Saul Levine

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.

Notes on chance, readymades, and time. Shot at Massart graduation 1997 and Boston 4th of July97. Some of the people appearing are Barbara Bosworth, Stephen Tourlentes, Roy Decarava. Edited shortly thereafter, printed DECEMBER2018 released 2019.

Moon flight loud silence soft dark hard light a Ray o gram made with a camera out of sight

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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. PARDES is ancient Persian for walled garden. In Hebrew and Aramaic it means paradise, heaven,the garden of Eden, the peak or terminus of ecstatic visionary, trance flight. NIGHT TIME IS THE RIGHT TIME: moon play light garden be loved

"FALLING NOTES UNLEAVING is made from footage gathered in the fall of 2012 and edited in early 2013. Anne Charlotte Robertson, friend and fellow Super8 filmmaker, died. I attended her funeral and filmed the burial of her ashes. She was famous for her diary films and I thought it important to honor her work by filming an event that she could not." - Saul Levine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

S8mm, b&w/si, (18 fps)

Super 8mm / color / silent / 18fps

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 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.

Workers and customers at a coffee bar in a winter twilight. S8mm, b&w/si

A midsummer daydream. S8mm, color/si, (18fps)

The first black and white LIGHT LICK. S8mm, b&w/si, (18fps)

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.

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.

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.

Harvard square stroll, talking to myself. Super 8mm / color / silent / 18fps

2000 film by Saul Levine

A film by Saul Levine

A portrait of Nancy Golden, a summer evening and Nancy photographing rocks at Singing Beach. 16mm,18fps / Super 8mm, 18fps

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

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

This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.

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

A conversation with Pelle Lowe

Stan Brakhage with a movie camera. Winter seascapes.

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 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.

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.

Conceived, performed and edited by Saul Levine. Camera by Pelle Lowe. The title says it all. "A film in the old style." -- Bill Brand

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 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.

Kerry Laitela delivers an elegiac account of the passions and struggles of a female chameleon.

Conceived, performed and edited by Saul Levine. Camera by Pelle Lowe. The title says it all. "A film in the old style." -- Bill Brand

Camera: Sylvia Gruner & Pelle Lowe

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.

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 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 FEW TUNES GOING OUT series: part 3

“[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.

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

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

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.

As editor of "New Left Notes", the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Saul Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. Filming from 1968-1982, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women's liberation and the Black Panthers.

A fim by Saul Levine

Directed by Saul Levine.

"Afternoon idyll with Nancy Frumkin."

At twilight in Binghamton, two filmmakers exchange portraits.

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

Made in Binghamton in 1976 - a warped record constructed out of visits to the zoo, relatives and various locations. Appearances by obsessive birds, caged bears and hungry rams. "Certain shots are very evocative, such as a long shot of a group of people sitting on a park bench, one person playing a song on a recorder. The sound of the music, its fragility, is matched by the distance of the shot, lending a feeling of precariousness to the moment. There is a repeated shot of a warped record playing, with the same musical phrase endlessly repeated. The shot is an interior one, with the lighting casting a golden glow on the scene. The warped repetitions begin to reverberate with suggestions of frustrations." – Daryl Chin, The Soho Weekly News "His first talkie, NOTES OF AN EARLY FALL is a characteristically raw work that parlays even the sound of microphone rumble into a formal element.

Directed by Saul Levine.

Film Notebook Part 1 from 1975 is a beautiful collection of daily fragments which Keller shot from her life the way one would write in a journal. She documents the world around her in a spontaneous home movie fashion then employs meticulous editing, making subtly poetic connections between shots and throughout the film.

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.

1974 (R8, 7m)

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.

Shot on a farm in Friendsville Penn. where Saul lived in a trailer with Dan Barnett; shot from the same spot over the course of several Fall weeks, a single frame study of the movements of people and livestock (horses, cows, sheep, etc); clouds sun and moon constructs of stasis and change.

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.

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.

STAR FILM stars a hand-made emulsion.

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. —filmref.com

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.

"NOTES is a series I started in 1968. NOTE TO ERIK was the second one completed but the footage goes back to 1966 when I saw the footage I loved it but didn't feel ready to deal with it. Seeing Sharon Moss again who had moved to NYC from Storrs, CT inspired me to return to this footage to make a note to a mutual friend ERIK KIVIAT. It took about 2 years for me to feel I could respond to the generosity of her performance and the images I had gathered and shaped in my camera. Sharon Moss and her cats play and dance naked in the snow." - Saul

Free for benefits and free showings. "we turning in side take it without them it closes Castles color You must pass through it before it closes open unstolen stop it closes castles color the before turning prism face the kiss half a beat time delay in image behind the cloth the rainbow bridge the rainbow bridge." – Erik Kiviat