Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
NAOMI LEVINE
January 16 – January 19
January 16-19, 2025
While primarily remembered today as Andy Warhol’s “first female superstar,” Naomi Levine was an artist and painter and, in the early 1960s, a New York underground fixture, star, and matchmaker. Charmed by Levine’s outsized personality, Warhol soon enlisted her to perform in some of his most important early films, including KISS (1963), BATMAN DRACULA (1964), COUCH (1964), and TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED…SORT OF (1963), where she played Jane alongside Taylor Mead and Dennis Hopper. (Sadly, these Warhol titles are currently not being distributed and, as such, are not available for this series.)
In fact, it was Levine who organized a screening of Warhol’s SLEEP at a downtown loft in 1963 especially for her close friend, critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. She subsequently personally introduced Warhol and Mekas to each other. Mekas swiftly incorporated Warhol into the New American Cinema movement and championed his films in the Village Voice, while Levine would appear in many other notable underground films of the era including NORMAL LOVE (Jack Smith, 1963-65) and WALDEN (Jonas Mekas, 1968).
Entrenched in the underground film scene, Levine began making her own avant-garde films as well. YES, completed in the summer of 1963, is an idyllic proto-hippie “back to the earth” pastoral, which features some of Levine’s friends and their children frolicking among nature in a lush rural agrarian setting with the aural backdrop of harmonium, Japanese flute, and sitar. Her second film, JEREMELU, a more frenetic and tightly edited exercise, captured a different group of friends: Gerard Malanga, performance artist and filmmaker Jack Smith, and artists Mimi Gross and Red Grooms.
Levine would continue to make her own work into the early 1970s, completing at least ten other films, all of which are now presumed lost. While her work was celebrated in the mid-1970s at venues including MoMA and Pittsburgh Film-Makers, which identified her as “a seminal figure in the now historic movement of the New American film,” she largely disappeared from the film scene by the 1980s and withdrew all her films from distribution in the 1990s. As a result, her work has largely been overlooked and underrecognized within the history of 1960s American avant-garde cinema – a situation we hope to begin to redress with this program, which features Anthology’s brand-new preservations of Levine’s two surviving films.
Upcoming Screenings
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NAOMI LEVINE PGM
January 16 at 7:00 PM
January 17 at 7:00 PM
January 18 at 7:00 PM
January 19 at 7:00 PM
