-- it's less than 3 minutes long. 

I wanted to understand why Levine had made this remarkable movie -- and whether telling his story on film had impacted the way he saw himself and the world.

I asked him how his family had ended up in Poughkeepsie, a city about an hour-and-a-half north of Manhattan that had seen better times.

"My grandparents emigrated there from Pinsk, a town in modern-day Belarus," he told me. "My grandfather was a tinker who sold pots and pans up and down the Hudson, my grandmother was a seamstress, and they were very poor. But my father was bright and earned a college scholarship, and he became a lawyer. That's how we ended up living at 5 Yates Blvd, corner of St. Ann's, Poughkeepsie, New York."

As a teenager,

Richard read Rilke and the Beats and dreamed of becoming a painter or a poet. In high school he started to make short, experimental films with his father's Bell & Howell movie camera. In the early 1970s, as a student at NYU, he made abstract, impressionistic movies in the style of avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs, who became his mentors. "I was a rebel," he told me. "I had no interest in telling conventional, linear narratives." Levine was so good at what he did that he had a one-man show of his films at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978, when he was only 27 years old. 

In the 1970s there was virtually no commercial market for avant-garde films, so Levine cobbled together a living first by doing carpentry, and later, by teaching film at NYU and other universities. "Like other avant-garde artists, I survived from grant to grant," he told me. In the 1980s, after MTV had taken root, he began to apply his skills and sensibilities to making music videos, notably of singers Suzanne Vega, Lionel Ritchie and Amy Mann, and the group Chicago. His hand-held video for "How Soon Is Now," a song by the Smiths, is considered one of the most innovative music videos ever.

Toward the end of the 1980s, with a wife and two young children to feed, Levine moved to California and made TV commercials, including Nike's famous Revolution ad.The money he made in advertising enabled him to buy a home in Santa Monica and raise his children. But he didn't feel comfortable working for a commercials production company. "I was loyal like a puppy dog but couldn't play the game," he explained. So, in the mid-1990s, he began teaching himself how to edit digitally on Mac computers. He and his wife, writer Jacqueline Austin, started their own business, Cyberia Media, and he went from making high-end TV spots to producing and directing non-broadcast media. 

"As I adjusted to each new technology, I had to reframe my existential perspective," he told me. "Turning 50 was horrible. At meetings I'd be the oldest person in the room by 25 years. That I'd made highly acclaimed music videos didn't matter. To the rest of the people in the room, I was ancient history."

As Levine and I talked, I realized that the progression of his life and career mirrored that of so many other members of our generation: In our teens and early 20s, we were anti-establishment rebels. As we grew older and needed to support our families, we tempered our rebelliousness and idealism. Often we took "establishment" jobs and used our unorthodox skills and sensibilities to sell products to our generational peers and their children. Because technology was changing faster than we could learn it, we had to stay on our toes and keep reinventing ourselves for the job market.

And then something big and unexpected happened in our lives. By the time we reached 50, we each had experienced a similar moment of crisis: a job loss, illness or the death of someone we loved, which smacked us in the face, then led us to look back at our lives and reevaluate who we'd bbe, going forward?

Here is what happened to Richard Levine. In 2004, when he was 53, his parents died within a few weeks of each other. "I felt devastated but somehow liberated," he told me. "And I began writing poetry again."  There was a poet he liked, John Giorno, who often repeated phrases, infusing them with the quality of a chant.  Levine adopted this technique.  In his mind he found himself revisiting the past -- the home on Yates Blvd, snowball fights in the backyard, fishing with his brother on Bull's Head Pond. He wrote the poem "Home," then stitched together the video from snippets of film his father had taken when Richard was five, six and seven years old, plus original footage. It's as if we are seeing Richard's home and childhood through his own eyes.

This is not a memory, it's real. I am really walking through my childhood home. The beige carpet. Textured white walls. The shiny mahogany tables. The big cushioned couch that no one, not a single person, ever sits in. 

In a previous post, I discussed "life review" -- the spontaneously occurring mental process that enables old people to make sense of their lives as they approach death. I noted how I had undergone a similar process in my mid-50s, after I had lost my job. After his parents' death, Levine seems to have gone through a process which paralleled mine -- and in his case, it resulted in the film "Home."  

Notice how the mood in the film shifts. You sense Levine going deeper into his subconscious and beginning to face perhaps the most difficult piece of unfinished emotional business of his life. 

I walk up the stairs, I walk up the beige carpeted stairs. Her door is to my right. I can't go in. It's not locked, I want to go in, I struggle to go in, I can't go in. 

I go in. 

The darkness, the cold darkness of her room, pushes me back. The sadness, the depth of her sadness, pushes me back. The groans, the sound of her soft groans push me back. Her fatigue, her loneliness, her pain, push me back. My dread of saying no, my dread of saying "No, I can't rub your head, no, I can't stop the pain," pushes me back. 

I want to understand. I want to understand, but never do. I struggle to speak. "I know you're in pain, I know you need help," I want to say, "I don't know what to do," but I can't. I can't say a word.

Why was his mother in bed? "She had constant migraines," Levine told me. "She spent a lot of her life in bed. To get some relief she took a lot of drugs -- Darvon, Placidyl.  She'd stay in her room for a week, hallucinating in the darkness. 

"But I think she suffered in other ways, too," he said. "My mother's life was not what she had hoped it would be. She wanted to be royalty, but my father, for all his hard work, could never give her that. So she stayed in bed. And my father, who worshiped her, never complained."