Black Sun is Back! Saul Levine Screening...

This Friday, March 8th, Black Sun will be returning to Plugd Records, Triskel, Cork!

The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are Richard Dawson and Raising Holy Sparks. For more on that: https://www.facebook.com/blacksuncork

The evening's film is one I've been very keen to programme as part of a Black Sun evening ever since I began with Black Sun more than three years ago: Saul Levine's Notes of an Early Fall (1976).

Here are some programme notes:

Notes of an Early Fall (1976, 34 mins) is a classic of personal filmmaking by Saul Levine, a man hailed as ‘the king of Super-8’. Film diary and film poem in one, it collages images taken from daily life and surroundings into a throbbing yet subtle meditation on claustrophobia and a sense of entrapment. The distinctive rhythms of camera movement and editing cause this raw, tactile work to breathe and react with a vividly individualistic force. Every frame attests to the handmade nature of the work, the material fragility and luminous vitality of Super-8 in the grasp of a poet.

Saul Levine is not only a maker but also a respected advocate of avant-garde film and video. Based in Boston, he is currently a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he has taught for over 30 years and programmed the longstanding MassArt Film Society. He is noted for his dedication to social change and personal self-expression.

“There's something naggingly incomplete about the cinema of Saul Levine. No slight intended. Really, such a quality is intrinsic to the appeal of his films, those fluttering transmissions of stream-of-consciousness nostalgia. This is rough draft cinema, work perpetually in progress… His films scream and stretch at the seams. Splices announce themselves loudly and proudly, rudely even. The mark of the maker is evident… [The films] seem to begin and end in the middle, as though we were leaping into them mid-stream, mid-sentence, mid-thought. If there is a structural integrity, an organizing principle, it is an inherently emotional one... They churn like the endless flood of human memory.” (A. A. Dowd, In Review Online)