This bold and unconventional film portrait reveals America’s foremost Social Realist painter doing what he does best: skewering corrupt politicians and police, raging over social injustices, and satirizing the petty foibles of humankind. Jack Levine got his professional start during the Federal Projects of the WPA, and quickly became world famous for his brilliantly painted, brutally ironic vision of America and the world. In a series, of totally unprecedented sequences Levine stands before an empty canvas. An in breath-taking display of technical virtuosity, assaults the canvas and over the course of the film completes a painting. As the painting scenes develop you watch a loving father paint a portrait of his only child, his daughter Susanna. Through their playful banter and tender reminiscences on gains an intimate sense of a happy and spirited family life. While working he discusses the influences on his art: the old Masters, Hollywood movies, Brecht, and the German Expressionists. Jack Levine is a complex individual and Sutherland has accomplished a dazzling feat in capturing the many sides of this American Master: we get to know Jack Levine the intellectual—who for years has been one of forty members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—and Levine the street tough… Levine the sports fan gives was to the playful Levine baiting an olf friend about past embarrassments… A bereaved husband in one scene becomes the acerbic social satirist in another. The complexity and intimacy of this portrait where not an easy achievement. This is not a free-form enterprise, nor is it cinema verite. Sutherland does not follow his subjects around hoping they will say something interesting. After drawing upon an impressive battery of consultants in American culture, history and art history, Sutherland spends countless hours with the artist, teaching him to confront the camera directly, as host, while asking him to address a number of issues believed by the subject experts to be pertinent not only to his own life and work, but to the context of his times. These sequences were filmed on super 8mm film, and hours of interviews were taped. The resulting footage and transcriptions were then used to create a tightly conceived and historically sound script. Sutherland then returned to Levine’s favourite haunts with film and storyboards, and filmed the artist in 16 mm while the artist spoke his own best lines. This is Sutherland’s second film in which the artist is both host and subject. The first film, PAUL CADMUS: ENFANT TERRIBLE AT 80, won 20 international awards. JACK LEVINE: FEAST OF PURE REASON has won 23 international awards and citations since April, 1986.