Program:SALT OF THE SEA
1965 (R8,4m) Color, Silent
Founded under water ... all at sea ... made at land.
THE BIG STICK | AN OLD REEL
1967-73 (R8, b/w 17m, 16mm Blowup)) BW, Silent
"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
NOTE TO COLEEEN
1974 (R8, 3.5m, 16mm Blow up) Color, Silent
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.
GROOVE TO GROOVE part 2 of A FEW TUNES GOING OUT
w/ MAI CRAMER & JESSE GREEN BLUES BAND
1978-1982 (S8,11m) Color, Sound
BOPPING THE GRAET WALL OF CHINA BLUE
1981 (S8mm, 6m) Color, Sound,
"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
WHOLE NOTE
1999-2000 (S8,10m, 16mm Blow up) BW, Silent
A portrait of my father in the last days of his life.
"Nothing is as whole as a broken heart"
- Hassidic saying.
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.
BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON is a sub series within the LIGHT LICKS, inspired by Psalm 137, a meditation on the experience of forced exile.
LIGHT LICK : BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON:
I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK
2011 (S8, 12m,16mm Blow up) Color, Silent
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. -SAUL LEVINE 2011
LIGHT LICK : BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON:
THIS MAYBE THE LAST TIME
2011 (S8, 16mm Blow up) Color, Silent
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