Phil Solomon (January 3, 1954—April 20, 2019) was among the great avant-garde filmmakers of this era. Solomon’s more than twenty films and digital pieces create an interior universe that has rarely, if ever, been surpassed in any medium for its intimacy, evocation of personal sensibility, expressive dream-like sounds and images, and for its sublime—and terrifying—sense of ambiguity between the recognizable world and its dissolution.

Filmmaker, “media archeologist,” and interim chair of the SFAI Film Department Kerry Laitala makes use of decaying cultural relics and antiquated medical technologies to resurrect images and artifacts that have been forgotten. For her screening on April 3, she will present her own work together with haunting, melancholic work by Phil Solomon and the recently departed Barbara Hammer–as well as a special performance of her recent expanded cinema work Chromatic Wheels, with a live score by Jon Leidecker.

Pioneering Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna 1998) is an elusive yet persistent figure in twentieth-century histories of both performance- and film-based experimentation. His practice was idiosyncratic to say the least, staked in experimentation across media communication platforms in film and the visual arts no matter where that took him—from cooperative theaters, midnight screenings at commercial theaters, fringe film festivals in abandoned subway stations, and punk shows in warehouses; to art schools, artist studios, galleries and international art and film festivals, across nations and continents.