Raps and Chants, Part I

A conversation with Pelle Lowe.

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

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 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."

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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