Notes For Viewing: An Evening with Saul Levine
A legend of small gauge filmmaking, Saul Levine’s practice includes film, video, live performance, collage and installation. Included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1998 exhibition Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films, Levine’s work is noted for its incorporation of splice marks, percussive editing, “unconstrained camera movements and spontaneous formal accidents” (Steve Anker). This distinctive style, informed by a background in the blues, poetry, and radical politics, produces “exquisitely kinetic,” and often very beautiful cinematic experiences. Levine’s influence extends beyond his film work: he has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for over twenty-five years and programs the longstanding Mass Art Film Society. Since 1964, he has made over eighty films and videos, five of which we present in this program. "Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose.” – P. Adams Sitney
PROGRAM
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The Big Stick/An Old Reel
Directed by Saul Levine.
US, 1967-73, 16mm, black & white, silent, 17 min.
The Big Stick/An Old Reel “intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by making temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomforting ragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility make simply working it an intrinsically political gesture... Levine's adroit use of graphic action from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts change the rapid cuts from awkward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions." – James Irwin, Artweek
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New Left Note
Directed by Saul Levine.
US, 1968, 16mm, black & white, silent, 26 min.
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers. “New Left Note is a study of radical politics in radical film form." – Marjorie Keller
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Note to Pati
Directed by Saul Levine.
US, 1969, 16mm, black & white, silent, 8 min.
Part of a series of films celebrating daily life, Note to Pati “concerns images of winter, children playing in snow, trees, a bird flying through branches… the red hats of the children in the snow have the intense luminosity of a Renoir.” – David Curtis
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Note to Colleen
Directed by Saul Levine.
US, 1974, 16mm, black & white, silent, 5 min.
A study of a day spent with friend and filmmaker Colleen Fitzgibbon.
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Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon In the Hour of the Angels
Directed by Saul Levine.
US, 2004, 16mm, color, silent, 24 min.
Restored print
Described by Levine as ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice, Light Licks is a series of films begun in 2000 and made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into frames left unexposed. Begun in 2000, the series is ongoing—By the Waters of Babylon In the Hour of the Angels is the most recently completed Light Lick. “I Saw The Light - Praise the Dark." – Saul Levine
