Last Days in a Lonely Place

The virtual landscapes of a video game are transformed into an existential tale of solemn beauty. By the end of Last Days in a Lonely Place, we realize that Solomon’s montage is neither random nor logical. Rather, it is a tracing of story scenes--the Griffith Park Observatory, the Golden Gate Bridge, a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard, a forest, a lonely interior—of characters—a female swimmer, a figure at a writing desk—and of objects—a hearse, a coffin. As tracings, Solomon’s tableaus allow viewers both to experience absence as well as to make their own associations. This is also what gamers do: create their own narratives from the raw materials given to them by the game. Solomon offers narrative openings—perhaps beginnings, perhaps endings. In this way, the work moves ahead more like a dream than a story told in a fully conscious state. The images and people we see are imbued with the suggestion of multiple layers of symbolism. With this new video Solomon brings avant-garde cinema even more squarely into the contemporary cultural arena. Solomon is not the first person to make movies out of material shot from a video game. There are, in fact, many examples of these other videos on video-sharing websites. But what Solomon brings to this endeavor, and what the young practitioners of “machinima” do not, is the sensitivity and creative potency of a veteran avant-garde filmmaker informed by years of dedication to personal cinema. Much of the current avant-garde cinema has struggled in recent years to move beyond the bounds it has constructed for itself. Some veteran avant-garde filmmakers today have looked to new technologies, but most have difficulty producing videos that rival their films. At the same time, certain young filmmakers remain orthodox, feeling like legitimate artists only if they work with codified materials, techniques and strategies.