August Moon and Sea

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.

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.

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 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.

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

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

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

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.

Wild flowers, morning glories, an urban jungle an eden for a petite Tyger.

LIGHT LICKS are a series of films, which 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.

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.

NOTE TO POLI is, in the words of his student and fellow experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller, "a note to the filmmaker Poli Marichal 'about' penetration." P. Adams Sitney observed that the film revealed "the visionary power of sexuality for the filmmaker" and it is indeed one of his most sexually visceral. Levine contrasts the startling frankness of the sexual activity that opens the film with the calm of a young person at rest with a cup of coffee and the serenity of post-coital cigarette smoke hanging in the air.