Friday November 2, 7:30pm
Saul Levine: Breaking Time
Organized by Lumia Lightsmith
Levine and Lightsmith in attendance

Still from “LIGHT LICK: AMEN” (2017) by Saul Levine – Image courtesy of the artist

“Levine has tackled many subjects as a filmmaker: love loss, war, music, the seasons, light, and loss again. But the film he makes of each is the same film, the one ongoing film of the film in the making…The pleasure in this for the viewer is, of course, the combined one of voyeuristically glimpsing into the life of an artist and, for those of us familiar with his other work, encountering an old friend up to new tricks.” – Marjorie Keller

Microscope Gallery is pleased to welcome to the gallery Boston-based filmmaker Saul Levine for an evening of films originally shot by the arist on 8mm and Super 8mm, organized by Lumia Lightsmith.

The screening focuses on 3 works from Levine’s extensive filmography: NOTE ONE (1968), the first film from his personal portrait series “NOTES” consisting of a black and white and superimposed sequences of his parents; BREAKING TIME: Parts 1-4 (1977-1983), a film looking back from an adult perspective at the people and places of the artist’s childhood, screened last in New York at the Collective for Living Cinema in the 1980s; and LIGHT LICK: AMEN (2017), a recent addition to Levine’s ongoing LIGHT LICK series of films “made frame by frame by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into frames left unexposed.”

Lumia Lightsmith’s description of the show follows:

“Seldom seen in the decades since its making, BREAKING TIME is perhaps Saul Levine’s Regular 8mm magnum opus. Culminating in almost two decades of work and study in the medium before shifting his focus and effort to exploring Super 8 and its sonic possibilities, this film is the final entry in his ‘Portrayal’ series, a group of Regular 8 films made throughout the 1970’s in which a portrait is also a betrayal, and one of the last films he made in the gauge.

This program presents the increasingly rare opportunity to see the film in its original 8mm format and bookending the screening is NOTE ONE and LIGHT LICK: AMEN, two films that also explore the familiar sights of New Haven and his parents, seen in their domestic space engaged in their daily and Judaic rituals. Reference points to be returned to, examined with different perspectives and formal concerns in mind, in new light in time.”

Saul Levine in attendance and available for Q&A following the screening. Introduced by Lumia Lightsmith. All works shown on newly struck 16mm film prints.


General admission $8
Students and Members $6

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Saul Levine, born in 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut, is a maker and advocate of avant-garde film, video, and facebook livestreaming. He is former a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he taught for 40 years and programmed the longstanding and now defunct MassArt Film Society. His work has been screened nationally and worldwide, most recently in Shanghai, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rotterdam. Levine is based in Boston.

“Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 50 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. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naïve notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse.” — P. Adams Sitney

Lumia Lightsmith is a “Dependent Programmer from Planet Earth, Rewiring the Minds of the Children for their Soular Nourishment”.


Program:


NOTE ONE
Regular 8mm to 16mm film, b&w, silent, 1968, 6 minutes

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.


BREAKING TIME: Parts 1-4
Regular 8mm to 16mm film, color, silent, 1977-1983, 51 minutes

In the fall of 1977, I returned to the New Haven area to live with my parents and aunts after being unemployed for a year. I resumed working in my father’s gas station and small used-car lot as both a service attendant and driver of cars between New York and New Haven. BREAKING TIME is a four-part work made up of four separate films on three reels. Each film is a complete work itself and may be shown separately. I feel that together they make a different work.

The return to my home allowed me to look back on the working people and places of my childhood with the eyes of an adult. It was a continual struggle to make a past present and I was only able to complete [the series] after I left the area. The work also reflects my experiences in the past working as a traffic surveyor and the automotive and petroleum base of the culture I grew up in. – SL

Part 1: MORTGAGE ON MY BODY
Stations throughout Connecticut and even New York City. Riding around with my father and back to the gas station.

Part 2: ARRESTED
Mainly a portrayal of my father, the blizzard of 1978 and the summer and spring.

Parts 3 and 4: LIEN ON MY SOUL and PORTRAIT NOT A DREAM
LIEN ON MY SOUL is a cityscape of New Haven shot from an East Rock park. Includes the 4th of July, a wedding, lovers, bikers, kids – an ecological meditation. PORTRAIT NOT A DREAM: My mother’s cry of rage.


LIGHT LICK: AMEN
Super 8mm to 16mm film, color, silent, 2017, 5 minutes 30 seconds
A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers to which I respond, AMEN.


Still from “BREAKING TIME: Parts 1-4” (1977-1983) by Saul Levine – Image courtesy of the artist


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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2018 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).