Saul Levine

DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took several years to finish it.

A short video in which Levine, facing a crescent moon, remembers Marjorie Keller telling a dream she had with her female friend, also a film director, who had died.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

No synopsis available yet.

A confrontational rant addressed to the judges of the films entered in a Super 8 competition at No Exit. Both Mark and I were surprised when not only was it shown at the festival but it generated much laughter and angry conversation. -Saul Levine

A conversation with Pelle Lowe.

DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took several years to finish it.

A short video in which Levine, facing a crescent moon, remembers Marjorie Keller telling a dream she had with her female friend, also a film director, who had died.

No synopsis available yet.

A confrontational rant addressed to the judges of the films entered in a Super 8 competition at No Exit. Both Mark and I were surprised when not only was it shown at the festival but it generated much laughter and angry conversation. -Saul Levine

A conversation with Pelle Lowe.

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 film made by Pelle Lowe and myself, Ready-Made is a single work in itself, and also exists as part of a series of works that Pelle and I made reflecting on Manet's painting OLYMPIA, including it's reception, it's relationship to painting, sex work, imperialism, the Paris Commune, sex, drugs and rock roll, ect.

A portrait of Picasso young and old, sung by the wind.

A study of my parents in grey and white. An evening film. My mother lights the sabbath candles, cooks, crochets, sleeps, talks to father reading the paper – we are together. This is the first completed note.

No synopsis available yet.

STAR FILM stars a hand-made emulsion.

Seeing photographers Barbara Bosworth, Laura McPhee, and DeCarava. Conversation after 1991 Mass. Art graduate Mark Lapore at the end of the session with the spectators.

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

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

Textures of some Polaroid pictures found buried under snow. Leather jacket as pool for them to be hit (by light).

Fixed shot of Saul's father, Julius Levine, playing Scrabble with his housekeeper.

At twilight in Binghamton, two filmmakers exchange portraits.

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

I spent the week of thanksgiving 2010 in Prague; I had never been to Europe before and as a Jew born in the 2nd World War, I had a strong association of central Europe with the Holocaust. I found Prague to be an extremely charming and beautiful city, an architectural palimpsest as it hadn’t been bombed. In this LIGHT LICK I responded to the city in the present tense, but kept being drawn into its past. The grave of Rabbi Judah Lowe, the alleged maker of the Golem, alleged descendent of King David, and certainly one of the great Jewish scholars and mystics of his time. The absence of a contemporary Jewish community and the wonderful statues, bridges, and buildings led me to make this dark Gothic reflection of 21st century Prague.

On 9/11/2005, Mark Lapore took his own life. I first met Mark at SUNY Binghamton in the fall of 1973, when I took my film production class. Over the years we became friends and colleagues, film/video makers and teachers. In the aftermath of his death, I decided to record unedited monologues by people who knew him from Mass Art--recounting their dreams or apparitions of Mark. I used an old black and white Panasonic studio camera similar to one he had been playing around with; I wanted a different quality to the image from HD and the Panasonic ghosted the image. I had thought it would be a web based work and nonlinear, but Erica Beckman's section, which we edited according to her instruction, changed my plan--it was a definite ending and a surprise to me. I found the piece worked as a projected linear experience. I urge you to watch it once that way.

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

I am just a rambling guy - here today, gone tomorrow. Sitting in the back of Dan's french car. French woman going to NYC for the first time. Reflections of the car - now static. Chicago as seen from Gunnar Juhansson's and Ruby Rich's apartment. N.B. Project at 18fps.

No synopsis available yet.

A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers to which I respond, AMEN. Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999. The films 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, and extend my interest in the ways film can be a medium of visual improvisation.

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?

Impersonations for the camera by Alison Tsoi, Nina Fonoroff, and Saul Levine. Additional camera by Silvia Gruner. (For Pelle Lowe and Luther Price)

A portrait of Amanda Katz (Posner) spinning, weaving and talking. A film about story telling rather than one that tells a story. The VHS copy of this tape was one of the most rented tapes in the local film section of the Brookline Videosmith.

Karine Albano recounts her experience with an antidepressant called Selexa.

"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.

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

No synopsis available yet.

This film was shot right before Dwayne's stopped processing Kodachrome, and the last time I shot Kodachrome for a LIGHT LICK. It was right after Thanksgiving weekend and the light is very much late November right before the Winter Solstice. Existence equals thin ice.

A film in the old style.

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.

The first black and white LIGHT LICK.

Levine's grammar is set up to join media images without hiding the seams; media images of race and sex, love and violence, work and play, and presence and memory blend into a song of sorts of our time.

One of a series of 80 minute long tapes, shot without stopping while driving around Boston after dark with the driver talking and driving while I shoot.

“[GROOVE TO GROOVE] continues this kind of portraiture, concentrating on Mai Cramer and Levine, and develops the 'bi-lingual' paradigm of film and music. The phantasmagoria of splices becomes the lexicon for Levine's improvisational study of making film, music and jokes." - Marjorie Keller. Featuring: MAI CRAMER & JESSE GREEN BLUES BAND.

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.

No synopsis available yet.