Light Licks: I Saw the Light Praise the Dark

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.

Stations throughout Connecticut and even New York City. Riding around with my father and back to the gas station.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

"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.