High resolution images available via Levine's online image library.
A legend of small gauge filmmaking, Saul Levine’s practice includes film, video, live performance, collage and installation. Included in the Museum of Modern Art ’s 1998 exhibition Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films, Levine’s work is noted for its incorporation of splice marks, percussive editing, “unconstrained camera movements and spontaneous formal accidents” (Steve Anker).
This distinctive style, informed by a background in the blues, poetry, and radical politics, produces “exquisitely kinetic,” and often very beautiful cinematic experiences. Levine’s influence extends beyond his film work: he has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for over 25 years and programs the longstanding Mass Art Film Society. Since 1964, he has made over 80 films and videos, five of which we present in this program.
"Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of
consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can
show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly
devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of
friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated
by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely,
representing repose.”
- P. Adams Sitney
Starring Vivian Kurz, with Ivan Cohn, Andrew Meyer and Rene Richard. A Cambridge-Boston night scene.
1965, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), Rental $20
Founded under water ... all at sea ... made at land.
1965, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), Rental $20
A winding dance wandering to the west.
1964-1967, 8mm, color/si, 3m (18fps), Rental $20
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
1966-1967, 8mm, color/si, 21m (18fps), Rental $60
Seeing at a distance through the burning
silk
may
the violence
grow between their eyes
in heaven
- Erik Kiviat
1966-1967, 16mm, color/si, 3.5m, Rental $20
Cats cradle harp wind harp lock
As silk of speech and moire between the lines
Tuning the harp up to pitch
String broke if I told a lie
Call of the sun rose Chords of the king
Retaining the lyrics of memory
A sound heard from the stone like a harp string breaking
Dangling lock. Did I forget here
Love woke
Early as the knot in the grain
- Erik Kiviat
1967, 16mm, color/si, 6m, Rental $20
SARAFREE SARAFREE film dancing in the street in the sky free film Dance Sing with the grass.
As long as men make war let us lie down and sing with the grass.
1968, 8mm, color/si, 3m (18fps), Rental $20
"Note on snowstorms in February-March '69. The restoration of the landscape begun to show friends on west coast violent beauty of this period. Childhood memories, snowball fights, sledding, etc., and how I felt about Medford where I live kept entering into the film. The principal birds in the film are the blue jay and the crow, both beautiful, smart and ruthless." - S.L.
1969, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps. 8 min. Rental $25
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
STAR FILM stars a hand-made emulsion.
16fps or 18fps is the preferred speed unless the projector is significantly brighter at 24fps.
1968-1971, 16mm, color/si, 15m (18fps), Rental $45
"The Big Stick/An Old Reel" [...] "intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by making temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomforting ragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility make simply working it an intrinsically political gesture. Levine also understood how to use very fast cutting in old-style 8mm, a difficult task in that the splice is in the middle of the frame. A cut is therefore void of illusion, and in fact threatens to obliterate a weak image...
"... Levine's adroit use of graphic action from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts changed the rapid cuts from awkward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions." - James Irwin, Artweek
1967-73, 16mm, color/si, (18 fps) 17m, Rental $65
Restoration completed by National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
Opens with a short portrait of Marjorie Keller that I made while she met Colleen Fitzgibbon and I on a corner in New York City. The rest of the film is a note to Colleen a continuation of conversations about portraiture, public and private art, love, friendship and loneliness.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18 fps), Rental $20
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
With Marjorie Keller, Kathy De Zengotida and Rick Needham.
A portrait of a get-together of friends and comrades, a struggle with the past to be present.
1975, 16mm, color/si, 7.5m, (18fps), Rental $20
Lying behind the Seer's Dance.
1976-1977, S8mm, color/si, 20m (18fps), Rental $60
1976-77, 16mm, color/si, 12 minutes, Rental $35
An elliptical light journey.
1978, S8mm, color/si, 1.5m, (18fps), Rental $20
Rap with conductor enlightens a Conrail trip, New Haven to New York.
1978, S8mm, color/so, 11m (18fps), Rental $30
"A portrait of disc jockey Mai Cramer, filmmaker Dan Barnett, and Levine himself. The film cuts between Cramer talking, Barnett working and touring China and Levine engaged in the routines of his life. Incorporated into the portrait are shots of an astronaut floating in space, clouds passing and Chinese women performing their daily exercise. As vast space and clouds float by, the film mixes daily routines, foreign locales and the expanse of the universe in a work of cinematic music and dance." - Marjorie Keller, program note, Collective for Living Cinema, 1983
1981, S8mm, color/so, 6m, Rental $20
1981, S8mm, color/so, 12m (18fps), Rental $35
"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." - P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice
"The filmmaker and collagist John Broderick tells (and sings) a story of a remarkable acid trip and the filmmaker, painter and collagist Caroline Avery laughingly plays a jazz tape recorder." - Marjorie Keller
1981, S8mm, color/so, 14.5m (18fps), Rental $45
Note: Both parts of RAPS AND CHANTS may be rented together for the special price of $50.
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers.
“'New Left Note' is a study of radical politics in radical film form."
- Marjorie
Keller
1968-82, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps. 26 min. Rental $100
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
In the fall of 1977, I returned to the New Haven area to live with my parents and aunts after being unemployed for a year. I resumed working in my father's gas station and small used-car lot as both a service attendant and driver of cars between New York and New Haven. BREAKING TIME is a four-part work made up of four separate films on three reels. Each film is a complete work itself and may be shown separately. I feel that together they make a different work.
The return to my home allowed me to look back on the working people and places of my childhood with the eyes of an adult. It was a continual struggle to make a past present and I was only able to complete [the series] after I left the area. The work also reflects my experiences in the past working as a traffic surveyor and the automotive and petroleum base of the culture I grew up in.
Stations throughout Connecticut and even New York City. Riding around with my father and back to the gas station.
1978-1983, 16mm, color/si, 23m (18fps), Rental $70
Mainly a portrayal of my father, the blizzard of 1978 and the summer and spring.
1977-1983, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), Rental $20
LIEN ON MY SOUL is a cityscape of New Haven shot from an East Rock park. Includes the 4th of July, a wedding, lovers, bikers, kids - an ecological meditation.
PORTRAIT NOT A DREAM: My mother's cry of rage.
Note: Both films are on the same reel.
1978-1983, 16mm, color/si, 21m (18fps), Rental $60
Special Package: BREAKING TIME
1978-1983, 16mm, color/si, 51m, Rental $110
"A note to the filmmaker Poli Marechal 'about' penetration: matter and light, substance and smoke. Images of drinking coffee and having sex evaporate as smoke is blown into a shaft of light on a refrigerator." - Marjorie Keller
"NOTE TO POLI, part of a series of intimate 'notes,' represents a burst of sexual energy as the prelude to a cigarette in the sunlit kitchen, as if the balancing of eros and narcosis precluded the intervention of splicing." - P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice
1982-1983, S8mm and 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), Rental $20
1974-1983, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), Rental $20
The third tune of A FEW TUNES GOING OUT. A Memorial Day Parade of songs, histories, cross conversations and interchangeable parts.
1976-1984, S8mm, color/so, 15m (18fps), Rental $45
Film tangents departures. The Susquehannah River, Marilyn Aigen, Dan Barnett, Elaine Johnson, Lee Brown, bridges, Marjorie Keller, Zack Bowen, Cliff Clark, David Marck, flying horses, Saul Levine and many others appear in this film.
1976-1984, S8mm, color/so, 30m (18fps), Rental $90
VHS Sale: $30 Home; $100 Other
With Randal Wells and Anita Zlobro.
1983-1984, S8mm, color/so, 1.5m (18fps), Rental $20
A breeze.
1983-1984, S8mm, color/so, 3.5m (18fps), Rental $20
Note: Both Shmateh II and Shmateh III may be rented together for the special price of $15.
Made with Mark LaPore.
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.
1988, S8mm, color/so, 5m, (18fps), Rental $20
"In title and content NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE directly alludes to Levine's '60s protest film, NEW LEFT NOTES, as well as to the SDS newspaper of the same name he once edited. It's also a startling companion piece to Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July. If Stone is ultimately ambivalent about Vietnam, Levine is not. A nameless vet in Fourth of July greets Tom Cruise's paraplegic Ron Kovic with 'Just what we need, another limp dick.' In NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE, ugly, ruddy close-ups of a flaccid penis begin to dominate the blitzkrieg montage; the limp dick isn't innocent bystander to America's Fall, but guilty witness. Yet the final images are of bouncy shtupping, a make-love-not-war, antiheroic corrective to Stone's mythic posturing." - Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
1989, S8mm, color/so, 15m, (18fps), Rental $45
Excerpts of performances and impersonations for the camera. The first a rooftop Cinderella. In the second, Gede honors Antoine Thurel's self-immolation protest of US imperialism's complicity in the maniacal state terrorism that afflicted the first Afro-American republic, Haiti, by a burning ritual. In the third, old Coke ads and childhood memories project a future .... The film was at first intended as a work-in-progress preview but has evolved into a complete work.
1989, S8mm, color/so, 5m, (18fps), Rental $20
With Amanda Katz spinning and weaving.
1991-1992, S8mm, color/so, (18fps), Rental $40
VHS Sale: $20 Home; $40 Other
Winter seascapes. Stan Brakhage with a movie camera.
1992, S8mm, color/magnetic sound, 3m (18fps), Rental $20
1994, 16mm, color/si, 3 minutes, Rental $20
1995, 16mm, color/si, 1 minute, Rental $20
A portrait of Nancy Golden, a summer evening and Nancy photographing rocks at Singing Beach.
1997, S8mm, color/si, 4m, Rental $20
2000, S8mm, b&w/si, 3m, Rental $20
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 frames left unexposed. LIGHT LICKS are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice.
The first color LIGHT LICK.
2000, S8mm, color/si, 10m (18fps), Rental $30
The first black and white LIGHT LICK.
2000, S8mm, b&w/si, 10m (18fps) Rental $30
Harvard Square stroll, talking to myself.
2000, S8mm, color/si, 3m (18fps) Rental $20
A midsummer daydream.
2000, S8mm, color/si, 12m (18fps), Rental $36
2002, S8mm, b&w/si, 12m, (18 fps), Rental $35
2002, S8mm, color/si, 12m (18 fps), Rental $35
Part of a subseries within the LIGHT LICKS. This film was shot in Cambridge, MA and Jersey City, NJ. It was inspired by ancient apocalyptic poetry, the more recent poetry of Walt Whitman, Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Reznikoff. There are views of the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the hour of the Angels. Thanks to Nancy Golden.
2004, 16mm, color/si, 23m (18 fps), Rental $90
"Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: Jamming" is another in the sub-series, presents footage of the 5,000,000 people demonstrating at the 2004 National Republican Convention in New York, a wedding in Salem, MA.
2004, 16mm, color/si, 21m (18 fps), Rental $82
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.
2000, S8mm, color/si, 3m, Rental $20
Workers and customers at a coffee bar in a winter twilight.
2000, S8mm, b&w/si, 4m, Rental $20
A portrait of my father in the last days of his life. "Nothing is as whole as a broken heart" - Hassidic saying.
2000, S8mm, b&w/si, 11m, Rental $33
The FOUR FILMS ... is a sample of films from three series of films blown up from smaller gauges.
See film descriptions above.
16mm, color/si, 14m (18fps) Rental $45
Kerry Laitela delivers an elegiac account of the passions and struggles of a female chameleon.
16mm, color/so, 4m (18fps) Rental $20
A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies. As if the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish.
1991, S8mm and 16mm, color/si, 3m, Rental $20
Conceived, performed and edited by Saul Levine. Camera by Pelle Lowe.
The title says it.
"A film in the old style." - Bill Brand
1991, S8mm and 16mm, color/si, 1m, Rental $20
Portrait of Laurie McKenna aka Bud Scrape.
S8mm, color/so, 4m, (18fps), Rental $20
Portrait of Pelle Lowe.
S8mm, color/so, 4m, (18fps) Rental $20
for Pelle Lowe and Luther Price
1996, VHS color/so
2000, VHS 2.5m, color/so, $9 home, $18 Other
2002 VHS Inquire
DRIVEN with Joe Gibbons is one of a series of 85 minute long tapes, shot without stopping while driving around Boston after dark with the driver talking and driving while I shoot. Joe drives by the places he has worked and lived in and the bookstores and bars he frequented while reminiscing about life as a filmmakers on the go. The DRIVEN series are intimate 2!st century cinema noir portraits there are 5 of them so far with more I hope to come.
2003 VHS Inquire for price
DRIVEN with Tracy MacCullion is one of a series of 85 minute long tapes, shot without stopping while driving around Boston after dark with the driver talking and driving while I shoot. Tracy talks about reasons she quits her job .... class,sexual and gender politics ....leaving Boston....her experience as a graduate student at Bard, death of her father, and the making of her film Mulroy.
2003 VHS Inquire for price
VHS $35 home; $110 Other
VHS, $30 home; $100 Other
Includes: BOPPING THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA BLUE, GROOVE TO GROOVE and A BRENNEN SOLL COLUMBUSN'S MEDINA
See film descriptions above.
1979-1984, VHS, color/si/so, 31m, $35 Home; $100 Other
See film descriptions above.
1989, VHS, color/so, 26m, $35 Home; $100 Other