Made in Binghamton in 1976 - a warped record constructed out of visits to the zoo, relatives and various locations. Appearances by obsessive birds, caged bears and hungry rams. "Certain shots are very evocative, such as a long shot of a group of people sitting on a park bench, one person playing a song on a recorder. The sound of the music, its fragility, is matched by the distance of the shot, lending a feeling of precariousness to the moment. There is a repeated shot of a warped record playing, with the same musical phrase endlessly repeated. The shot is an interior one, with the lighting casting a golden glow on the scene. The warped repetitions begin to reverberate with suggestions of frustrations." – Daryl Chin, The Soho Weekly News "His first talkie, NOTES OF AN EARLY FALL is a characteristically raw work that parlays even the sound of microphone rumble into a formal element.

"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." - Saul Levine

Stan Brakhage with a movie camera. Winter seascapes.

Every fall a store called NOMAD in Cambridge, on Mass Av,e puts up a window display of Mexican Day of the Dead pieces. My birthday is November, 3, so I am hyper aware of the death/resurrection fall celebration --. this is my sidewalk pedestrian note.

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

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.

I am just a rambling guy - here today, gone tomorrow. Sitting in the back of Dan's french car. French woman going to NYC for the first time. Reflections of the car - now static. Chicago as seen from Gunnar Juhansson's and Ruby Rich's apartment. N.B. Project at 18fps

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.

Notes on chance, readymades, and time. Shot at Massart graduation 1997 and Boston 4th of July97. Some of the people appearing are Barbara Bosworth, Stephen Tourlentes, Roy Decarava. Edited shortly thereafter, printed DECEMBER2018 released 2019.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Saul Levine began Lost Note as a love poem to his wife but before he finished the film everything had changed. This film is all that was left – 68/69 was a period of violent transition for many. The film was formally challenging, editing footage with in-camera superimpositions and cutting b&w with color.

DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took several years to finish it.

Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, “Note to Pati” presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm as a suburban neighborhood digs out from under the accumulation and children make the most of an unexpected day off from school by playing in their winter wonderland. Saul Levine’s images are diffused, faded, and ephemeral, made all the more dissociating by Levine’s disorienting rapid cut editing, restless and twitching camerawork, and destabilized, quick pan sequences – an evocation of a transitory and wide-eyed innocence. —filmref.com

Shot on a farm in Friendsville Penn. where Saul lived in a trailer with Dan Barnett; shot from the same spot over the course of several Fall weeks, a single frame study of the movements of people and livestock (horses, cows, sheep, etc); clouds sun and moon constructs of stasis and change.

On 9/11/2005, Mark Lapore took his own life. I first met Mark at SUNY Binghamton in the fall of 1973, when I took my film production class. Over the years we became friends and colleagues, film/video makers and teachers. In the aftermath of his death, I decided to record unedited monologues by people who knew him from Mass Art--recounting their dreams or apparitions of Mark. I used an old black and white Panasonic studio camera similar to one he had been playing around with; I wanted a different quality to the image from HD and the Panasonic ghosted the image. I had thought it would be a web based work and nonlinear, but Erica Beckman's section, which we edited according to her instruction, changed my plan--it was a definite ending and a surprise to me. I found the piece worked as a projected linear experience. I urge you to watch it once that way.

A portrait of Amanda Katz (Posner) spinning, weaving and talking. A film about story telling rather than one that tells a story. The VHS copy of this tape was one of the most rented tapes in the local film section of the Brookline Videosmith.

1974 (R8, 7m)