Saul Levine

A conversation with Pelle Lowe.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

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.

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

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.

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

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

"Seeing at a distance through the burning silk may the violence grow between their eyes in heaven." – Erik Kiviat

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first black and white LIGHT LICK.

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

As editor of "New Left Notes", the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Saul Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. Filming from 1968-1982, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women's liberation and the Black Panthers.

On 9/11/2005, Mark Lapore took his own life. I first met Mark at SUNY Binghamton in the fall of 1973, when I took my film production class. Over the years we became friends and colleagues, film/video makers and teachers. In the aftermath of his death, I decided to record unedited monologues by people who knew him from Mass Art--recounting their dreams or apparitions of Mark. I used an old black and white Panasonic studio camera similar to one he had been playing around with; I wanted a different quality to the image from HD and the Panasonic ghosted the image. I had thought it would be a web based work and nonlinear, but Erica Beckman's section, which we edited according to her instruction, changed my plan--it was a definite ending and a surprise to me. I found the piece worked as a projected linear experience. I urge you to watch it once that way.

RAPS AND CHANTS is also without the typical cataract of cuts. The first part is a man's monologue about a grueling LSD adventure (even the image is a washout), and the second is the portrait of a woman, gleefully milking cacophony from a tape recorder by rapidly playing with the buttons. It is an essay in the filmmaker's twofold aesthetic: the roughness and punch of experience remains without cosmetics, unsentimentalized, uninterpreted; instead, the material of its transmission, image, and sound, becomes the field of cathartic, nervous play, a wild Hasidic dance.

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

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

"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.

A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers to which I respond, AMEN. Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999. The films are made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice, and extend my interest in the ways film can be a medium of visual improvisation.