From: Brooke Holgerson (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Nov 08 2006 - 08:07:47 PST
Hello Frameworkers,
Something you might be interested in coming up at the Harvard Film Archive:
Notes for Viewing: An Evening with Saul Levine
Tuesday November 14 at 7 pm
A legend of small gauge filmmaking, 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
*Director Saul Levine in Person*
November 14 (Tuesday) 7 pm
The Big Stick/An Old Reel
Directed by Saul Levine
US 1967-73, 16mm, silent, b/w, 17 min.
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's adroit use of graphic action
from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts change the rapid cuts
from awkward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions." - James
Irwin, Artweek
New Left Note
Directed by Saul Levine
US 1968-82, 16mm, silent, b/w, 28 min.
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. 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
Note to Pati
Directed by Saul Levine
US 1969, 16mm, silent, b/w, 8 min.
Part of a series of films celebrating daily life, Note to Pati "concerns
images of winter, children playing in snow, trees, a bird flying through
branches... the red hats of the children in the snow have the intense
luminosity of a Renoir." - David Curtis
Note to Colleen
Directed by Saul Levine
US 1974, 16mm, silent, b/w, 5 min.
A study of a day spent with friend and filmmaker Colleen Fitzgibbon.
Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon In the Hour of the Angels
Directed by Saul Levine
US 2004, 16mm, silent, color, 24 min.
Restored print
Described by Levine as ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and
mystic visionary practice, Light Licks are a series of films made frame
by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond
the gate into frames left unexposed. Begun in 2000, the series is
ongoing---By the Waters of Babylon In the Hour of the Angels is the most
recently completed Light Lick. "I Saw The Light - Praise the Dark."-
Saul Levine
-- Brooke Holgerson Publicity/Outreach Harvard Film Archive 617-496-3211 email suppressed http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/ __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.