Half lullaby for the dead, half lamentation on the twilight of the cinema. Phil Solomon’s 1994 film alters found footage to craft a poignant, chemically decayed lullaby for his dying grandparents and the cinema.
Photochemical Elegies and Corporeal Decay: An Analysis of Phil Solomon’s The Exquisite Hour (1994)
Verlaine’s Cadence and the Elegy of the Dusk
Phil Solomon’s The Exquisite Hour (16mm version, 1994) acts as a profound meditation on memory, mortality, and the materiality of the cinematic apparatus. Conceptually derived from Reynaldo Hahn’s musical setting of Paul Verlaine’s symbolist poem L’heure exquise, the film functions as both an intimate lullaby for the dying and a melancholic lament for the sunset of analog cinema. Dedicated to the memory of his grandparents—Albert Solomon, a Fox projectionist, and Rose Solomon, a ticket taker at Loews Paradise in the Bronx—the film embeds personal ancestry within the grander, decaying archive of film history. Through this dual commitment to domestic and industrial memory, Solomon crafts a hauntological space where the fleeting nature of human existence is mirrored directly in the decomposing celluloid.
Photochemical Decomposition and the Somatic Analogy
At the heart of Solomon’s formal methodology is a rigorous process of chemical and optical manipulation, drawing on the traditions of minor cinema and modern art. Rather than utilizing found footage as a tool for cultural satire, Solomon treats the emulsion of the film strip as a physical site of geological and biological excavation. Through the deliberate application of chemical baths and precise frame-by-frame optical printing, the boundaries between the representational image and the physical film base are systematically blurred. The crackling, bubbling textures of the distressed emulsion serve as a powerful somatic analogy. The physical degeneration of the human body—witnessed during the prolonged illnesses of the filmmaker’s loved ones—is translated into the actual, bubbling decay of the 16mm stock, linking corporeal mortality to the fragility of the archive.
Haptic Landscapes and the Suture of Abstract Memory
Visually, the fourteen-minute work floats within a highly ambiguous, dreamlike register where figures and landscapes are only partially discernible. Fleeting silhouettes of ice skaters, a lawn mower, or figures suspended in liminal spaces emerge and dissolve within an undulating field of amber and charcoal hues. This aesthetic aligns directly with the phenomenological concept of haptic visuality, wherein the spectator’s eye operates as an organ of touch. By withdrawing the easy legibility of the narrative frame, Solomon forces the viewer to engage with the film on a deeply sensory and tactile level. The resulting images do not merely represent memory; they perform the very mechanism of forgetting, capturing the agonizing process by which sharp historical events fade into indistinct, emotional impressions.
Acoustic Ruins and the Elegiac Audio-Viewer
The melancholic power of The Exquisite Hour is significantly heightened by its dense, textural sound design, which behaves as an acoustic counterpart to the visual decay. The soundtrack is characterized by muffled, low-frequency drones, crackling vinyl surface noise, and fragmented musical phrases that drift into audibility before being swallowed by silence. This sonic architecture evokes the experience of listening to an old, deteriorating broadcast or a half-remembered lullaby from childhood. By refusing to synchronize sound and image in a conventional, illustrative manner, Solomon constructs a complex acousmatic landscape where the auditory ruins echo the visual debris, locking the viewer in a state of sensory suspension.
The Archival Ruins and the Solomonic Legacy
In the broader context of late-twentieth-century American avant-garde cinema, The Exquisite Hour stands as a defining achievement of the lyrical tradition pioneered by figures like Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs. Through its exquisite, painful beauty, the film transcends the boundaries of personal mourning to become an ontological critique of the moving image itself. As cinema transitioned from the physical tangibility of silver halide to the weightless infinity of the digital era, Solomon’s work acquired a prophetic dimension. It serves as a permanent, fragile monument to the indexical past, reminding us that both the bodies we love and the materials we use to remember them are bound to the inexorable laws of entropy and time.
