Warren Sonbert: Montage and Polyvalence
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, March 10, 7pm: Warren Sonbert: Montage and Polyvalence Screening and Conversation
Two Warren Sonbert Films: Honor and Obey (1988) and The Cup and the Lip (1986) + A conversation with Drake Stutesman and Jon Gartenberg
Playing at the FMC Screening Room (475 Park Ave. South, 6th Floor) on Friday, March 10th at 7pm!
This event honors M.M. Serra and her years of dedicated work for the Film-Makers' Cooperative and is the final program Serra initiated as executive director of the organization.
Warren Sonbert (1947–1995) was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental film. He started making films in 1966 while a student at New York University, and when he was 20 years old, he had a career retrospective at the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. These were proto-narrative films in which he both directed and followed his youthful protagonists and Warhol superstars Gerard Malanga and Rene Ricard around New York City.
Beginning in 1968, with The Tuxedo Theatre, Sonbert began traveling the world and created tightly edited, silent montage films. He became known as the leading proponent of polyvalent montage, in which, according to Sonbert, his films were “not strictly involved with plot or morality but rather the language of film as [it] regards time, composition, cutting, light, distance, [the] extension of backgrounds to foregrounds, what you see and what you don’t, a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce various displace effects.”
This screening will include two of Sonbert’s most accomplished silent montage films: Honor and Obey (1988) and The Cup And The Lip (1986). Honor and Obey questions all forms of male-dominated authority, particularly familial, religious, political, and military. As for The Cup And The Lip, according to critic Fred Camper: “what is unique about it is… the never consummated state of suspension that Sonbert achieves. In this film’s universe, the cup must never reach the lip, for if it does, the party is over; the cup’s contents, once ingested, are digested, and thus destroyed, never to be seen again.”
