Film Notebook: Part 1 (For Saul)

Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.

Georgic I: The annual produce first seen in spring. The furrowed earth ready for planting. The distribution, support and protection of young plants. The implements of the garden. Georgic II: The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred. The sheep of Arcadia. The handling of bees. The pagan Lion of Kea. Georgic III: The skill and industry of the old man in autumn. Ancient custom and modern method. The use of implements of the garden. Georgic IV: The compost is prepared at season's end. The filmmaker completes THE ANSWERING FURROW with the inclusion of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to parallel the trace of history. Charles Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for that music closest to the hum of bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant.

HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space and history.

Working in the diaristic mode of lyrical cinema, Marjorie Keller arranges fleeting impressions of a summer vacation as pearls on a string. Her deliberate rhyming of color and light contrasts wondrously with the incidental nature of the scenes depicted. Rockets are fired off in the backyard, mussels collected on a rocky shore and plates passed down a long picnic table. Keller’s montage grazes the sublime mystery of feeling at home.

A life-light guilt trip, tragicomic psychodrama in the film time. Made in the darkness of my year in a women's dormitory. 1969, Tufts University, Medford, Mass. –M. K.

"The film opens and there is a disfunction of the camera that gives two images at once. The tension between the first and the second, the wrestle to see which becomes dominant is like the tension between an observed couple. This couple is two singulars, one singular, one double, two doubles, and one triad. Sometimes they are separate, sometimes coupled, and sometimes collasped upon each other and the world. My intrusion is the film."-M.K

MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. [The] structure lends the film a pacing rhythm that has less to do with traditional cinema-verité documentary or film journalism than with the pacing and rhythm of poetry.

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.

A study of the patterns and gesture of family when ceremony no longer counts. Made to remember the occasion and place myself as a part of it.

"A journal of change in pattern of living and seeing as determined by an often misfunctioning but faithful camera."-M.K

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.

The We Demand march of 1971 was the first recorded political action taken by queer activists in Canada. The date of this march, August 28, 1971, coincided with the second anniversary of the passing of Bill C-150 which decriminalized gay sex in Canada. Although this reform of the 1969 Criminal Code led to the decriminalization of certain homosexual acts, it did not have much of a tangible impact on the policing and surveillance of queers. In fact, the policing of sex between men actually increased following Bill C-150.