At the end of his 2001 video Dream Story, the celebrated U.S. experimental filmmaker Saul Levine (New Haven, Connecticut, 1943- ) recalls seeming to wake up from a dream, only to find his close collaborator Marjorie Keller (who had died in 1994) next to him: “I said to her, ‘You can't be here,’ and she said to me, ‘But I am.’ And I felt suddenly, totally relieved, and at peace.” To find Levine presenting his work in Mexico City and Oaxaca is likewise at once metaphysically incongruent, perfectly fitting, and a much sought-after occasion for peace.
Is a Saul Levine retrospective in Mexico highly anticipated? It might seem to be, taking into account his former students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) who have led brilliant careers in Mexico, such as Silvia Gruner and Annalisa D Quagliata Blanco. Successful screenings of Levine’s work in October 2022 and January 2024 at the quasi-secret micro-cinema in Mexico City co-founded by Quagliata, La Cueva (a space frequently evocative of the MassArt Film Society, run by Levine from 1978 to 2018), have generated expectations, thanks especially to their curators and presenters, Lumia Lightsmith and John Quackenbush, who will also join us for the Levine retrospective in Mexico. Names casually invoked in those screenings—such as Marjorie Keller, as well as Levine’s colleagues and students Luther Price, Pelle Lowe, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Jonathan Schwartz, and Nina Fonoroff—still await substantiation in the screening rooms of Tenochtitlán.
Indeed, an alternative history presents itself, where radically dissimilar cities like Mexico City and Boston are discovered to have surprising commonalities just at the level of the kind of personal, independent, poetic, small-gauge, unabashedly left-wing (antiwar) cinema of which Levine, now entering his ninth decade, is one of the medium’s most singular and astonishing teachers.
We begin on June 27 at La Cueva, with the program “Homenaje a Saul Levine, Luther Price y la MassArt Film Society”: destiny supplants space and time as La Cueva and the MassArt Film Society finally become perfectly superimposed. Thanks to Ed Halter and Bard College, we will screen the restored version of Warm Broth (1988), one of Luther Price’s most iconic films from his period of taking the moniker “Tom Rhodes,” while also highlighting the participation in that film of Laurie McKenna, a former student of Levine and 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 (as in his proverbial “notes”): to Anne Charlotte Robertson, to Mark Lapore, to Marjorie Keller, 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 last time in this retrospective, these artists will go searching for each other in that most interstitial space of transit: dreams.
At the Cineteca Nacional on June 28 we will present “Saul Levine: Notas e iluminaciones tras un largo silencio”: an anthology of some of Levine’s most political work, across his “light licks” and “notes” (in silent 16mm as well as sound Super8), often relying on editing styles that emphasize shared physiognomies over linear narrative time, and never abjuring the idea of protest as our most natural, and most communal, response to uncomfortable silences.
At the Centro de Cultura Digital on June 29 we will present “Saul Levine: Lo que la paz pura permite”: an approach to family and homecoming across early, middle, and late stages in Levine’s career, and likewise across analog and digital video formats. Here again a kind of long silence is broken in the sound video Kibitzer (2000), where a game of Scrabble between Levine’s father and his caretaker Barbara Burbridge closes with unanticipated poetic and symbolic connections between “to bode” (to foreshadow) and “abode” (the home).
At the Cineteca Nacional on June 30, with “Saul Levine y su enseñaza: El tema supremo del Arte y el Canto,” we again turn to Saul’s teaching. Following the opening of a “gift box” for Luther Price by Laurie McKenna, we include works made between Boston and Mexico by former MassArt students Silvia Gruner (Pregunta, 1988), Annalisa D Quagliata Blanco (Calypso, 2016) and Rian Brown (Saca una foto, 1994: despite its foreign provenance, this is a film ingrained by that fundamental year in Mexican history). If much of Levine’s small-gauge political filmmaking adapts the anti-Vietnam War message of his teacher Stan Brakhage’s Regular 8 23rd Psalm Branch (1967, screened in Mexico City at FICUNAM in 2022), Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I Want to Paint It Black (2011), of his first trip to Europe, might be regarded as Levine’s delayed response to the section of Brakhage’s film on “Peter Kubelka’s Vienna”; the result is, as Levine put it, a “dark Gothic reflection.” Two recurring motifs in Levine’s work (shots of the moon and dialogue with another filmmaker in a car) memorably cross in his plaintive collaboration with Pelle Lowe, Crescent (1993), where Lowe’s story of her parents and an umbrella made from a handle manifests the precise beauty of the fragmentary and inconclusive anecdote.
In Oaxaca City, at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo on July 3, with the program “Saul Levine en Oaxaca: Lo que el corazón escuchó, el fantasma lo adivinó,” an imaginary dialogue opens between Levine and that venue’s titular photographer (most of whose film work was lost in the 1982 Cineteca fire) and yet another legendary cineclub, Francisco Toledo’s El Pochote, the font of decades of Oaxacan experimental cinema. This program mixes some of Levine’s most assertively abstract work from very different parts of his career, such as Star Film (1968) and Light Licks: Pardes: Counting Flowers on the Wall (2018), with late-life portraits of Stan Brakhage and Marjorie Keller.
The phantasm of Saul Levine’s MassArt Film Society rests in the very idea of the cineclub as a site of pedagogy, collective work, and reconciliation, impressed by the pains of those whose passion for this art has too often exceeded professional niceties. Meanwhile Saul’s work now lives, in Mexico more than ever before, resting on a ballast no less firm than an experimental cinema of love—obdurately opposed to bureaucracy, punitive cultures, and imperialist war.
On behalf of Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), we want to thank our international guests, Saul Levine, Lumia Lightsmith y John Quackenbush, and as always our collaborators from the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC), and especially the work since the beginning of this project of Annalisa D Quagliata Blanco, whose feature film ¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! / ¡Ya México no existirá más! will have its Oaxacan premiere within the framework of this series, and Morris Manuel Trujillo, the main arrow of “Cine Más Allá,” who will give a workshop with John Quackenbush on 16mm on June 29.
-Byron Davies
