Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

September 11, 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened the first of three programs of works by Saul Levine. This is the audio recording of the introduction and discussion that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Saul Levine.

David Pendleton  0:24  

Good evening, folks, David Pendleton of the Harvard Film Archive here to welcome you to a very special evening: the first evening of three all taking place this weekend, featuring films from the first dozen or so years of a long and very important career. And that's the filmmaking career of Saul Levine. So please, all the films tonight are silent; they have there's no soundtrack. So please make sure that all your devices are turned off. And also please refrain from illuminating them once the program gets going.

We're very pleased to be featuring Saul's work. He's important to us here at the archive for many, many reasons. The most obvious one being that he's one of the most august and celebrated representatives of the American experimental filmmaking community today. He's been making films for fifty years now and has had his work shown around the country and around the world. And in fact, it seems to me that Saul's fame has been accelerating lately. He's been traveling quite a bit, showing his work all over the place, while also remaining a quite prolific filmmaker as well. But besides being an important figure, nationally and internationally, he's also central right here in the community of filmmakers in Boston and Cambridge. Born and raised in New Haven, with much of the early work that we'll be seeing shot there or at SUNY Binghamton—where he taught as part of a celebrated cohort that also included Ken Jacobs, Larry Gottheim and Ernie Gehr—or points West. But he's been here in Boston and Cambridge teaching filmmaking at MassArt since the 1980s, during which time he's been a teacher to people like Luther Price, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Mark Lapore.

But we at the HFA also know him as a very committed cinephile. One of the most surprising things I've learned, I think, as a programmer who deals both with the film going public and with filmmakers, is that not all great filmmakers are great cinephiles. That is there are some very talented filmmakers who don't necessarily love to watch movies the way that we cinephiles do but Saul is one of them. His cinephilia is broad and deep, he goes to see everything. And I really admire him for that. We also admire him as a programmer. Every Wednesday night, he programs screenings at the MassArt Film Society at MassArt. He does it single-handedly and basically single-handedly, basically without a budget, and nevertheless puts together screenings that rival many better-funded venues that show experimental and independent cinema. And I encourage all of you to go to those screenings on Wednesday nights. They’re the best things to do generally here on Wednesdays, as a film lover.

Saul’s work has been shown here and there. But when we started approaching it systematically to think about showing it here, I started by watching it chronologically, and I realized that seemed really the best way to present the work as well because it is very broad, very varied, very prolific. And I thought that the way to do it would be just to sort of start at the beginning and go systematically rather than try and put together some sort of complicated program, tracing various themes, etc. And so, this is Part One of a retrospective. This part is three nights focused on the first dozen years or so, from Saul's beginnings as a filmmaker in the early 1960s, and ending on Monday in the mid-1970s around the time that he left SUNY Binghamton, and around the time that he started working with sound.

Except for one film, all of the films that we're going to see are silent. And all were shot originally in standard eight-millimeter or regular-eight as it’s sometimes called, except again for that last sound film. Saul's work in eight-millimeter, or this use of eight-millimeter, I think, is central to Saul’s aesthetic signature, eight-millimeter is that most portable and economical of film formats, but also a format that provides a certain intimacy as well as a certain sense of fragility or vulnerability. And I think that those are all parts of Saul's work that I think that give it its rich emotional charge, I think.

He began by shooting the things he saw around him working in sort of a diaristic frame. But as you'll see, he submits this footage to an often radical reworking in the editing process. One of Saul's signatures is the foregrounding of the splices in his work typically. Eight-millimeter splices typically fall in the middle of the frame. Eight-millimeter is usually a reversal format, which means that you send it to the developer and you get back a unique copy that's not easy to make duplicates of. And so for all these reasons, the splices that are typically invisible in industrially produced films are quite visible in Saul's work. And I think that that's one of the key ways that Saul locates himself as at this intersection between the diaristic and the formalist or the structuralist, at least the way I see it, the splices themselves become these important visual events.

Tonight's program includes both the earliest works in our program and some of Saul's best-known works. But they also provide, I think, a really great introduction to Saul's films for those of you who haven't seen them before. They’re an excellent example of the way that he weaves together the intimate and the social, the political and the personal. So we'll start with a couple of early exploratory and diaristic works, Saul’s Scarf and Lost Note, on to the found-footage film, The Big Stick/An Old Reel, and ending with perhaps Saul's best-known work to date, New Left Note, which consists largely of footage documenting protests, rallies, the political scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you go online, you'll note there's a slight change in the order of the films on Sunday and Monday; we're showing all the same films, but the order has shifted slightly for various practical reasons dealing with films being on the same reel, etc. I should also note that our next screening in the program, which will be on Sunday will feature a conversation between Saul and Ed Halter, one of the heads of Light Industry, the venue in New York that does some of the sharpest programming anywhere. Ed is also a great writer and a well-known critic. He was here for our Luther Price program at the beginning of the year, and we're very grateful to have Ed working on this program with us again. But now I will stop talking until I come back up for the conversation at the end of tonight's screening. It lasts about an hour and we'll go straight through the films. But here to introduce his own work. We're very pleased and proud to introduce Mr. Saul Levine.

[APPLAUSE]

Saul Levine  7:56  

Thank you, David, for that wonderful introduction. And thank you for curating this program. Actually, your remarks will make my remarks shorter, because you covered... Not only did you do good programming in your choices, but actually your introduction saved me a lot of trouble. I of course want to thank the Harvard Archive, David, Jeremy, Haden, John Quackenbush, and Brittany, everyone else... I've always seen film as a social art in this sense, even if you make a film and show it only on your own living room thing, it's still social because usually, you have it processed somewhere else. Right? But also you carry... Of course, it's social in many, many other ways. And actually, an occasion like this is the work of lots and lots of labor, and some of it my own, but only some of it. As a matter of fact, in Saul’s Scarf you'll see some of the footage of me is like, of course not shot by me but by Mike Jacobson.

I'm thinking about place a lot this week because I had been doing a series of Mark Lapore and the 10th anniversary of his death, but as a celebration of his films, and it's a space that…  Mark haunted every theater in Boston. Talk about cinephiles. He outdoes... There are really great cinefiles in this room, but Mark was also an insomniac. So for rock-n-roll and movies, he beat out pretty much everyone. But Screening Room One was a very important room to him, and so was this. I was thinking because both Mark and I shared a love of Fuller. And so, in seeing this retrospective, I was not only thinking back on the times I saw them with Fuller present here, but also with Mark. And so there's a way in which this is a very appropriate place to show these early films, although the Archive didn't exist then. This is the closest thing to my living room or backyard drive-in that you can get. People know I come here to every show. I sit usually in the same place. So this is the place I really feel at home.

There are some filmmakers who don't want to see too much to preserve a kind of virginity, of freedom from influence, but I've lost that so much, and I think you go one way or the other. And so I dive into it that way. And I really am and I love all filmmaking, but I also come from– I was thinking about it because I was thinking about Coltrane, I was thinking about jazz, and in jazz you have to move forward. To be true to the moment is not to be true to the past. It's about constant innovation. So, I actually come from that tradition in film of trying to rethink new ways that time-based media can be articulate. I also come from a generation that had two premises, or say, a cultural movement that thought that film as a medium did not have to be bounded by its marketability. And after the Second World War, the development of 16-millimeter film and also the improvement in small-gauge made some of this possible, also war surplus. There were a whole bunch of factors that led to this, but... This was one thing: film did not have to be made to return a huge budget or to even be a commodity. And in fact, for people like by itself, it was in that sense an anti-capitalist movement, it was against the idea of the commodification of art or film. Also, that the main form of film theory was in the films themselves, was not in the writing about film, though that was interesting, as was the scholarship, but actually if you want to know, why I go to so many films, that's the answer. I go back to the primary texts. And to some extent… it's a conversation among filmmakers and film seers, viewers, and the films themselves.

Ah, okay, so I'm coming to the last part, we also felt or feel that film is actually a paradigm of consciousness. That's why I was attracted to the medium. And a lot of other reasons too. But in it, you could deal with memory, anticipation... And there were lots of ways that film could mirror or think about consciousness, that hadn't been done yet. And it still remains a pretty fertile field like that. So the last thing I'll say is: these films, in particular, were made when I was becoming conscious of trance, and the way in which film from the beginning had its own set of trances. And because another moving image media, video, came along, or TV, it was possible to meditate and think about what those differences were and to think about trance in everyday life, outside of all of this. So these films are involved in consciousness, both as mirroring and exploring perception. Now, I said, film is a social art. Lots of people have labored to put this together. John Quackenbush is about to become an extremely important performer in this, but I'm going to say what usually isn't said: the whole apparatus is now up to you. These films especially they're not made to be familiar, or even necessarily entertaining. They require work. Because I value your time, my contract with you is I think it's worth your while. But I also have to say it's up to you now. Have a great time.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  19:09  

Now the discussion with Saul Levine and David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  19:15  

Please join me in welcoming back Saul Levine.

[APPLAUSE]

We will of course be taking questions from you guys. Maybe I'll start with one or two just to sort of warm things up a little bit. And it seems appropriate to start by asking you a question about beginnings. We talked about you are somebody who watches a lot of films, I'm wondering which came first: the filmmaking or the cinephilia?

Saul Levine

Well, when I was in high school especially, I started– Well, I come from also a generation where there were neighborhood theaters. So on Saturdays starting when I was seven, or maybe earlier, my parents would give me a quarter or whatever, and go to the neighborhood theater… And that continued. I ave especially started to go to see lots of stuff in high school with my friends. One of my friends became a film historian, William Paul, but he could remember where and when he saw a feature. And still can I think, but so during that period, I would sometimes think about working in the film industry or wanting to do something like that. I was also trying to write. All of that movie-going wasn't about my seeing anything I wanted to do. I was also trying to write first novels and plays, I was very interested in theater, but increasingly becoming disillusioned with my ability to write with theater as theater. And I first started to do experimental theater before I did experimental film, if you want to call it that. And the kind of theater I was doing was either theater, that if it was stagey involved moving things around more than actions. But if it were, like, pre-arranged actions would be staged events in public places unannounced that would redefine the context of the situation or… Either very minimal things that nobody would know, or very spectacular things like, I twice staged my murder. [LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton

Yeah?

Saul Levine

I mean, I was thinking–

David Pendleton

In front of people who didn't realize that they were witnessing a performance?

Saul Levine

Yes, yeah. In both cases, yeah. I mean, so sometimes like during the Joe Gibbons thing people were criticizing, you know, the social irresponsibility of that. And I have to admit, you know, I also have been socially irresponsible and exactly this thing... But to answer your question...

David Pendleton

Can you guys hear Saul? Okay, alright, well I was gonna say you could use this…

Saul Levine

I was gonna say there was an event. You know, I'd seen sort of stuff like Pull my Daisy, but that stuff didn't make me– I didn't want to do anything like that. Maybe like Pull my Daisy but I'm a big fan of Sam Fuller, but I would not want to make more movies, love story, crime dramas, especially that... You know, I'd seen all of that stuff. I sometimes think with Sam Fuller, I was thinking that he sort of has the ideology of my parents, and the good things, things that I love about him and I... But on the other hand, I rebelled against all that. And similarly, in film, I don't want to make the stuff and I thought they were both– I was a student of literature, I thought narratively film was 100 years behind ways of being articulate and narrative that Gertrude Stein or James Joyce or lots of people were more advanced so finally I saw Maya Deren in maybe between my freshman year and sophomore, sometime around then, I saw three films that changed my life. Maya Deren's At Land, her Choreography for a Camera, and Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale. The last one, a guy works for about twelve years to make a two-and-a-half-minute film but that's about the evolution, a graphic evolution of form over time, an attempt to make a universal language. And the other film– Maya Deren, I realized, was employing narrative continuity language in At Land to talk– There's so much going on and that film in terms of time, condensation and expansion of… And also, like just having dense association, instead of causal plot. And you know, I didn't understand any of these films when I first saw them. But I understood that there was a world that was different from the movie-going, and that was something I actually felt I could do. I mean and wanted to do. So.

David Pendleton

And how soon after, after seeing these films, did you start making your own films? And I'm assuming that the embracement of small gauge was a pretty natural choice to make.

Saul Levine

Yeah, I mean, I started making regular-eight films because I could afford it. My aunt used to enter contests as a kind of hobby. And they won a Kodak box movie camera plastic, and they said, “Gee, do you want this?” And I mean, I would have killed for it. So yes, I wanted it. And then I started to play with that. I first made cut-out collage movies, and actually painted on film, thinking no one had done that before, right? But I did come to see Brakhage’s work and met him and other people. I met Jack Smith independently of that. And I had a good friend, P. Adam Sitney, who was involved with this stuff. I mean, suddenly a whole world of other kinds of cinema opened up to me when I was a sophomore in college and stuff like that, Markopoulos, Jack Smith, Warhol, back to Maya Deren, Shirley Clark. I had a friend who was working on The Cool World. So I mean, I came into this in a very fertile—an overwhelmingly—fertile period. So there was just a lot of interesting stuff going on. Not to mention cinema vérité and all that.

David Pendleton

Right, right. Plus you were near New York so you were near where a lot of it was happening too, right? Well, can you talk a little bit more about your working about in eight-millimeter and Super eight? Because you said some interesting things when you were introducing the MassArt program on Wednesday night about a certain mistrust that some people had towards working with small gauge. And why it's important to you working in...

Saul Levine

Well, there were amateur film clubs that the Kuchar brothers were part of. And their idea was to try and replicate—although the Kuchars took it in a different—was to try and replicate the movies. I never wanted to do that, in fact, I had a horror of doing that. So for me, the small gauge was an inexpensive format. I knew that what I wanted to do in filmmaking was not what would not be sellable. I mean in that way... Sam Fuller had come at a moment in time when he could be a writer, director-producer for a while and really make great work and have that kind of control. In that sense, like Maya Deren or Sam Fuller, you know, I often say I don't have the temperament of a filmmaker but I'm a control freak in that way. I want to control that world myself. So even though it might be better to work in 35 in some ways for the image, the loss of control by having to make that money come back didn't appeal to me. And it wasn't what I was trying to do. Also, I'm not that big myself. So small gauge... I often see things throughout the day that I want to film. I sometimes forget that I have in my pocket something that will allow me to do that, you know, the cell phone now and I should use it more. But so, regular-eight let me carry it around.

I had two friends, one of them was very advanced in filmmaking although a year behind me in high school, George Landau who you may also know as Owen Land and he was doing wonderful stuff in regular eight. I saw his work very soon after Maya Deren’s. I mean, that moment that epiphany was also echoed by seeing Brakhage films and knowing George and finally seeing his work and many others, Markopoulos and Jack Smith, many, many people all at once. So it was a wonderful period for regular-eight because you could get all kinds of film stocks... From Sears and Roebuck you could get like this out-of-date Kodachrome. The first version of Kodachrome One they had sold to Ansco and there was this thing that came out turquoise and magenta. Everything you shot came out in that range, which was wonderful if you wanted that. [LAUGHTER] But there were lots of film stocks: Agfa, Agfa-Gevaert. And they were very inexpensive. That stock I just mentioned came with processing for seventy-five cents or something. And even at that, I still I couldn't afford... so I got into superimpositions because it gave me a chance to practice, shoot lots of rolls of film, and also I was concerned to not have single-point perspective on the screen.

David Pendleton 35:00

That's interesting... So, maybe to talk about Saul's Scarf, for instance, in relation to this, there's almost this flicker effect.

Saul Levine

There is a flicker.

David Pendleton

And is that–

Saul Levine

Yeah, that was a big overt concern of mine, especially at the time. And that had to do with trance. But Saul’s Scarf is made out of very little footage. It's about twenty-five minutes long, but it's actually made out of three or four minutes of film, I shot a regular double-eight film in a 16-millimeter camera, and had superimpositions within it, but there are four regular-eight frames, double– Okay, let me go back: double-eight is sixteen millimeters wide. When you put it in a regular-eight camera, it would be shot and then the lab would split it down the middle, and in shooting, you would flip over the roll. So there were two things people did: more often, people shot it in regular-eight and just used it on a 16-millimeter had four frames on the thing. Mike Jacobson and I, both of us made work in which we shot it in a 16-millimeter camera. And in my case, I made a reduction print before I split it. I think there may be two rolls that are like that. Then I did have the lab split it and then I had them make a print of that. And then I added some footage that I just shot regularly or in other ways. And then I edited them all together, so... Don't worry about it.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton

Well, no, because I mean, you know, watching these films all together, this is the first time that I've watched the four of them back-to-back. I mean, I had always thought about the importance of the splice and of editing and montage in your work as this partly formal, partly political... But then also now thinking about this idea of trance, there’s a way in which your use of the splice is also related to questions of flicker or altered kinds of consciousness.

Saul Levine

Yeah, well, it was deliberate. Many other filmmakers who have said this. There's a kind of sadness to film. First of all, half of the time you're watching anything, you're sitting in the dark, and half of the time what's in front of the camera you'll never see because of the way the shutter mechanism works. You can only add darkness to a film, you can't add more light. And you can extend– You can syncopate that– All films have this rhythm [MAKES QUICK, BEATING SOUND WITH HAND] If you introduce black leader, blackness, that syncopates it. And that in fact, if you notice, a lot of times in films people do that, they add a little... It's a very striking kind of thing. Or, you know, if there's black then you can add a white frame. But you can never actually have more light than if you just project clear leader. That's a limitation. But you can make it more dark. But then there's this issue of consciousness. Flicker it turns out– Brakhage in his extreme used to say that if you take a variable speed projector, you can put people into all of the various emotional states. Now at one time, I was very interested…. I did a multimedia performance, which was collaborative with a lot of people. And because it was MIT, we got a lab-strength, variable-speed, strobe light. And it actually was true that by varying the speed of the strobe, we hit one thing, where we were wandering around in a timeless trance, and it was actually hard to change it to get out of it. But at this period, I was very, you know, rhythms of flicker were both formal ways of working and ways of being articulate, not that different from the way like John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler, people I was listening to, might inflect rhythm. And, and, yeah, you know, like that.

David Pendleton  41:25  

Are there questions from the audience? I have more questions, but I don't want to monopolize if anybody's brave enough to start. If not, I'll go back to asking a couple more.

All right. I mean, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about then your discovery of editing or I mean… Because for instance, the splice where we see the splice, where we see the splicing tape on frame, we don't see that in Saul’s Scarf; it appears–

Saul Levine

Oh, no, you do!

David Pendleton

Is it in Saul’s Scarf? I didn't–

Saul Levine

You can see at the very beginning, there's all of this color leader edited.

David Pendleton

Well, yes, that's right.

Saul Levine

But they look in fact a little like... not like a real Rothko, [LAUGHTER] but like, you know, a cartoon Rothko.

David Pendleton

Right. Well, that's true. And actually, throughout tonight's program, there's more abstraction in your work than I think that people often give you credit for... So that was something that you were doing from the very beginning then was this was foregrounding the splice? I mean, there are films that we're not seeing in this program that pre-date Saul’s Scarf, obviously.

Saul Levine

Yeah. I mean, really the first film I consciously worked with it was Salt of the Sea. And one of the people I was close to, another person I'd gone to high school with, Mike Jacobson also, he and I were sort of paralleling working... So I saw a film of his where he used the splice. The first thing when I saw At Land, I noticed Maya Deren’s splices. And she, in fact, had a bit of one frame and I sorta liked it. I had heard Brakhage early on or read it in one–  I talk about Marie Menken’s use of splices in Hurry, Hurry, and that influenced me a lot.

Salt of the Sea is a film where I use that magenta-and-turquoise thing, I was filming when I was out on a sailboat. And at this time I was thinking about abstraction and representation and also what is representation over time? Or even figuration. But I had trouble thinking about how to get footage like that. So I would sail out, and a friend of mine jumped to buoy and said “You could get some really good shots from here.” So I tried and I missed and I went into the water. I had a near-death experience that was very ecstatic actually. But then found myself clamoring onto the buoy but I had hung on to my camera. I processed this footage and got back exactly what I was looking for. And in that, I got these clusters and I had been filming over– So I got bits and pieces of sun and water and turquoise and magenta patterns. And then in editing that, I used the splice marks as a kind of counter rhythm to these kinds of more organic, for want of a better word, shape development. So this was kind of more like this.

But also, I mean, the other way of thinking about splice marks... During this period of time, filmmakers were very much about trying to show what wasn't seen, and the artifice of filmmaking. George did, you know, the china doll film, and [Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering…] or, you know, sexual or social content that couldn’t be... Or sprocket holes or flares... So my use of the splice mark goes along with the flare, you know, why not? Why is the flare always thrown out? Up until the 60s and in film school, people were taught not to do that.

David Pendleton

Right, right.

Saul Levine

Now you can buy an app that does it.

[LAUGHTER]

Why do it?

David Pendleton

Yeah, that's because people know it's valued. So people will add it in places where it didn't happen. I mean, it seems to me that–  Oh, is there a question? I'm sorry.

Saul Levine

Yeah, Jeff Singleton is actually in New Left Note. He's one of the people you see quite a bit.

Audience 1

So I'm not a filmmaker. Although I love film, and Saul’s one of the reasons why. Or at least his films… And also I want to thank you for pointing out, setting up programs and his skills with that because that was huge for us, you know, Tufts back in 1967, 1968. And that sort of thing. It really did change the way, I– Even when I see mainstream films, I just really look at them differently now, because of that. As far as New Left Note is concerned, I mean, I can't really watch the film without seeing the people I know, but also mostly thinking about the political context. And I hope this Saul doesn't consider this sacrilegious, but I became a history Ph.D. and that you know, so I'm into the politics of it all. And I still slow down the YouTube version of that thing to see the slogans on the signs because we were obsessed with the Communist Party slogans versus our slogans versus the Trotskyist slogans. So I hope that's okay. But  one other little anecdote, and not to bore people with roasting Sixties’ chestnuts over the fire, but  the first time I saw Saul, I saw Saul's Scarf and this is one of those great, you know, lightbulb moments when you're nineteen years old, I guess. And Saul got upfront and we were about to watch that movie. And Saul introduced it and he said, “You know, some people complain that my films hurt their eyes. So if your eyes start to hurt, just close your eyes.” I thought well, this is the coolest guy ever saw.

[LAUGHTER]

Audience 2  48:46  

On that note, my question I do have one... You talk about trance and development and form, flicker and flare. And you have been articulate about being conscious of those phenomenas’ capacity to alter people. But you don't talk about disorientation or with those people who– You haven't this time around though, and I've somehow ended up living with Jeffery Singleton and I hear these stories all the time. But I do wonder– How long ago was that? That Saul hilariously asked everyone to close their eyes if they were being bothered? ‘67, ‘68. I wonder now in– I mean, I just put my shades on! And that was fine. But have you ever had it that an audience member was so sensitive that they've had a seizure and visions of their own and considered that a sort of [UNKNOWN]? 

Saul Levine

No, no, in fact…

Audience 2

Well, now you have.

Saul Levine 

Okay. No, I've had people have problems watching this. One of my oldest friends from when I was at Clark, Judy Crockett came to my show in Portland and had to leave because she gets vertigo with camera movement, let alone flicker. No, I realize that there were some aspects of my work that are... some people have problems with, right? Because, actually, we all organize, especially our consciousness in very different ways and very individual ways. And so yeah, I understand that. I have friends who have issues with flicker riding a bus that then can watch my work without that problem. But so, I hope it wasn't too painful.

Audience 2

It's bittersweet, but that’s exactly the way I like it. And much less painful than public transportation.

Saul Levine  51:53  

Well, I mean, my taste in music tends to go towards the rough side and the dissonant. So it kind of gets echoed in this work, but not always, right? Not always. Another thing is that there are people who cannot watch a silent film, it totally upsets them. I've found that more frequently than people– Well, no, I've found them both, you know, and then sometimes the focus can be an issue for people.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]

Oh! I meant it in simple terms, but in the other term, certainly!

David Pendleton

Sure. There's a couple of questions over here.

Audience 3  53:05  

So you were talking about... for somebody who's so interested in music and so into sound, have you ever thought of adding a soundtrack to a film or making a film with the idea of having sound?

Saul Levine

I do make sound films. My interest in sound is more actually in speech. Because I had trouble learning to speak. I mean, I developed very bad speech problems. And so for me, portraiture has to do with speech. I mean, in New Left Note... Jeff is right: I too was paying a lot of attention to the words and to color, also. I mean, for me, sometimes New Left Notes is about color, but the way we use color as an icon or politically as well as emotionally. But I was trying not to in that field, as I did, when both Jeff and I were editors of New Left Note the paper of STS, we were constrained by our organization’s consensus. I was trying not to be constrained in this way, but I was very conscious of… I mean I’m glad you made that– I was conscious that people like you and I would see these images differently than people who weren't involved in the movie. But yeah, I mean, we’ll get to sound. And I I'm very interested in specially in sync sound. And I've also occasionally—and I'm thinking of doing it again—I've had somebody play with my work, but it's deliberately made to be experienced silently when it's silent, or when I put sound on it, it's meant to be heard.

I try to use music as an element, but if I have music in my films, opposed to when somebody plays with the image, it tends to be a part of the overall sound what we would say now “sound design” and is an articulation that has both content and sound as maybe, as it being music, do you know? So...

David Pendleton

Yeah, there's a question there. And then and then we'll come to you, and hang on one second, there's somebody behind you.

Audience 4  56:44  

Okay. This gets back a little bit to when you were saying that, like the first one, actually I think several of these have very, not a lot of material, base material? That are kind of built up by aggregating by layering, mixing, sampling, looping, and that kind of a thing. It's almost like, I don't know, like a visual analogue of what today might think of as DJ slash EDM or whatever. And so it’s kind of a comment.

And then another thing that sort of gets back to this, this flicker stuff, I noticed the other thing is like, often there It looks to be for the sake of discussion, let's call them stories, but several, two, three, maybe more stories that are interleaved at extremely fast cut-rates. And what that strikes me– One of the things it seemed to me is that you push it to the point where it almost gets what you would call… Well, it’s very high entropy. [LAUGHS] You almost get heat death with it, but not quite, so you pull it back and so it's not quite white noise. I mean, if you pushed it even faster, you would probably just no longer have this cognitive dissonance kind of going on where you're trying to assimilate all of this stuff simultaneously. Even though they do appear to be thematically linked, at least some of them are. So you have a thread that sort of helps you link all these things together. So I don't know. Do you have any comment on any of that stuff? [LAUGHS]

Saul Levine  58:22  

Oh, well, you're appreciating what I'm doing. Let's put it that way. You're apprehending it anyway. Sometimes I'm trying to see how many balls I can keep up in the air and going at once. But there's an interweaving of association especially in The Big Stick and New Left Note where I'm rhyming shape or color or both, and carrying action and... The Big Stick: you know, I get to think about the chase. But what that was really inspired by was... My seeing is very timely now with all the Black Lives Matter movement, Ferguson, police violence, I had seen a lot of police violence when I was a student and in Worcester and violence in general. I had experienced domestic violence of various sorts or lived around it. So I realized other people would make a film about that topic. And for me, what it made me think about was my own anger and rage and violent impulses, and the feelings of co-op between victim and victimizer, let's say, right? And the way in which film and movies are implicated in that. So I had had the experience, I don't know how to describe this, I had the experience of one night feeling, walking down Main Street in Worcester, that I was Charlie Chaplin’s character for a moment. And then I had made this loop, I had an eight-millimeter version of In the Park, and I made a loop. And I realized that loop had a lot of these ideas in it. When I showed it, people—actually, as part of a different media-mix situation—people found it funny. And I understood why but I realized I wanted to work with that material, and not only show the humor or the way in which the humor was coming out of social anxiety. And that this would be a way I could think about anger, rage, appropriateness, of appropriate uses of it, but also that you get caught up in it's called The Big Stick/An Old Reel, “the big stick” referring to Teddy Roosevelt's early American imperialism, but “the old reel” about the cycles of violence that you see. And, you know, I love Charlie Chaplin as a filmmaker. The other film it's drawn from, Easy Street, is very strange for a guy– I mean, it has the contradictions of Charlie Chaplin, his love of the working class, but also his contempt for and for it and its advocacy ideologically of a kind of Christian fascism, which I can't imagine he believed in, but it’s a very… So I was also, you know, thinking about the content of that. I had started making this loop. And at first, I thought it was just a theme and variation of the loop. As I began to think about repression, anger and this being a film to explore it, I began to realize I needed Chaplin as not the victim. And I had seen it, so I found that movie, and started down this journey. Yeah.

David Pendleton  1:03:57  

Okay, one more question.

Audience 5  1:04:02  

Saul? I'm just wondering, in relation to the way you edit, and show the edit, sort of, by making this seem apparent to the audience. How that relates to creating a semblance of a trance experience. Doesn't that kind of interrupt the consciousness of the person or the eyes of the person that's watching it? Are those just two separate projects?

Saul Levine  1:04:43  

I think that's a good question. Because they definitely interrupt the expected trance, especially like if you're watching a Charlie Chaplin film, you're watching what he's doing and what the actors are doing, even less so than in Keaton. You're not drawn to seeing the apparatus of the cinema. So I'm definitely breaking the normal cinematic trance. But in terms of rhythm, the splice lines can enter into a rhythm thing or even contrapuntal. There are a number of books about music and trance and drumming, and very often, like a possession occurs when the rhythms become disrupted. When people are moving in a– and then they're thrown off into another thing. So that's my answer.

David Pendleton

I think that that tension between wanting to be absorbed into the image versus that kind of trance that’s induced by the rhythm, I feel like there's a similar kind of tension in New Left Note that gets back to what Jeff was saying is there's this, on the one hand, we have this need to want to see these demonstrations, particularly now, this stuff is like this sort of historical footage, but at the same time, what you're doing is constantly interrupting any sort of seamless reception of these images with your editing. And I feel like that tension between seeing and not seeing or what you want to see and what you can't see is actually really is what creates a tension in New Left Note.

Saul Levine

Yeah, it's also in some senses that’s the content. It’s the flow between representation– Yeah, I'm definitely changing up the trance, but not that differently than, like, say, various sorts of music would and in certain cases, you know, it's about the world of the screen. I'm always working with this in some ways as flat thing as well as you're being able to experience it three-dimensionally or in other directions. So... Yeah.

David Pendleton

Okay, one more question.

Audience 6  1:07:50  

You were talking about film as something that is moving forward, right? Or we assume film time is about when we move forward. But one of the things I realized in watching your films, they're sort of like, we've seen those– It's like all the things that are happening at the same time. But we have to see them over time, like the way if you could stop, freeze frame a thought, you'll realize how many thousands of other thoughts are right there. So that was just something I noticed, that in some ways, it's not about progression forward. It's about, sort of, this deep layering. Certainly, this superimposition is about that. But the layering... this kind of “Z-axis” time, if that's possible. [LAUGHS]

Saul Levine 1:08:51  

Yeah, I mean, Jean, you– That's exactly right. I mean, I was at that time especially, trying to get into the simultaneity of thought, at the same time, the way in which it was not only a movement forward but a movement backward.

Audience 6  1:09:08  

Oh, absolutely. I mean, thinking is very fucked up, you know? [LAUGHS] I mean, in a good way.

Saul Levine  1:09:15  

Yeah! And also, I mean, you know, in addition to Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and his other work is so great in its meditation on the expansion and compression of subjective time.

Audience 6  1:09:42  

I mean, the representational moments... like if I thought about Buñuel or something, these kinds of iconic symbols, when they arrive in your film, they're sort of like, that's the resting space, you know? We get to reassemble ourselves around the symbol or the icon, and then go back into the thinking...

Saul Levine  1:10:11  

That was great.

David Pendleton

That was really– No, that was very interesting. Well, I think I'm going to cut it– All right, very quick. Because we do have two more nights.

Audience 7  1:10:22  

Were there any subliminal cuts in there?

Saul Levine  1:10:24  

What?

David Pendleton

Were there any subliminal cuts? Are you doing subliminal cuts?

Saul Levine

No, I'm not. No. I mean, in fact, going back to your comment about white noise. Film, you really can't do that, you know, you're in eighteen or twenty-four. If you get into the digital world... Subliminal is a term used loosely. Yeah. I mean, advertising did stuff with single frames in movie theaters. But subliminal is really you have to get to the thousanths so that the mind sees it, but the eye doesn't register it. You know subliminal is that, it's much faster.

David Pendleton

Well, thank you for some really fascinating questions and comments. Come back Sunday night for a conversation with Ed Halter and Saul. It's a much more lyrical program, I think, on Sunday. So it'll be interesting to compare with this one. And above all, thanks to you, Saul.

[APPLAUSE]

Saul Levine

Thank you.

David Pendleton

You're welcome. You’re welcome

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