Saul Levine: Notes From the Underground
Curated by Mark McElhatten
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 repos. (P. Adams Sitney )
Levine makes ‘Notes’ in both the musical and the epistolary sense – love letters, petitions, edicts, shouts, rants, rambles and breakdowns, films of personal exploration and political challenge. Neither ramshackle nor seamless, these painstakingly constructed, visually percussive films embrace a funky materialist approach that puts an exceptional stress on the physical join and metaphorical fuse of the Splice. In some of his super 8 sound films Levine uses the cut point and the sound – image delay to create a film equivalent of musical skips and bent-pitch blue notes. In the silent films on this program Levine’s film splices are sites of detonation, barricades and exploded horizons that are visceral and delectably ‘erotic’ in their ooze and scrape. (Mark McElhatten )
All the films on the program are Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics, with the exception of Notes after a Long Silence.
In this combined programme
-
New Left Note
Levine’s incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naive notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to -
-
Note to Coleen
The willing portrait sitters who pay curbside artists to sketch quick commissions find themselves immortalized on film. -
-
The Big Stick / An Old Reel
This film intercuts two Charlie Chaplin shorts centring on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting.
