SAUL LEVINE: RAPS AND CHANTS

Wednesday, May 22, 2013
7:30 PM

“Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America.” — P. Adams Sitney

Directly following a retrospective screening at MoMA New York, the Boston-based filmmaker Saul Levine visits Media City with a program of Super 8 and 16mm films selected by the festival. A legend of small-gauge filmmaking, Levine has made more than 80 films and videos since 1964. He has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston for more than 30 years, influencing several generations of filmmakers and programming the longstanding MassArt Film Society. In the late 1960s Levine was editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of the Students for a Democratic Society, and was arrested several times for protesting the war in Vietnam. His work is noted for its incorporation of splice marks, percussive editing, unconstrained camera movements and spontaneous formal accidents.

Raps and Chants with John Broderick
Super 8mm, 10 min, 2003

The Big Stick
Regular 8 on 16mm, 10 min, 1973

Later Later Dutch Master Later
Super 8mm, 3 min, 1991

Rambling Notes
Regular 8 on 16mm, 15 min, 1977

Notes after a Long Silence
Super 8mm, 15 min, 1989

Amazing Grace
Super 8mm, 3 min, 1977

“For nearly 50 years, Saul Levine has made experimental films that are distinguished by their machine-gun rhythms, political urgencies, and moments of cloistered, even blissful, family settings. Levine’s is a cinema of violent juxtaposition — Charlie Chaplin hotly pursued and Walter Cronkite intoning the grim news of the day; Vietnam War paratroopers and B.B. King playing the blues; street protests, police roundups, and workers on the dole.

Inspired by jazz improvisation, Jewish mysticism, visual punning, and poetic meter, as well as the films of Stan Brakhage and Sergei Eisenstein, Levine’s editing ricochets between shock montage and more tender, abstract passages. Through his use of repetition, superimposition, and fragmentation; accidents of exposure, and raw, jagged splicing, Levine creates jarring collisions among television news broadcasts, slapstick comedies, lyrical contemplations of the natural world, and intimate scenes of domesticity and eroticism.” — Musuem of Modern Art