Made "as a prayer, an offering, a get well soon card…" for a friend who was not expected to survive, Phil Solomon's found footage films look away from the violence of Grand Theft Auto to find stillness, melancholy, and grief.
“Leave it all on earth
I tell you this from across the blackened vine,
The night has no need for stars. Nowhere asks for you.”
Grief is a violent pause. I remember the anger I felt after losing my sister, and how my world was torn apart. I replayed the videogames we played as children, the vibrant world of Rayman now haunted by her memory. I retraced our steps through a world which was exactly as it was, and yet unsettled, its 32-bit display now cast forever in my wish for things to go back to how they were and my wish ungranted. I still can't play that game.
Playing games does that to me, the environment permeates my subconscious, I am unable to tell fact from fiction. I can feel Phil Solomon's Rehearsals for Retirement under my skin, his violent transmuting of Grand Theft Auto into a liminal space, fraying away the edges of its pixelated fabric into purgatory. Sucked into navy, Solomon's place of internal solitude is filled with the fragments of memory, hours spent behind my controller, eyes seeping into pixels and noise. I see myself onscreen, wandering through the landscape of grief in a familiar town.
Gaming is a profoundly lonely experience: time stands still, bringing with it comfort and escape. Alone, I can cast out my solitude to see more clearly its depths within me. I know this town, the tunnel, the farm, these rolling hills. I trace their surface before I am pulled back in. It is a neglected corner of the world, indiscernibly gazed upon by the shadow of a protagonist. Not looking at us but over there. A forest, shrouded in darkness, slowly crawls away. Endless tunnels. A hearse on the river Styx. I'm taunted by all this toying with the idea of death. I remember watching her hearse stretch off in front of me and living endlessly in that moment, recounting all the words unsaid. I could have gone on forever. Aimless, we float above the crescent motions of the virtual sea. Grief often comes in waves. That is what I was told, again and again.
The blades of grass come out of the screen, their sharp edges prick my skin and my hair stands up on the back of my neck. The camera shakes free from its shackles. I see inside the hearse travelling down the abandoned roads, fields and forests of San Andreas. I am alone here, in true isolation, like something out of a dream, running from something I don't fully understand. The memory is painful. I don't want to look back it hurts but I must make sure she is still there...
The world is burning, up in flames.
Yet here he stands with a bouquet, a gift never delivered a regret. The tunnel is Pluto's gate, the first circle encroaching my waiting place. My time is up. I am dumped into the crescent waves, my memory to be washed, my body left to float.
Comentários