Organized by Lumia Lightsmith
Levine and Lightsmith in attendance
“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 8mm and super 8mm films 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.
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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”.