NOTES > NEW LEFT NOTE

NEW LEFT NOTE

1968-82 | Regular 8 | Silent

"Levine's rapid fire cut­ting has nev­er found a more ap­pro­pri­ate sub­ject than in NEW LEFT NOTE, his film on the an­ti-war, an­ti-racist, and wom­en's lib­er­a­tion move­ments of the ear­ly 1970s in Amer­i­ca. NEW LEFT NOTE rep­re­sents a syn­the­sis of ideas that Levine sought to in­ject in­to a much-di­vid­ed move­ment. The 'Free Bob­by Seale' demon­stra­tions in New Haven (Levine's home town) in 1970 is put in­to con­text through the edit­ing .... At the time of shoot­ing, Levine was the ed­i­tor of New Left Notes, the na­tion­al news­pa­per of SDS (Stu­dents for a Demo­crat­ic So­ci­ety). He was uni­lat­er­al­ly com­mit­ted to the move­ments he filmed but be­lea­guered by the lead­er­ship of the or­ga­ni­za­tion for his non-sec­tar­i­an views. ... [NEW LEFT NOTE] is a study of rad­i­cal pol­i­tics in rad­i­cal film form." -- Mar­jorie Keller

"The life he records is a jum­ble of demon­stra­tions, fused with the kalei­do­scop­ic fury of mem­o­ry; its brief repris­es in­clude a cat­nap in the back of a car and a glimpse of a zoo. His in­ces­sant, chaot­ic out­pour­ing of po­lit­i­cal en­er­gy seems less geared to a naive no­tion of bet­ter­ing the world than to a per­pet­u­al pres­sure to keep it from get­ting worse." -- P. Adams Sit­ney, The Vil­lage Voice

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