Entry Note

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.

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?

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.

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

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.

"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.

"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.

Harvard square stroll, talking to myself.

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.

John Broderick recounts a bad LSD trip.