The Experimental Narratives of Warren Sonbert + Panel Discussion
MoMA, May 11-19, 2023: The Experimental Narratives of Warren Sonbert
On Saturday, May 13 at 2:30pm, Framework Senior Editor Drake Stutesman will be on a panel with Board Member Jon Gartenberg following Program 5: Narrative Strategies through Polyvalent Montage.
Framework 56.1, Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings, will be available for purchase at the MoMA Bookstore.
“In a career that spanned the American experimental film world from New York City to San Francisco, filmmaker Warren Sonbert (1947–1995) was driven by the belief that ‘independent film...is the only avenue for those who want to take risks and satisfy their own self-imposed demands.’ This retrospective of a seminal figure in experimental film encompasses Sonbert’s complete body of work from its beginning in 1966. Comprising seven programs, the series opens on the theme of queer identity, and goes on to focus on Sonbert’s early flirtation with Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, his travel diaries, the evolving styles, strategies, and poetics of his 16mm film work, and much more. Guest curator and Sonbert's archivist, Jon Gartenberg, remarks, ‘Sonbert’s film Carriage Trade was first shown in 1971 in the MoMA Cineprobe series, and it has been nearly two decades since the last retrospective of his films in New York City. This series can be considered a capstone to Warren Sonbert’s creative career.’”
More Info from Jon Gartenberg and Gartenberg Media Enterprises:
Sonbert began making films in 1966, as a student at New York University’s film school. His earliest films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were inspired first by the university milieu and then by the denizens of the Warhol art world. These early sound films are constructed as an accumulation of vignettes, or micro-narratives, replete with pop songs on the soundtracks. By the time he was 20 years old, he had a career retrospective at the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. A reviewer in the trade publication Variety wrote that “Probably not since Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls had its first showing at the Cinematheque…almost a year and a half ago has an ‘underground’ film event caused as much curiosity and interest in NY’s non-underground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque….”
In the late 1960’s, Sonbert began traveling the world, where he started to perceive the interrelationship between the global scope of human activities, and embarked on a series of silent montage films, beginning with Tuxedo Theatre (1969). Sonbert’s montage works were meticulously constructed in the selection and sequencing of individual shots. Language poet Alan Bernheimer wrote an incisive article in The Grand Piano about the narrative structure of Sonbert’s films, articulating that “Narrative concerns pervade his films on at least three levels, all working with and against each other: nano narrative within the shot, ‘collisional’ montage, and the metanarratives or themes running throughout each film.” Film theorist Noël Carroll gave the term “polyvalent montage” to Sonbert’s working style, in which each shot “can be combined with surrounding shots along potentially many dimensions.”
In the mid 1980’s, Sonbert wrote a full length screenplay for Strauss’s opera Capriccio, a love triangle in which a composer and poet vie for the affections of the heroine. In similar fashion, with Friendly Witness (1989), Sonbert reintroduced music tracks into his films, offering a further reflection on the tension between music and images in his own works. In 1995, Sonbert, as his health was failing, was working on his final film, Whiplash, that was posthumously completed in its final form by filmmaker Jeff Scher (Sonbert’s former student at Bard College). Whiplash had its World Premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 30, 1997.
Sonbert’s final film is a compelling, multilayered portrayal of the filmmaker’s struggle to maintain equilibrium in his physical self, his perceptual reality, and the world of friends and family around him. In it, Sonbert articulated the ideas and values for which he intended to be remembered. Most important among these is the theme of love between couples, a subject he had explored in his earliest films, including Amphetamine (1966) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1967).
Since Sonbert’s passing in 1995, Jon Gartenberg has embarked on a multi-decade project in conjunction with an array of cultural entities to further Sonbert’s legacy. These include a major initiative to preserve his entire body of work on celluloid at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences; to archive his papers and 16mm work reels at Harvard University; to place 16mm prints of his films in distribution (at Light Cone in Paris, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, and the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative); to curate retrospectives of his work at major museums worldwide (including the Tate Modern and the Beaubourg); to publish writings about Sonbert’s films in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media; to prepare high resolution digital scans of his films for exhibition, sales, and distribution purposes. As Gartenberg has recently noted, “Through all these endeavors, Sonbert’s creative career is generating significant interest among numerous young curators, filmmakers, scholars, and audiences worldwide. This will inevitably lead to a new generation of Sonbert enthusiasts to continue to further this seminal filmmaker’s legacy.”
