Warren Sonbert (1947-1995), was one of the key figures of American independent filmmaking. Works spanning Sonbert's entire career are now available for rental through Canyon Cinema, beginning with AMPHETAMINE (1966), made when he was still a teenager at New York University film school, through WHIPLASH (1995/1997), completed posthumously according to the filmmaker's specific instructions. Sonbert was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in April-May 1999, guest curated by Jon Gartenberg. These new prints were struck directly from the preservation internegatives made by the Academy Film Archive from the camera original and original prints in the Estate of Warren Sonbert.
A film by Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel. With Gene Dawson and Tommy Mitchell. Asst. Edythe Lazarow and Peter Heller.
"Sonbert began making films in 1966, as a student at New York University's film school in New York. In his first films, he uniquely captured the spirit of his generation, and was inspired both by his university milieu and by the denizens of the Warhol art scene. In both provocative and playful fashion, AMPHETAMINE depicts young men shooting amphetamines and making love in the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
"In this film, Sonbert also reveals his deep admiration for classic Hollywood cinema, which he regularly inscribed in his filmmaking practice. The circular tracking shot of the two young men kissing is a vivid visual reminder of the famed scene of James Stewart and Kim Novak embracing in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)." - Jon Gartenberg
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $75
"This film is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert's film classes at NYU, in which he was given outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence. Adding to this found footage, Sonbert filmed Warhol's superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga in more private and reflective moments.
"Throughout HALL OF MIRRORS, Sonbert underscores the materiality of film and the self-referential aspect of the filmmaking enterprise. HALL OF MIRRORS begins and ends with the protagonists' movements enmeshed within multiple relfecting mirrors. He incorporates black and white 'found' footage with newly filmed scenes photographed in color, works the exposed leader of the film rolls into the film's fabric, and captures his own reflected image while filming one of his protagonists. The rock and roll soundtrack underscores the sense of visual entrapment of the characters." - Jon Gartenberg
1966, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 7m, $75
Warhol Factory days ... serendipity visits, Janis and Castelli and Bellvue glances ... Malanga at work ... glances at Le Mepris and North by Northwest ... girl rock groups and a disco opening ... a romp through the Modern. My second film.
Note: This film can also be shown without the audio cassette soundtrack.
1966, 16mm, color/sound on cassette tape, 15m (16fps), $75
"One of the most profound themes coursing throughout Sonbert's work is that of love between couples in all its pitfalls and perfect moments. To express this theme between his protagonists onscreen as well as in the relationship between his ever-roving hand-held camera and the human subjects in his field of vision, Sonbert employed diverse cinematic strategies, including in-camera editing (in THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL), twin-screen effects (in TED AND JESSICA), and montage of discrete shots filmed in distinct spaces (in HONOR AND OBEY).
"'Whatever manipulative games the filmmaker plays in THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL are not just film games (except of the most obvious kind) so much as human games, similar to those probably everyone engaged in worldly activity plays to some extent or another; and it is the deeper honesty of Sonbert's presentation not only to include these but to make them plain.' (James Stoller, The Village Voice, January 25, 1968)" - Jon Gartenberg
1967, 16mm, color/so, 34m, $105
"Following Sonbert's death in 1995, we recovered a 16mm reversal print of THE TENTH LEGION among the materials in the filmmaker's estate, which Sonbert had struck before disassembling it and recutting sections into CARRIAGE TRADE.
"Unseen for decades, this film represents a major rediscovery in Sonbert's oeuvre. The film stylistically exemplifies the artist's masterful use of a constantly moving hand-held camera as it trails the college-age protagonists in choreographed fashion, and of chiaroscuro lighting effects in interior scenes. 'People engaged in their living, in their purpose, in their contribution, however trivial or important, to the work of the world.' (Gregg Barrios, Hollywood Harbinger, April 1982)
"One contemporaneous viewer observed that 'this stunning film could make it very big .... If Warhol's Chelsea Girls can do it, why not Sonbert's TENTH LEGION?' (The Independent Film Journal, v.59, no.7, March 4, 1967)" - Jon Gartenberg
1967, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $105
"[T]wo of Sonbert's beautiful people ride the subway to Coney Island, invading the remembered landscape of the filmmaker's childhood, and for the first time Coney Island looks like a Warren Sonbert film: the characteristic quivering, circling camera, neon in late afternoon, the curiously evocative rhythms of the ferris wheel. Finally Sonbert improvises the image that will contain this nostalgia, in the endless circle described by the red rail of a Coney Island ride as the camera follows it in an extended delirium - while a whistled melody connects with the red curve to provide one of the sensory treats of movies." - James Stoller, The Village Voice, July 20, 1967
Note: This film is in the process of being restored. Please inquire for availability.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 13m, Inquire
"In HOLIDAY, ... the concern with individuals, with the excitements of personality, begins to recede. It's as if TED AND JESSICA, which preceded it, were the farewell to all that by virtue of being only about that. HOLIDAY begins with an invocation: the filmmaker gazing at a candle flame through an antique kaleidoscopic prism. It is a diary of experience that highlights the magic of the ordinary, the available. The film evokes a distinctly fin de siecle New York .... "There is an idyllic visit to two filmmakers who live in the country; woods and small animals, skating on a frozen lake (the filmmaker also on skates), nature seen from the window of a cutting room. (A great deal is seen through windows and on screens in HOLIDAY.) Most of the film's last section is given over to a primitive Oriental-style magic cartoon, busy with pursuits and transformations, photographed off a television set tilted impressively in the frame ...." - James Stoller, The Village Voice, July 4, 1968
Note: This film is in the process of being restored. Please inquire for availability.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 13m, Inquire
"Beginning in 1968, Sonbert abandoned his earlier filmmaking style, which had brought him such notoriety in the public press while he was still a teenager. He began using his hand-held Bolex camera to enlarge his field of vision beyond New York, recording footage for his films as he traveled around the world. THE TUXEDO THEATRE, recently rediscovered (sitting unrented in the London Filmmakers' Co-op), offers heretofore largely unseen direct evidence of Sonbert's first steps in developing his unique style of editing, and is a precursor to Sonbert's first epic, CARRIAGE TRADE.
"About this film, Sonbert wrote, 'New York again and some Morocco. First sketches of varieties of people. East west city country, rich poor, old young. Many levels. Less movement but more editing and geometric progressions. It's over before you know it.' (London Filmmakers' Co-op catalogue)" - Jon Gartenberg
1968, 16mm, color/si, 21m, $75
"In CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert interweaves footage taken from his journeys throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, together with shots he removed from the camera originals of a number of his earlier films. CARRIAGE TRADE was an evolving work-in-progress, and this 61-minute version is the definitive form in which Sonbert realized it, preserved intact from the camera original.
"With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the 'knee-jerk' reaction produced by Eisenstein montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described CARRIAGE TRADE as 'a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.' This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator's assimilation of 'the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images." - Jon Gartenberg, program note for CARRIAGE TRADE, Whitney Museum of American Art, New American Filmmakers Series, October 11-17, 1973
1971, 16mm, color/si, 61m, $150
"Sonbert was also a noted opera critic, and he frequently theorized about the relationship of film to other art forms, in particular, music. He analogized the notes, chords, and tone clusters of music to the progression of shots in film. The shot was the building block upon which Sonbert created the musical rhythms of his films.
"Sonbert published excerpts from his feature-film screenplay adaptation of Strauss' Capriccio, his favorite opera, in 1986. SHORT FUSE, completed six years later, can be seen as a return to Capriccio's themes, including 'Nazism and eroticism, beauty and force, detail and structure.' (William Graves) Underscoring a question raised by Capriccio - whether in opera the music or the libretto takes priority - SHORT FUSE is replete with a soundtrack that counterpoints the film's visuals, prompting the viewer to ask whether the music or the imagery predominates." - Jon Gartenberg
1972, 16mm, color/so, 37m, $120
"After successfully integrating the language of film - composition, lighting and editing - into a unique formal vision in CARRIAGE TRADE, in subsequent films Sonbert embedded these stylistic devices within a commentary on larger social issues. RUDE AWAKENING is 'about Western civilization and its work; activity ethic and the viability of performing functions and activities.' (Warren Sonbert lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979, published in Film Culture, no. 70-71, 1983)
"Sonbert's vivid color palette enhances the ritualistic nature of each action observed. Set against this lush panorama, Sonbert subverts the expectation of classic cinematography with a liberal sprinkling of avant-garde techniques. The incorporation of the materiality of film, the treatment of light, and the use of a hand-held camera, all suggest the influence of Stan Brakhage (Sonbert's 'hero'). Sonbert's use of the shot as the foundation of his silent montage works parallels the use of the frame as the basic filmmaking unit in the films of Gregory Markopoulos (Sonbert's 'mentor')." - Jon Gartenberg
1976, 16mm, color/si, 36m, $110
"Sonbert was also a noted film critic, and his writings about feature films are among his more extraordinarily profound and insightful creations. In them, he expressed admiration for a pantheon of American directors working within the studio system, including Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk. An indication of his enthusiasm for Hitchcock was his reputation for conducting tours for visiting friends, associates, and filmmakers of the locations around San Francisco used by Hitchcock while filming Vertigo (1958), and for signing his reviews under the pen-name Scotty Ferguson, the so-named protagonist of this renowned film. In 1986, Sonbert gave a lecture at the Pacific Film Archive, in which he spoke of the 'schizophrenic split' in Marnie between 'images of /en/closure and escape,' representing the interplay between male domination and female independence. Sonbert paralleled these conceits in his own film, A WOMAN'S TOUCH." - Jon Gartenberg
1983, 16mm, color/si, 22m, $105
"Sonbert's most recent film refines the premises of his work over the past 15-odd years. His bravura-acrobatic camera and editing style of the '70s pale next to the seemingly effortless spectacle he produces today. ... The film is so dense it's impossible to apprehend it at a single viewing .... It is Sonbert's darkest work." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
"THE CUP AND THE LIP is a complex and challenging picture that will stimulate adventurous filmmakers for years to come. ... Although its imagery is too dense, varied and fast-moving to be thoroughly parsed after one viewing, the film appears to be a regretful and perhaps sardonic essay on human frailty - and on the effort to stave off chaos by means of political and religious institutions, which carry their own dangers of social control and mental manipulation." - David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
Awards and Exhibition: Special Jury Award, Experiments in Form category, SF Int'l Film Festival, 1987; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987; Berlin Film Festival, 1987; Salsomaggiore Film Festival, 1987.
1986, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $105
"... what was clear was Sonbert's absolute mastery of form." - Elliot Stein, Film Comment
"In Warren Sonbert's HONOR AND OBEY soldiers march in formation, a tiger stalks through the snow, religious processions wind through the streets, and palm trees wave in a tropical breeze. As brightly colored images of authority figures blend into scenes of cocktail parties, this 21-minute silent film flows along with the grace of a musical score built on complex tensions hidden among the notes. 'Whose authority will you obey?' the film seems to ask, as it deftly avoids simple-minded juxtapositions. Instead, we see a melange of images so full of geography (Notre Dame Cathedral, the Sydney Opera House, Fifth Avenue), that the work mocks the idea of any specific setting. Sooner or later, social and natural laws meet and probably clash, Mr. Sonbert suggests, but in this scenario of discrete images, all is apparent harmony. HONOR AND OBEY is by far the most accomplished and rewarding piece in 'Avant-Garde Voices,' the title covering five works by independent filmmakers shown at the New York Film Festival ...." - Caryn James, The New York Times
1988, 16mm, color/si, 21m, $105
"In FRIENDLY WITNESS, Sonbert returned, after 20 years, to sound. In the first section of the film, he deftly edits a swirling montage of images - suggestive of loves gained and love lost - to the tunes of four rock songs. 'At times the words of the songs seem to relate directly to the images we see ...; at other times words and images seem to be working almost at cross-purposes or relating only ironically. Similarly, at times the image rhythm and music rhythm appear to dance together, while at others they go their separate ways.' (Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, October 12, 1990)
"Accompanying the closing imagery with a music underscore from Gluck's overture to Iphigenie en Aulide, Sonbert remarked that 'Spectacle, public domain, objective (god's eye) point of view is the aesthetic approach with the constant idea that all this activity is perhaps occurring simultaneously.' Here, as Sonbert weaves together an extraordinary palette of synchronous global activity, he places himself firmly in the pantheon of the great montage theorists in film history." - Jon Gartenberg
1989, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $120