Twilight Psalm
4 movies
Experimental film series by Phil Solomon
Psalm I: The Lateness of the Hour
A little nachtmusick, a deep blue overture to the series. Breathing in the cool night airs, breathing out a children's song; then whispering a prayer for a night of easeful sleep. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
Psalm II: Walking Distance
Imagine a rusted, medieval film can having survived centuries, a long lost D. W. Griffith / Georges Méliès co-production, a film left to us from the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, but free to form and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim.
Psalm III: Night of the Meek
The film combines, through a variety of optical printing techniques, documentary archival footage, images from the The Golem (1920), and Solomon’s cinematography to evoke the legendary tale of Rabbi Löw’s monster in order to save the Jewish population of the 16th century Prague ghetto.
Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow
Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow, pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston’s reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead”.