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.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Also 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. -
Film details
- Country of production
- USA
- Year
- 1973
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2007
- Length
- 17'
- Medium/Format
- 16mm
