
Saul Levine
Directing
Biography
Saul Levine, born in New Haven Connecticut, is a maker and advocate of avant-garde film and more recently video. He is currently a professor at MassArt where he has taught for over 30 years and programmed the longstanding MassArt Film Society. His work has been screened nationally and worldwide, most recently in Ontario, MOMA (NYC), Lima and Prague. He is based in Boston and hardly leaves town.
Known For
This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.
As Is Was

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
Dreaming In The Dark
STAR FILM stars a hand-made emulsion.
Star Film

Saul Levine began Lost Note as a love poem to his wife but before he finished the film everything had changed. This film is all that was left – 68/69 was a period of violent transition for many. The film was formally challenging, editing footage with in-camera superimpositions and cutting b&w with color.
Lost Note
Made in Binghamton in 1976 - a warped record constructed out of visits to the zoo, relatives and various locations. Appearances by obsessive birds, caged bears and hungry rams. "Certain shots are very evocative, such as a long shot of a group of people sitting on a park bench, one person playing a song on a recorder. The sound of the music, its fragility, is matched by the distance of the shot, lending a feeling of precariousness to the moment. There is a repeated shot of a warped record playing, with the same musical phrase endlessly repeated. The shot is an interior one, with the lighting casting a golden glow on the scene. The warped repetitions begin to reverberate with suggestions of frustrations." – Daryl Chin, The Soho Weekly News "His first talkie, NOTES OF AN EARLY FALL is a characteristically raw work that parlays even the sound of microphone rumble into a formal element.
Notes of an Early Fall

A brief documentary focused on the history of experimental Super 8mm filmmaking. Prominent figures of the "s8" boom of the 1970s discuss their work and their first encounters with the medium.
A (possible) trip around the world in super 8

Moon flight loud silence soft dark hard light a Ray o gram made with a camera out of sight.
Note to Tetsua

No description available.
Light Licks: Pardes: Drowned Hat Rescue Media City Motown Jump
No description available.
Whole Note

As the crow flies, as the crow cries, as the crow alites CAWS
Caw Notes

ALL THAT'S SOLID (and) MELTS INTO AIR are each separate films shot at an exhibition of the urban landscape artist Tyree Suyton in Cambridge at Harvard. I was struck by the redemptive critical and visionary character of his work which struck me as similar to G.M. Hopkins or Clarence Smith. Coincidentally as I was shooting these films I went to a screening of Charles Burnett and asked him what film he would like to make but couldn't get the money for. He replied, "a feature narrative about Tyree Suyton." So I put together four of the films from Spring 2000 into a four-film work called "4 For Charles Burnett - All That's Solid Melts Into Air". They are: ALL THAT'S SOLID, LIGHT LICK, TOSCANINI'S EUROPEAN SIDEWALK CAFE, and MELTS INTO AIR.
All That's Solid

Workers and customers at a coffee bar in a winter twilight. S8mm, b&w/si
Toscanini's European Sidewalk Cafe
Director of the Film-makers Coop, M.M. Serra, recollects her morning on September 11, 2001. The Coop is a few blocks from the New York Worlds Trade Center. The tape was shot a month after, while we were waiting to have lunch together.
911-Serra's Morning
Stan Brakhage with a movie camera. Winter seascapes.
Z (Zee Not Zed)
Fixed shot of Saul's father, Julius Levine, playing Scrabble with his housekeeper.
Kibitzer

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.
Light Licks Series
A study of my parents in grey and white. An evening film. My mother lights the sabbath candles, cooks, crochets, sleeps, talks to father reading the paper – we are together. This is the first completed note.
Note One

A portrait: of Saul Levine, filmmaker and one-time Italian Ice Vendor./of the film surface & depth/so by the choice of image./ of the inside & outside light in the summer and the shower. –M. K.
Untitled
Portrait of artist T.J Donovan, as he recounts dreams about his grandfather. A nostalgia for films where cigarette smoke was the protagonist.
Pillow Filled With Tears

Founded under water ... all at sea ... made at land.