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SAUL LEVINE: NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND Total Running Time: 58min. The Tenth Annual Views from the Avant-Garde A Special Presentation of the 44th New York Film Festival Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith. Saul Levine in person. Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics. Note to Poli blow-up by Carolyn Avery “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 repose” - P. Adams Sitney Immediately distinguishable in their rhythms, declarations and scope the films of Saul Levine are incendiary, lyrical, intimate and socially committed. Levine like Brakhage, Conner, Jacobs, Landow, the Kuchars and others was instrumental in pioneering the instruments of small gauge movie making elevating amateur cameras into artisanal tools for fully developed artistic expression. Neither ramshackle nor seamless , these painstakingly constructed, visually percussive films embrace a funky materialist approach that put 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. 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. These old notes in new bottles are in no danger of washing out to sea, the details and accents of the original 8mm are clarified in these superb 16mm blow ups initiated by Anthology Film Archives and realized by B.B. Optics. - Mark McElhatten Note to Pati U.S., 1969; 8m Kinetic, celebratory, compact. Note to Coleen U.S., 1974; 5m Spontaneous portraits both rigorous and playful. New Left Note U.S., 1968-1982; 26m Levine's rapid fire cutting has never found a more appropriate subject than in New Left Note, his film on the anti-war, anti-racist, and women's liberation movements of the early 1970s in America. New Left Note represents a synthesis of ideas that Levine sought to inject into a much-divided movement. The 'Free Bobby Seale' demonstrations in New Haven (Levine's home town) in 1970 is put into context through the editing .... At the time of shooting, Levine was the editor of New Left Notes, the national newspaper of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). He was unilaterally committed to the movements he filmed but beleaguered by the leadership of the organization for his non-sectarian views. ... [New Left Note] is a study of radical politics in radical film form. - Marjorie Keller "The life he records is a jumble of demonstrations, fused with the kaleidoscopic fury of memory; its brief reprises include a catnap in the back of a car and a glimpse of a zoo. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naive notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse." - P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice The Big Stick/An Old Reel U.S., 1967-1973; 17m "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 Poli U.S., 1982-83; 2m Screening at Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street between Broadway & Amsterdam Avenues on the plaza level

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