CONTENT WARNING: These films contain flashing lights which may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.

Saul Levine does not stop. He is an uncompromising and relentless filmmaker whose work reflects his experimental verve. As far back as the 1960s, he has shown that film is a material object, that it can be twisted, warped, chopped, and stretched to produce immersive and challenging experiences. On April 4, we are pleased to host Levine—alongside a troupe of filmmakers and thinkers close to him—for a night honoring his legacy.

In addition to the impressive body of work Levine has assembled over the decades, he has imparted a love and understanding of experimental filmmaking to younger generations as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, among them Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco. Her work championing his films, alongside Byron Davies and Lumia Lightsmith, led to the presentation of a Saul Levine Retrospective that toured Mexico last year. Tonight we present an abridged version of that retrospective, with Levine in person to discuss his work.

The program notes for the Saul Levine retrospective in Mexico are available here.

All 16mm prints are from Levine’s personal collection.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – 7 PM

TICKETS

STAR FILM
1969, 15 mins, 16mm

“I began this film in 1968. I had painted, scratched, scraped and bleached film since I began making films in 64/65 mainly in regular 8 and usually with photo-chemical representations. In this film I decided to paint and bleach 16mm clear and black leader thinking from the beginning that I was making an emulsion that light would shine through. I was making both positive and negative images that could be contact printed. The film is made from a painted and bleached original a little over 100 ft that has been contact printed onto b&w and color positive and negative film. I used stars, circles and crescents to ground the viewer and make clearer the meditation on positive and negative space. I also wanted to make a completely camera-less film.” — Saul Levine

BIG STICK / AN OLD REEL
1973, 10 mins, 16mm

“Beginning in 1967, with roughly a dozen short films under his belt, Levine spent six years reediting 8-mm prints of the Chaplin shorts Easy Street (1917) and In the Park (1915), incorporating television images of an antiwar protest in which the Boston filmmaker participated. The result was The Big Stick/An Old Reel (1967-73), his self-tutorial in montage, the ascesis of narrative, and the beauties of caustic rhythms. In the early stages of that work’s construction, Levine was teaching filmmaking at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, but he would soon be fired, if not specifically for his role in occupying a campus building during a protest over the dismissal of an African-American secretary, then for his political activism generally.” — P. Adams Sitney

NEW LEFT NOTE
1982, 27 mins

“‘New Left Note is a study of radical politics in radical film form.” — Marjorie Keller

IS AS IS
1991, 3 mins, 16mm

“A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies. As if the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.” — Saul Levine

FIVE-MINUTE INTERMISSION

AS IS WAS
1995, 4 mins, 16mm

“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.” — Saul Levine

FALLING NOTES UNLEAVING
2013, 13 mins, 16mm

“Falling Notes Unleaving is made from footage gathered in the fall of 2012 and edited in early 2013. Anne Charlotte Robertson, friend and fellow Super8 filmmaker, died. I attended her funeral and filmed the burial of her ashes. She was famous for her diary films and I thought it important to honor her work by filming an event that she could not. The burial took place in a wonderful old cemetery in Framingham, Massachusetts, which lightened a sad event. The film also includes footage shot in the mountains outside of Portland and the streets of Cambridge and Somerville in Massachusetts. It is not a diary. The title and the film reflect Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Spring and Fall.’ Luther Price, Bob Brodsky, Tara Nelson, Gordon Nelson, Liz Coffey, Heather Green, her daughter Rosealee, her dog Blue, and many other people and animals appear in this film.” — Saul Levine

NOTE TO PATI
1969, 7 mins, 16mm

“Note on snowstorms in February-March ’69. The restoration of the landscape begun to show friends on west coast violent beauty of this period. Childhood memories, snowball fights, sledding, etc., and how I felt about Medford where I live kept entering into the film. The principal birds in the film are the blue jay and the crow, both beautiful, smart and ruthless.” — Saul Levine

LIGHT LICKS: PARDES: COUNTING FLOWERS ON THE WALL
2018, 13 mins, 16mm

“Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999. The films 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, and extend my interest in the ways film can be a medium of visual improvisation. ‘Pardes’ is the ancient Persian word for walled garden. In Hebrew and Aramaic it means paradise, heaven, the garden of Eden, the peak or terminus of ecstatic visionary, trance, flight, wild flowers, morning glories, an urban jungle an eden for a petite Tyger.” — Saul Levine

LIGHT LICKS: AMEN
2017, 6 mins, 16mm

“A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers, to which I respond, AMEN.” — Saul Levine

NOTE TO TETSUA
2018, 1 min, 16mm

Moon flight
loud silence
soft dark
hard light
a Ray o gram
made with a camera
out of sight
— Saul Levine

Special thanks to Saul Levine, Byron Davies, Lumia Lightsmith, Stephen Cappel, and Kathy Del Beccaro. Davies and Lightsmith co-programmed this screening, in addition to adapting and writing the program notes. Davies’ research project, “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film,” forms the basis for these screenings, which are supported by Salón de Cines Múltiples. Additional support was provided by Laboratorio Experimental de Cine.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – 10 PM

TICKETS

WARNING: These films contain flashing lights which may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.

Destiny supplants space and time as La Cueva, Spectacle, and the MassArt Film Society become perfectly superimposed. The show begins with a vintage Super 8 print of Warm Broth (1988), one of Luther Price’s most iconic films from his period of films made under the moniker “Tom Rhodes,” while also highlighting the participation in that film of Laurie McKenna, a former student of Levine and friend + collaborator of Price whose video Why the Long Face (1997) we will also screen. By rendering tribute to Levine, we will also attend to his own talents at rendering tribute to others: to Marjorie Keller, Anne Charlotte Robertson, to Stan Brakhage, to his Father, and—especially in this program—to Luther Price (aided in this tribute by short films by Laurie McKenna, Annalisa D Quagliata Blanco, and Linnea Nugent). Not for the only time in this retrospective, these artists will go searching for each other in that most interstitial space of transit: dreams.

The program notes of the Saul Levine retrospective in Mexico are available here.

WARM BROTH
Dir. Luther Price/Tom Rhodes, 1988
35 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Canyon Cinema.

“Everything will be ok, just close
your eyes little thing
go to sleep little fuck
feel my hand on your warm
forehead
It’s cold isn’t it? Ice cold.

“Dream of something real sweet
for mommy
Mommy likes sweet things
Dream of a merry-go-round and
cotton candy

“Mommy’s hand got all warm
resting on your tiny head
See, look at mommy’s hand
It got all warm now

“You’re running a slight fever
Mommy will get you some
water
And you’re running a slight
fever

“Little fuck don’t have to go to
school tomorrow
but no playing in the yard
Someone could see you
And I’ll be an unfit mommy
You’ll have to stay in all day

“but now, dream of the prettiest
flower for mommy
I’ll make you oatmeal first thing
And you could tell me the color
of the –
prettiest flower.”

-Luther Price/Tom Rhodes

WHY THE LONG FACE
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 1997
26 mins

A former student of Levine and collaborator and friend of Price, McKenna made this short about Nancy Luce, a desperate, creative, Martha’s Vineyard oddball of the mid 1800s. Using old photographs, puppets, toy models, and off-the-cuff footage, McKenna creates a lonely work as daring and personal as that of her teachers and peers.

GOODTIME CHARLIE BIRTHDAY
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 1997
2 mins

A film of stuffed animals, haunted by a lullaby. Much like Price, McKenna makes visible the horror hiding beneath the surface of familiar American scene audio: rehearsal cassette recording, vocals: Laurie and Tom Rhodes (Luther), the Fabulous Turquoise Rain and Shines, 1987.

AGGREGATE
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 2020
6 mins

McKenna’s pandemidiario conjures desert punk powering the aggregate of memory and charcoal and grounds national rupture in a sonic package.

“A whole formed by combining several (typically disparate) elements” – Laurie McKenna

OUTCRY (FOR LUTHER)
Dir. Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, 2015
1 min

“Luther Price’s handmade film work demonstrated the vagaries of trauma internal to the medium itself: the simultaneously world-destroying and world-repairing possibilities of unmaking and remaking of the body of the film strip. Annalisa Quagliata has taken up the lessons of Price’s handmade film course at MassArt, maintaining their queer resonances while reshaping them with the perhaps unanticipated application to the unmaking and remaking of myths of the Mexican body politic. This 2016 tribute to Luther Price, made in that same MassArt course before Quagliata’s return to Mexico, reminds us of the facilitating possibilities of the body in disintegration. A 16mm optical sound bar is the skeleton on which it all hangs.” – Byron Davies

WAS ONCE ONE
Dir. Linnea Nugent, 2023
3 mins

“Was Once one is the auditory artifact of since lost Luther Price speaking on what was once one film that belonged as two.” – Linnea Nugent

CRESCENT
Dir. Saul Levine and Pelle Lowe, 1993
5 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

“A conversation with Pelle Lowe.” – Saul Levine

SCHMATEH IV & SCRAPE
Dir. Saul Levine, 1986
8 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

Two portrayals on one reel. A Portrait of Pelle Lowe and A Portrait of Laurie McKenna aka Bud Scrape.

READY-MADE
Dir. Saul Levine and Pelle Lowe, 1993
4 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

“A film made by Pelle Lowe and myself, READY-MADE is a single work in itself, and also exists as part of a series of works that Pelle and I made reflecting on Manet’s painting OLYMPIA, including it’s reception, it’s relationship to painting, sex work, imperialism, the Paris Commune, sex, drugs and rock roll, ect.” – Saul Levine

Special thanks to Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, Saul Levine, Byron Davies, Lumia Lightsmith, Stephen Cappel, Nicolas Cadena, Mono No Aware, and Kathy Del Beccaro.

Davies and Lightsmith co-curated this screening, in addition to providing the program notes. The banner and poster image for this program come courtesy of David Michael Curry, who participated in the filming of Warm Broth. Davies’ research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film” forms the basis for these screenings, which are supported by Salón de Cines Múltiples.

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN
(AZ EMBER TRAGÉDIÁJA)
Dir. Marcell Jankovics, 2011.
Hungary. 166 min.
In Hungarian with English Subs.

SUNDAY 4/6 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY 4/16 – 7PM
SATURDAY 4/26 – 10PM

TICKETS

Adam, Eve, and Lucifer search for the meaning of life and humanity while traveling through mankind’s history and inevitable demise.

In 1957, the Pannónia Film Studio was established, marking the beginning of the golden age of Hungarian animation. Unlike live-action films of the time, animated films faced less scrutiny from political censors, successfully penetrating the Iron Curtain and reaching prestigious Western film festivals like Cannes, and ceremonies such as the Academy Awards. Pannónia became known as one of the top animation studios in the world alongside Disney and Toei. During this period at Pannónia many of Hungary’s most prominent animators honed their craft.

One such director, and probably the most internationally recognized Hungarian animator, is Marcell Jankovics. Jankovics started working at Pannónia as a stage manager, at nineteen, in 1960, before becoming a director there in 1965. In 1973 the government commissioned the first feature-length Hungarian animated film JOHNNY CORNCOB, which Jankovics directed. In 1981 he created his most famous work, SON OF THE WHITE MARE, to international success, even though the film ran into censorship issues because of its anti-marxism interpretation of time. Both films have enjoyed a tenure at Spectacle first playing in 2016 and then in 2022.

In 1983 Jankovics finished writing his magnum opus, THE TRAGEDY OF MAN, based on the dramatic poem by Imre Madách. This epic tale chronicles the journey of Adam and Lucifer from the dawn of humanity to its ultimate demise. Jankovics began production on the film in 1988, just a year before the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. In an interview with Cartoon Brew, he noted, “There were political changes in Hungary which made me freer to express myself and communicate my ideas more clearly.” However, the fall of communism also led to the denationalization of the Hungarian film industry, resulting in the loss of state funding that Jankovics and other animators from the golden age had depended upon.

Jankovics spent the next twenty-three years securing funding, creating one of the fifteen segments of the film, and then waiting for more funding. The film was finally finished in 2011 and is one of the longest-animated films ever made. Some notable funding was received after his Academy Award-nominated short SISYPHUS (1974) was used in a General Motors commercial for the 2008 Super Bowl. Another batch of funding was secured after Rob Allers watched a SON OF THE WHITE MARE bootleg and convinced Disney to hire Jankovics to work on what would ultimately become THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE (2000). Jancovics left pre-production after Disney rewrote the script, stating, “What I had made wasn’t used in the ruined, stupid, kitschy final version.”

Each of the fifteen segments of THE TRAGEDY OF MAN showcases a unique animation style, reflecting various moments in humanity’s past and future. This animation shift enhances the film’s epic scale and deepens its emotional resonance, allowing viewers to experience a broad spectrum of human experiences and philosophies. Despite its critical acclaim, and rich tapestry of artistic expression, THE TRAGEDY OF MAN has rarely screened in the United States outside its original festival run in 2011.

This April, Spectacle invites you to embark on an epic journey through mankind’s past present, and future with Jankovics’ twentieth-century masterpiece, THE TRAGEDY OF MAN.

BRIGHTON WOK: THE LEGEND OF GANJA BOXING
Dir. Gabriel Howard, 2008.
United Kingdom. 90 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, APRIL 20 – 5 PM with Q&A, this event is $10
FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, APRIL 27 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 29 – 10 PM

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Ninjas, Ganja, Kung Fu.

Terror has befallen the English coastal city of Brighton in the form of the Italian ninja Vafan Cuolo and his army of kung-fu warriors. The people of Brighton’s fate is up to one man, Ryu, who is just recently out of a care home himself and not exactly up to the task. Ryu must find the Ganja Master, learn the ways of Ganja Boxing, uncover the origins of Cuolo, and defeat him once and for all to save Brighton before it succumbs to tyranny.

Low in budget, but high in action, and just high in general; BRIGHTON WOK is 4/20’s answer to St. Patrick Day’s all-time Spectacle classic: FATAL DEVIATION. A completely DIY affair, filming began in 2004, wrapped in 2006, and was finally released in 2008 after post production was split up over a couple years between other responsibilities: jobs, school, and ganja of course. The making of the film was all-hands on deck, and entirely Brighton-made, with fight choreography and stunts even being taken care of by a local martial arts instructor and his pupils. For a ragtag labor of love, its achievements are impressive. And audiences will be charmed by the film’s ambitions and ability to wear its childhood inspirations on its sleeve.

To help celebrate one of our favorite holidays, Spectacle will be joined on April 20th by the film’s director Gabriel Howard, producer Saul Howard, writer/actor Samson Byford-Winter, and editor/cinematographer John MacDonald, virtually for a very special audience Q&A after the film.

DERNIER MAQUIS
dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2008
France, 90 min
In French with English subtitles

SATURDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM w/Q&A (this event is $10)

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The screening will be followed by a discussion with members of La Clef.

Written on the walls of La Clef, a collectively run cinema in Paris:

“What consoles me, anyway, is knowing that there is always somewhere in the world… a little monotonous noise… and this noise is that of a projector projecting a film. Our duty is that this noise never stops.” – Jean-Luc Godard

Members of La Clef have selected DERNIER MAQUIS by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche to screen in New York as a jumping-off point to discuss their work. RAZ’s film is about an industrial pallet and truck repair shop where largely African and Arab immigrant workers push back against the owner (played by the filmmaker).