April 17th, Thursday, 7:30PM

Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre
290 Harvard St.
Brookline, MA 02446

Balagan presents: Dreams and Apparations of Mark Lapore (2007) by Saul Levine (Director in person)

w/ Polina Marshakova, Adam Savje, Kim Keown, Saul Levine, Joe Briganti, Alison Holt, Schiller Diny, Luther Price and Ericka Beckman.

Each of these persons recount dreams or visions of Mark Lapore. It was made in response to his suicide on 9/11/2005. Shot with a Black & White Panasonic studio tube camera

On September 11th, 2005 a former student, old friend, and a colleague, Mark Lapore took his own life. I responded to this and my grief by video taping people close to him, recounting their dreams and visions of him. I recorded them using an old b/w Panasonic Studio tube camera using a miniDV deck as a video and sound recorder. The camera softens the edges and often makes trails and ghosts when people move. This gave me the opportunity to make a series of portraits of how people appear when they’re looking inward to call up an emotionally charged dream. When I show DREAMS AND APPARITIONS OF MARK LAPORE (2006 - 2007) either publicly or privately I have been surprised at the intensity of the emotional response. People who never met Mark are drawn into the work and want to talk about their own dreams and personal loss. I feel good about having made a piece that gave others a voice that will be evidence in the future of how some people spoke and felt today..

Biography
“Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naïve notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse.” — P. Adams Sitney.

Saul Levine is a onetime welfare rights activist and one of the key teachers of avant-garde filmmaking in the country (Professor at Mass College of Art). Working at the margins of an already marginal culture, Levine makes movies that are unpredictable, visceral, immediate, and mind-expanding.