Saul Levine

A brief documentary focused on the history of experimental Super 8mm filmmaking. Prominent figures of the "s8" boom of the 1970s discuss their work and their first encounters with the medium.

A portrait: of Saul Levine, filmmaker and one-time Italian Ice Vendor./of the film surface & depth/so by the choice of image./ of the inside & outside light in the summer and the shower. –M. K.

Saul Levine began Lost Note as a love poem to his wife but before he finished the film everything had changed. This film is all that was left – 68/69 was a period of violent transition for many. The film was formally challenging, editing footage with in-camera superimpositions and cutting b&w with color.

A small apocalypse prophecy on the threshold of disaster world/home.

A conversation with Pelle Lowe.

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

As the crow flies, as the crow cries, as the crow alites CAWS

Concerned with the relation of a word to what we hear or see in our mind when we see it. How this relates to film and color.

Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, “Note to Pati” presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm as a suburban neighborhood digs out from under the accumulation and children make the most of an unexpected day off from school by playing in their winter wonderland. Saul Levine’s images are diffused, faded, and ephemeral, made all the more dissociating by Levine’s disorienting rapid cut editing, restless and twitching camerawork, and destabilized, quick pan sequences – an evocation of a transitory and wide-eyed innocence.

Harvard square stroll, talking to myself.

Saul Levine spent six years (from 1967-1973) cutting up and re-editing 8mm prints of two Charlie Chaplin shorts, IN THE PARK and EASY STREET, into a dynamic yet dreamy deconstruction of physical and narrative movement. What begins with Chaplin looping around in circular repetitions between a cop and an ominous vagrant becomes more fractured as the film expands. News footage of police arresting protesters (shot from a television screen on black-and-white 8mm film) is cut into the comedy of cops and criminals (a shot of political reality amidst slapstick fantasy) and images are abstracted by rapid-fire cutting. Even the physical cuts on the celluloid become part of the image as Levine chops through the frames themselves, leaving broad gashes on the screen and fracturing images until they overlap with the next shot and the suggestions of narrative are whirled into a frenzy of motion.

The first black and white LIGHT LICK.

ALL THAT'S SOLID (and) MELTS INTO AIR are each separate films shot at an exhibition of the urban landscape artist Tyree Suyton in Cambridge at Harvard. I was struck by the redemptive critical and visionary character of his work which struck me as similar to G.M. Hopkins or Clarence Smith. Coincidentally as I was shooting these films I went to a screening of Charles Burnett and asked him what film he would like to make but couldn't get the money for. He replied, "a feature narrative about Tyree Suyton." So I put together four of the films from Spring 2000 into a four-film work called "4 For Charles Burnett - All That's Solid Melts Into Air". They are: ALL THAT'S SOLID, LIGHT LICK, TOSCANINI'S EUROPEAN SIDEWALK CAFE, and MELTS INTO AIR.

Workers and customers at a coffee bar in a winter twilight. S8mm, b&w/si

A portrait of Nancy Golden, a summer evening and Nancy photographing rocks at Singing Beach.

John Broderick recounts a bad LSD trip.

"Wild Blue Yonder" was the song of the army corps in which Saul Levine's uncle and father served when he was born in 1943.

Wild flowers, morning glories, an urban jungle an eden for a petite Tyger.

A midsummer daydream. S8mm, color/si, (18fps)

Moon flight loud silence soft dark hard light a Ray o gram made with a camera out of sight.

Every fall a store called NOMAD in Cambridge, on Mass Av,e puts up a window display of Mexican Day of the Dead pieces. My birthday is November, 3, so I am hyper aware of the death/resurrection fall celebration --. this is my sidewalk pedestrian note.

I spent the week of thanksgiving 2010 in Prague; I had never been to Europe before and as a Jew born in the 2nd World War, I had a strong association of central Europe with the Holocaust. I found Prague to be an extremely charming and beautiful city, an architectural palimpsest as it hadn’t been bombed. In this LIGHT LICK I responded to the city in the present tense, but kept being drawn into its past. The grave of Rabbi Judah Lowe, the alleged maker of the Golem, alleged descendent of King David, and certainly one of the great Jewish scholars and mystics of his time. The absence of a contemporary Jewish community and the wonderful statues, bridges, and buildings led me to make this dark Gothic reflection of 21st century Prague.

NOTE TO POLI is, in the words of his student and fellow experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller, "a note to the filmmaker Poli Marichal 'about' penetration." P. Adams Sitney observed that the film revealed "the visionary power of sexuality for the filmmaker" and it is indeed one of his most sexually visceral. Levine contrasts the startling frankness of the sexual activity that opens the film with the calm of a young person at rest with a cup of coffee and the serenity of post-coital cigarette smoke hanging in the air.