stimulating exchange of ideas on
the notion of haptic visuality, and for reading and commenting on an early
draft of this article.
Hava Aldouby, PhD, is a member of the senior faculty at the Open University
of Israel, Department of Literature, Language and Arts. Her research interests
pivot on moving-image art, spanning experimental cinema, new media, and
video art. She is the author of Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film
(University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is a contributor to Ori Gersht: History
Reflecting (MFA Publications, 2014), and is currently preparing a monograph
on the works of video artist Ori Gersht, under the working title “Ori Gersht:
Photography, Video, and the Quest for Presence.”
Notes
1
A recent exception is Taberham 2014.
2
To the foregoing “somatic senses of touch” associated with the haptic, Mark Paterson
adds the vestibular sense, responsible for body balance and associated with the inner ear
(Paterson 2007: 4).
3
Note that in The Address of the Eye, Sobchack posited a “mutual capacity for and pos-
session of experience through common structures of embodied existence . . . that provide
the intersubjective basis of objective cinematic communication” (1992: 5).
4
This study employed video clips depicting an identical scene produced alternately with
fixed camera, zoom, steadicam (camera carried on the cinematographer’s body), and dolly
shot (camera fixed on a moving platform).
5
The information provided in this paper concerning Phil Solomon’s working processes,
biographical details, and other aspects of his films, draws primarily on my extensive inter-
views with the artist (Boulder, Colorado, 15–19 August 2014). All quotations and references
to process and aesthetic concerns, as well as biographical and other relevant details, derive
from the foregoing interview, unless otherwise indicated. Earlier email correspondence and
Skype interviews are referenced separately within this article.
6
PSS theory has been further corroborated by an fMRI study (Goldberg et al. 2006) that
looked at the involvement of sensory knowledge retrieval in semantic decision tasks con-
cerning sensory properties of objects; such as color, sound, touch, and taste. Sensory cortical
regions, relevant to the perceptual properties in question, were activated in the course of
semantic elaboration. Probably most relevant to my research is the finding that decisions
regarding tactile properties (such as softness), involved increased activity in the somatosen-
sory cortex; and in addition, increased activation in motor and premotor regions.
7
Notwithstanding the artist’s self-proclaimed indebtedness to Ken Jacobs’s Nervous
System multiple projector performances, and to the pioneering use of the flicker by Peter
Kubelka (yet another influential figure at SUNY Binghamton), Solomon deviates from his
predecessors’ projects in his commitment to “ecstatic cinema.” Rather than reduce cinema
to its skeletal elements and expose its optical apparatuses, Solomon deploys the flicker
(which he refers to as “pulsing”), as a catalyst of rapture, conceived in terms of psychedelic,
orgasmic experience. Notably, Solomon’s bypacking of the flickering image is unique and
not found in the work of either Jacobs or Kubelka. The latter seems to be interested in the
flicker itself as a formal (or formalist) trope.
8
Solomon associates Paloopa with the popular cartoon figure Joe Palooka (email to au-
thor, 2 February 2015).
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The Physical Anxiety of The Form Itself PDF

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“The physical anxiety

of the form itself”

Keywords: avant-garde ﬁlm, cognitive neuroscience, embodied simulation,

My whole gamble was that the roiling chemical soup, which

The age of postphotographic moving images, argue Thomas Elsaesser and

Projections Volume 10, Issue 1, Summer 2016: 86–113 © Berghahn Journals

The Haptic and Related Theories of Film and New Media

Embodied Simulation and Aesthetic Experience

Haptic Aspects of Solomon’s Process

Figure 1. Phil Solo-

The Secret Garden (1988)

Figure 2. Phil Solo-

phasis added). This quotation might seem to run counter to my argument,

Figure 3. Phil Solo-

What is at stake in this ﬁlm is a pervasive anxiety of absence, pertaining to

The Snowman (1995)

Figure 4. Phil Solo-

Figure 5. Phil Solo-

Through its 11 appearances, the image is visible for increasingly shorter

Figure 6. Phil Solo-

Walking Distance (1999)

The sheer quantity of embedded materials is overwhelming. Solomon

Figure 7. George Mar-

Solomon’s private somatic experience. A decade earlier, Remains to Be Seen

Figure 8. Phil Solo-

Solomon remarked on the palpability of chemically treated images and his

Figure 9. Luc Besson,

Figure 10. Phil Solo-

ticipation of touch, motion elicits a simulation of motor engagement with

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