Taking Note: P. Adams Sitney on the Films of Saul Levine

Sitney, P. Adams, Artforum International

Saul Levine has been one of the most underrated filmmakers in the American avant-garde cinema throughout his more than forty-year-long career. His one-man program at the New York Film Festival last year was his first, although he had been included in group screenings there before. The five films selected were so old (made between 1967 and 1983) that they were promoted as restored artifacts. Only in the past decade has New York's Anthology Film Archives devoted occasional programs to him. Yet if someone were to write a critical history of the avant-garde cinema in Boston (as David E. James did for Los Angeles in his magisterial 2005 book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles), Levine would be its hero. He seldom leaves the city, where, as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, he has been one of the most influential teachers of filmmaking in the nation, and his energies have for decades sustained the larger community of avant-garde filmmakers in Boston.

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The chief reason for his neglect, or isolation, may not have been his geographical location, however, but rather his long commitment to 8-mm and Super 8 formats (although he has blown copies up to 16 mm for distribution by the Film-Makers' Cooperative and Canyon Cinema since the 1970s). A figure of the perennial Left, Levine has identified with and championed the small gauges as if they were marginalized citizens of the republic of cinema. By example, he has taught his students to cling to their artistic freedom by seeking out the least expensive modes of filmmaking and, as Emerson wrote in the essay "Experience," to "hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly." As a consequence of this ascetic attitude toward the medium, Levine embraced video much earlier than did those of his fellow filmmakers who shared his passion for the texture of celluloid. For instance, Stan Brakhage--with whom Levine studied in the early '70s and who was, more significantly, the greatest influence on his work--resorted to painting on film in his last years rather than make the switch. When the expenses of 16-mm production temporarily drove Brakhage into a detour of making first 8-mm films (in 1964) and later Super 8 films (in 1976), he thought of his engagement with the smaller gauges as exemplary for younger filmmakers. Of those who followed his example, Levine has been the most persistent. He …

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Publication information: Article title: Taking Note: P. Adams Sitney on the Films of Saul Levine. Contributors: Sitney, P. Adams - Author. Magazine title: Artforum International. Volume: 45. Issue: 9 Publication date: May 2007. Page number: 343+. © 1999 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group.

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