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 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.

Made at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton as a class exercise, filmmaker Saul Levine performs with students who each try to mimic his previously recorded phrase and then try to imitate each other imitating the recording.

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.

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

Work is part of a series of works by Pelle Lowe and Saul Levine in different media that reflect on Manet's Olympia and its critical reception.

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

"Starring Saul Levine, with some of his camerawork. First part: Birth from the water; Second: in the City with Janet, mostly in darkness; third: a bridge of scratches and flashing splices; ending with his dance on the beach, the world upside down, sunset and afterimage."–M.J.

A film in the old style.

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.

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 conversation with Pelle Lowe.

STAR FILM stars a hand-made emulsion.

No synopsis available yet.

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

No synopsis available yet.

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

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.

No synopsis available yet.

A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies as the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.

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

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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

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.

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.