Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:01
September 13, 2015, Harvard Film Archive hosted its second evening of works by Saul Levine. This is the recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are filmmakers Saul Levine, film historian/curator Ed Halter and HFA Programmer David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 0:23
Good evening, folks. I'm David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the middle evening of the three evenings that we're devoting to the early work of Saul Levine this weekend. We're pleased to be beginning a look back at Saul's prolific and important career not only as a filmmaker, but also as a teacher and mentor who can count among his students Mark Lapore, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Luther Price and Jonathan Schwartz, as well as a programmer. He does yeoman's work week after week, the MassArt Film Society, with a small staff on budget putting together a really important series of screenings of experimental work at MassArt on Wednesday nights at eight o'clock.
As always, please turn anything off on your person that might make noise or shed light. It's particularly important this evening, because, as so much of Saul's work, all of the films that we're going to be seeing tonight are silent, have no soundtrack. In fact, throughout the weekend, the one program that contains a sound film will be tomorrow night, where one of the major films shot on Super 8 in sync sound, but otherwise, everything that we're going to see is silent.
The program on Friday night sort of spanned the period of the early to late 60s, tonight will start in sort of the late 60s and go into the early 70s, so we're kind of overlapping. Helpfully, Saul tends to organize his work into series with sort of similar titles that indicate the series to which the films belong. And the first of these series, which continues to the present day is the Notes series. We saw Lost Note and New Left Note on Friday. Tonight, we'll be starting and ending with films from the Notes series. We'll be starting with Note to Patrick, and Note to Patty and end with Note to Colleen. As the term note indicates, many of the films in the Notes series indicate a certain kind of shared intimacy, often between Saul and the person—often it's a triangular intimacy, you might say—between the person or people in front of the camera, Saul behind the camera and the person to whom the note is addressed. We’ll also see Star Film, one of the few films that Saul made at the time on 16 millimeter, and also unusual in his filmography in that it could be considered a work of animation built around the use of manipulation of the iconic shape that gives the film its title rather than a photographed reality. And then we'll also be seeing On the Spot, which is a really excellent example of Saul's mixture of the diaristic and the structuralist, we could say, it being a record of time and of place, shot on regular 8.
Overall I think the program foregrounds Saul as an orchestrator of color, of light and motion, but also someone thinking about time as we mentioned on Friday and particularly cycular time, in the case of On the Spot. So we've moved Nearsight to tomorrow night and moved Note to Colleen from last night to tonight, a change prompted largely by practical considerations, but it does have the added benefit of making the program more chronological and separating the Notes that we'll be watching tonight from the “portrayals,” a series that Saul started in the 70s. So, all the films will be seen on 16 millimeter except for On the Spot, which means that the Notes films that we'll be seeing were blown up from regular 8 to 16. We'll be seeing On the Spot on a digital video copy, there being the original on regular 8 as well as one 16 millimeter blow-up that's part of the collection of the Royal Cinematheque of Brussels, a print that they don't loan—even when we're using it to to honor Saul—because they consider it difficult if not impossible to replace. But unusually I think among a lot of Saul's colleagues, Saul is somebody who has digitized his work and has put his work out there digitally. And so we'll be seeing that one film like that tonight and then we'll go back to 16 for Note to Colleen.
The other exciting news about tonight is that the post-screening conversation will be moderated by another special guest. He being critic and curator Ed Halter, one of the founders of Light Industry in Brooklyn, that does some of the most interesting and original programming anywhere in the New York area. And we're very grateful to Ed for his presence here tonight. Here to say a few words before the screening, please welcome the filmmaker Saul Levine.
[APPLAUSE]
And also Saul, I wanted to present you with a Samuel Fuller T-shirt for being an exemplary cinephile and for everything you said about how great Sam Fuller was last time. So there you go.
[APPLAUSE]
Saul Levine 6:15
Oh wow. Thank you. [INAUDIBLE] So David gave a good introduction. These set of films, it's great that these have three of the films that are directly addressed to people like a note, because the Note series grew out of an increasing blockage in writing, and my thinking about what it meant to be taking notes, all of the various meaning of notes in film, but I also meant it in two ways... I definitely had the thought of notes in the bottle and how all of this kind of work is like a note in the bottle. You throw it out into the pool of culture, and where it lands and how people take it, who knows, right? But also the sense that some works, including things that seem very popular can also have a personal communication or be directed towards a particular person.
And I may have said this Friday night or in some interview recently, I was very inspired by Yeats as a poet. And one of the things I both found love and find weird is that he would go back and rewrite love letters. Because I mean, the love affair, successful or not, was over. But he also had a sense of being a public person and how he could have actually done better. And so the variorums in Yeats include not only his poetry, but letters and notes. So then I was also thinking about, I mean a lot of people did this kind of thing—William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein—where they would take a laundry list. Mark Lapore, since you mentioned him, was very inspired by these ideas of lists. I happened to be having coffee and somebody behind me was talking about the William Carlos Williams poem, where he wrote about eating the pear or plums, you know. So I knew all this stuff, right? But these notes—Note to Eric, Note to Patty, Note to Colleen—had both personal meanings between the person and them, and I actually sent them a regular-8 film of it. And I was already thinking that I would be showing these to people who both knew and didn't know the people who I was addressing and the people in the work. When I do a film like this, usually the person I'm addressing the film to isn't in it. I'm not sending them their own picture. So I won't say too much more about that now.
The other interesting thing is On the Spot was the first film I made when I moved from Binghamton to Chicago. I've always been inspired by jazz and by the kind of esthetic and impulses in jazz towards innovation, towards miming and burlesquing various forms of communication and so on. So, film is somewhat of a resistant media to the idea of spontaneity. And this has always been something from my very beginning I'm concerned about. In On the Spot, I suddenly arrived from hardcore urban Chicago to living on a trailer that was off a twenty-mile country road and then a three-mile dirt road and in which I woke up in the morning and there was a cow outdoors. So I had thought of making the film in Chicago where there was a bridge from where I would just stay there and film from one spot. By “spot'' I didn't mean necessarily one but every direction around me. So I transposed that situation to Friendsville, Pennsylvania, and made On the Spot really a frame-by-frame film. Then a Memorial Day later, I was visiting New York City in a street fair, and I made a similar film. I made a film that both reflected on On the Spot, but also conversations I had had with Coleen Fitzgibbon about portraiture, public and presence, art and sort of patronage. And both of those films are very much frame-by-frame and in-the-camera, and attempting to do in both things, introduce things that were more like a jazz solo. Now I’ll end by saying again, to the audience, I've done my job okay. I know John Quackenbush is gonna do an exemplary job of projection. Now it's up to you.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 15:41
And now David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 15:46
Please join me in welcoming Saul Levine and Ed Halter.
[APPLAUSE]
Ed Halter 16:08
Hi Saul. Thanks for having me here. You know this is such a remarkable program. It's making me think about so many things. But one thing I wanted to ask first is something that David had brought up in the beginning, in his introduction tonight and also last night, where he talks about your work as a kind of combination of the diary film and maybe the structural film, but I think I could say it another way in that so much of your work the primary tension is between the photographic aspect of the work—of it recording the world and representing it back to us—and the graphic part of the film, you know, the material substrate of that representation being shown to us: the splices, the scratches, that kind of thing. And I'm wondering, why do you think you gravitate towards that tension in so many in so many different ways?
Saul Levine 17:14
At the street fair that I shot some of Note to Colleen at, I was in Greenwich Village and I was wandering around and most of this stuff didn't interest me, although the portrait-making interested me, but I was wandering around and I said, “Wow, I really love this!” I came to this work I love. And then I realized it was actually this old sign that, you know, it was a palimpsest of what happens to a wall space. So the issue of figurative and representation has always been on my mind a lot. I've actually always been drawn like . . . Jackson Pollock made more sense to me when I was a kid seeing it in Life magazine, than Renaissance painting. And, you know, the music I listened to in college, like I was into Albert Ayler, and I was into Coltrane. So I'm drawn to that side of things. What I thought about when I was watching it in the three Notes that they’re a lot about the white screen and then especially in Note to Patty and Note to Colleen, I mean, I was thinking about the Asian traditions of using the white page in a similar way. So, yeah, I think the figurative and abstraction and the expressive use of the image is there and also questioning the representation. I mean, the thing about film is that you can see stuff over time, and you realize the photographic media, the idea of “the moment” reveals to us like the magic of an instant, but film is about making relationships among instances—and you know, I’m [using] broad strokes—and so I think that's also going on.
Ed Halter 20:23
Yeah, and it was interesting that the first night someone in the audience was talking about New Left Note and saying how he would download it off of YouTube to be able to slow it down so you could read the signs in it. I mean, that's interesting because there you've made this time capsule, like the photographic, the representational aspect of it might not have seemed as urgent at the moment, except as a mode of communication. But now it's a historical document. And we want to look into it, maybe a little more.
Saul Levine 20:54
Well, I always knew you could slow it down. The analytic projectors existed. And it was also about compression. I mean, when Brakhage talked about Joseph Cornell, he talked about how Cornell would deliberately put something on the screen too fast for you to read it all. And that that itself had meaning. Or that when you had a thing reverse left to right, that says “the end,” meant it's not the end. It's like this.
Ed Halter 21:37
Yeah, I mean, that also brings up this idea of the– I want to talk a little bit or you to talk a little bit about the camerawork in these films. I mean, to me, what's interesting as I'm watching the Notes films, I kept thinking, wow, what's really incredible about the camera work here is the way in which it really does reflect the tinyness of the camera, you can feel what you can do with that size of a camera that a heavier camera can’t do. But then when I watch the one 16 millimeter film here, which this is On the Spot– It’s on 16 right? Oh, it's not. Which is the one that’s shot on 16?
Saul Levine 22:15
The 16 millimeter film is the Star Film.
Ed Halter 22:19
Oh Star Film is the 16 which we didn't see on film.
Saul Levine 22:24
Yes we did!
Ed Halter
Oh we did, okay. [LAUGHS] This actually gets into my next point too.
Saul Levine 22:27
On The Spot was made with regular 8, as were all the Notes, except for... The 16 millimeter film was the painted film. And On The Spot was shown a mini-DV transfer that was made from a print.
Ed Halter 22:58
Yeah, well, this actually gets to my question. My own confusion gets to this question, I guess, is that you're known for your 8 millimeter / Super 8 work. Everything we've seen here today is either transferred to 16 from 8 or in this one other case, we have a 16 millimeter film on digital. And I'm wondering how much that act of transference, what do you think . . . how significant is that to you?
Saul Levine 23:21
Well, the first time you make a print, there's always a shock, because it's not the same. I mean, because you make film print, because it's an analog media, and the print is a representation of an original. Now, I was also taught when I took a night school film production class at BU, that the film media was not about the original. It was about making the print. So if someone who started maybe looking at original a lot, it was quite shocking to see the change in the print, but then you get over it. So you begin to understand that every copy is a translation. And you know, I got a lot out of those Jackson Pollocks in Life magazine, even though they're very much paintings that are made to be seen in light, in all like that. But, then later on, I could walk to downtown New Haven and go and see one of them, but I didn't when I was six or seven. So, I was thinking about it in the case of Saul’s Scarf, what is the original media? It was shot on a 16 millimeter camera, and it was reduced, and so I mainly showed it as a regular 8 print, but I think it's authentic, its authenticity . . . Maybe the original is somehow authentic, but it also involves reproduction, as does the Star Film is very much artisanal in it, but it actually relies on contact printing and reproduction. I'm in the tradition of people whose . . . the reproduction quality of it is part of the work. I mean, I'm thinking about reproduction—we were talking about White Heart, which is a film that uses reproduction as a metaphor—it's always on my mind.
Ed Halter 26:27
Yeah, I mean, I think there was a time when people were . . . filmmakers and many of them were much more doctrinaire about the issue of transference and those kinds of things.
Saul Levine 26:37
Some still are.
Ed Halter 26:40
But what's interesting to me is not so much you know, is it more authentic or less authentic, but that each step of transference kind of brings its own memory of the apparatus that existed before it, so on these 16 blow-ups of 8 millimeter, for me, I think your camera work is even more apparent in a blow up than it would be maybe in seeing it in the original. And I'm wondering if, for a moment, you could talk a little bit about the camerawork in these and in the Notes, specifically.
Saul Levine 27:11
Well one of the advantages of a regular 8 camera is that you can really think of it as a gatherer of light. Somebody, like Robert Fulton's films were shown . . . a film of his was shown here last Thursday. And in that film, it's not so apparent, but he was like a martial arts guy, and also did lots of [INAUDIBLE]. And he used the camera as a gatherer of light, but he was way more practiced at moving it, but I early on started to think of the camera in that way, and the hand, that you can actually have this closet in your hand that you're letting light into and it's focused on this filmstrip and in regular 8, it could be about as big as this. You got an image in regular 8 that had a lot of depth of field because you have a very small aperture, although you needed a lot of light. And also regular 8 suffered in projection. So in a way, getting back to 16, you get some of the benefits of projection so that in fact, you can see some of the 8 millimeter quality. I have never seen a regular 8 projector good enough to project an image in this room. I'm happy to have the miniDV of On The Spot shown. I would have had to get the audience to move up into the first three or four rows to do regular 8 projection and it would have been small, but you know, it's okay. Everything tonight is on Vimeo and complete. I know partly, in some ways I'm giving it away, but I also know that that's a different experience than seeing it here with the light bouncing off. I enjoy looking at Note to Colleen waiting for the red line at Porter Square when the sign says, “Red Line coming in two minutes”, and I could watch three or four of my Notes before it comes actually. They have a variance like Jean Cocteau’s, or Maya Deren’s sense of time.
[LAUGHTER]
Ed Halter 30:50
To get back to On the Spot as well, you had mentioned in your introduction—you've said many times—the influence of jazz on your filmmaking, but then you also said the film is kind of, the phrase I think you said, was “resistant to spontaneity.” But, I mean, isn't part of that resistance the fact that film, as a photographic medium, is just essentially retrospective; you you can't improvise on the instrument in the same way. And I was thinking this as I'm watching it, but then I'm also thinking, as you just said, listening in college to Albert Ayler and others I assume you were listening on records?
Saul Levine 31:30
Yeah.
Ed Halter 31:31
So I'm just curious if you could draw a little bit more...
Saul Levine 31:39
But I also went and heard stuff. I heard John Coltrane live, never Albert Ayler. I mean, I agree. There's a big difference between being in the room and feeling the room with the musician than hearing it on vinyl. Although with Albert Ayler, I became aware of him when he died.
Ed Halter 32:09
So if that's an aesthetic that you're drawn to how do you transpose that into the cinematic medium? That's maybe the question.
Saul Levine 32:15
That's the dilemma. I mean, I think Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light where the astrophysicist talks very eloquently about how light is—even that whole thing of photography—t's always after the fact. I mean, even in the room, we're hearing the music after the fact. But there is that often working together of musicians in the moment. So I try and do that, at least in the photography. when I'm shooting and trying to think of how that can be, but it's the sadness, in a way. There are many sadnesses of representation. But one of them is it's always later. It's instantly after the fact.
Ed Halter 33:27
Yeah. And in this room, the one person who's actually live is the projectionist and they shouldn't improvise, except to fix something.
Saul Levine 33:37
And the audience engages in the film in an active way, whether they like it, or whether they tried to or not. They may tune out, go into some association, they may think in their mind that the person who talked them into going into this really owes them, [LAUGHTER] and they're thinking of what they owe them.
Ed Halter 34:05
The active spectator for sure.
Saul Levine 34:06
Yeah.
Ed Halter 34:07
Maybe one last question, then we can go to questions from the audience. I was rereading some things that P. Adams Sitney wrote about you. And he said this very nice thing, which was that if somebody wrote a book about the history of the avant garde film in Boston, you would be the hero of that book. Which I thought was very nice, but it also brings up this idea of you as an educator and you having such a long career as a teacher, which is something that so many experimental filmmakers do. And moreover, we even tend to talk about experimental film this way. It's almost like the Book of Numbers when someone starts talking about someone you know, Stan Brakhage begat Saul Levine and Saul Levine begat Luther Price and Luther Price begat you know, etc. So I'm just curious about your thoughts on why this particular mode of filmmaking, it's situation in the educational context. You know, what does that do to the filmmaking? And also what does that do to the educational mode of using that kind of film to educate people?
Saul Levine 35:16
Well, with all of my students, I was not their sole teacher, or not necessarily the most important teacher, and P. Adams wrote about me in his introduction to Coleen Fitzgibbon that was in BOMB in an interview he did with her. I really liked the interview. And I somewhat like what he said about me, but I think he got—surprisingly—he got things a little wrong. First of all, I mean P. Adams actually once criticized a school for hiring someone who wasn't, in his opinion, properly in succession. What I love about this idea is how it parallels like Kabbalah or other... I mean, it's actually a very traditional way of looking at things, that there [is] an authenticity of transmission for people in tribal traditions, it's that or, like, say the Kabbalah, originality is not good. Even when you're strikingly original, you claim to be part of the tradition. And people want to know. There are three different kinds of prophecy or revelation. And some of that is that that comes out of tradition. And sometimes you're visited by revelation, but absolutely, and there are hierarchies. The lowest form of revelation is your own imagination. So people try never to claim that because if you say, “I just thought it up,” that means it's not true. Okay? So P. Adams said, I learned in school, I actually learned from talking with people like P. Adams. I mean, there's an oral culture around avant garde film that has to do with bubba meises, grandmother tales, gossip, half-remembered gossip, and technology, half-remembered technology, and then discussions of you know, all of that I got a lot of my education from listening to P. Adams and Jonas Mekas or Brakhage or Carolee Schneemann who are people I came in contact with. But I should say as an educator I don't only talk about avant garde film in that tradition. In some ways I don’t get to all that much. But you know, because avant garde film was often reflexive to the media. It actually is a good way of teaching people intro film, because it brings up essential stuff.
Ed Halter 39:56
Well let's see if there's any questions. In the back? Yeah, right there. This young man over here.
Audience 1 40:16
Hi Saul. My question is actually about the editing in the last two films. Specifically On the Spot, actually, I'm really curious about this strobing effect you achieve. It's kind of a pan with cuts in between. And I'm just curious, On the Spot, was this a blow-up that we saw?
Saul Levine 40:41
No, this is . . .
Audience 1 40:42
Oh, this is a DV.
Saul Levine 40:43
Yeah, this is a miniDV transfer from a print from an 8 millimeter print to miniDV.
Audience 40:55
So are we actually losing any of the splices?
Saul Levine 41:02
You're losing a lot, first of all, in just that it's a print. You know, it's another generation. I didn't think it was... I mean, you're losing a certain amount of detail.
Audience 1 41:27
Okay, but like, for example, earlier in this film . . .
Saul Levine 41:29
But, oddly enough, if I were to take this thing, you'd see some of that if you watched it on Vimeo in a smaller format, you would see some of that detail would come back.
Audience 1 41:44
Okay, but we're not losing, for example, if there were a splice, we would still see it.
Saul Levine 41:48
Oh, yeah, definitely, you saw all the splices. I mean, sometimes, I can make the splice disappear, or come close to disappearing. But, most of that film, it's very much as I've said beforehand: a single-frame in-camera film. So even things that look like continuous pans may have been done one frame at a time. Although sometimes they're not, sometimes I’m just moving the camera.
Ed Halter 42:35
It's interesting, the discussion of the fidelity of generational transmission is happening in two different ways. I mean, we were just talking about actual physical generations of people.
Is there another question? Yes, right there.
Audience 2 42:56
I thought that On the Spot was just so beautiful, even a miniDV version of it, and I'm wondering about when you talk about spontaneity, does that extend to the editing process? Or is that a more conscious and planned process?
Saul Levine 43:22
Well, in the case of On the Spot, I mean, it's more like editing a jazz record. I'm putting together things, right, and I didn't try to be creative in the editing too much. The spontaneity is not in the editing; it was more like assembling it, and making choices about timing. But it’s diaristic in that I pretty much, you know, there's a dailiness involved and it's more or less shot in sequence, although if it's not it's more lapse of memories, right? So, unlike Note to Patty, or Note to Erik, the editing in those is more part of the film—the articulation of the film—than it is in On the Spot. You know, I knew I was gonna use the moon, and the night things as kind of spaces, but also because if you're there, that's what you see. You'd see the dark, and the moon and whatever.
Ed Halter 45:18
I was wondering when I’d seen those moon sequences, which are very difficult to shoot as well, is there any kind of influence of La Central Region? Because he also uses those to punctuate these really wildly, ah . . .
Saul Levine 45:34
No, no I would say this film is very influenced by La Central Region. I mean, it's a little grandiose for me to say that. It's a response to that film, because I'm doing some of the same things. And it is also a film that I love, period, right, and at the time was very taken with. It's a film—for those of you who may not know—that Michael Snow made on a mountaintop in Canada with a camera that he could control in a kind of analog computer, and really, you know, it's a much more cosmic film than On the Spot. But, yes, totally inspired.
Ed Halter 46:55
But it's also, I mean what's interesting about your camera work is it's also, La Central Region is basically shot by a robot more or less. And so the movement is perfect, it's mechanically perfect. And in this film, you're replacing that with this very expressive, very human movement. And also in The Central Region he dropped the robot out in the tundra, so there's nothing around. Not even hardly anything living. This is in human habitation, barns, bucolic.
Saul Levine 47:22
But he was standing there and sometimes manipulating it through this thing, and then edited it. I mean, in his case, he's inflecting stuff in the editing process, more than I did. I also think that it's not only La Région centrale, but Back and Forth. Back and Forth, especially, was a film that really blew my mind in a lot of ways. And also this whole issue of editing. My first time I saw it, I made the wisecrack that this is truly an academic film, because it was shot in a classroom. And then I realized that that, of course, was the minor joke that he was making, and that there were so many things going on in that film that referred to both the academy and the anti-academy and also to issues of jazz. And the use of that blip, that sound, was in the editing; there is no sync sound. He was making it all up—none of which I realized at the beginning, right? But yeah, I think that film had a lot to do with my impulse to make On the Spot. And I said this the other night, filmmakers are responding to other films. And that's where I think I got my education from seeing stuff. And I try in my classrooms to show them a lot of stuff and what they got out of it, you know, who knows? Who knows? Also, just one other thing I thought, I try not to teach people to be me, partly cuz one of me is enough.
[LAUGHTER]
Ed Halter 50:22
Any other questions that people have that they'd like to ask? Was there a question? Oh, sorry, I couldn't see you over there. Yeah.
Audience 3 50:33
Hello, thank you. I had a question about whatever memories you have about the night you saw ‘Trane, what year it was or club or location. And what you remember about those performances or performance?
Saul Levine 50:47
Well I saw him at the club that was on Boylston Street near Mass Ave sort of where the old ICA was. It was called the Jazz Workshop, or Pall Mall, Pall Small, I forget what it was called the time I saw him. I think I saw him twice. But the most memorable time was when he had two drummers. And I actually went three or four times during the weekend. And I was just blown away by the music, but both by the whole thing with Coltrane, the newness of it, and, but it seemed immediately understandable. I mean, you know, the audience really swung with the music, all different kinds of people, you know Pelle Lowe also was there a lot at these things and actually knew the musicians better than I. I used to go partly with Berkeley students or ex-Berkeley students I hung out with, but that club was great. They had various ways that you could get in cheap, you could go to the last show, and just buy a drink at the bar. And then they had Saturday and Sunday matinees, which were a lower price. So it was a great thing. It was a wonderful thing.
Ed Halter 52:56
Is there time for one last question, you guys, if someone has one? Saul, any words about the next screening?
Saul Levine 53:13
Ah, well, for those of you who have been sitting here wondering where the sound is, you'll get to hear the sound. I mean the last time I had a show here—not Friday night, but—somebody was giving me a hard time about sound and I said “I do make sound films.” Often people regret having asked for sound. I mean my work doesn't get more mainstream because I used sound. Let's put it that way.
Ed Halter
Fair warning.
Saul Levine
I hope you come back though. This is a rare occasion. So I hope you come back and thank you for being so patient.
[APPLAUSE]
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