Warren Sonbert Retrospective Presented By The Center For Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv, Israel) – Begins February 14, 2017 Curated by Chen Sheinberg and Jon Gartenberg

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to announce a retrospective of Warren Sonbert’s films, for the first time extensively paired together with those of Hollywood filmmakers of the postwar years, including Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Gordon. 

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex Camera.

Six programs will be screened at the Cinematheques in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. This series has been co-curated by Chen Sheinberg and Jon Gartenberg, and is presented by the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund. Before the first screenings (on February 14 and 15), Jon Gartenberg will give an introduction to Warren Sonbert’s work. Chen Sheinberg will introduce the screenings that follow in the coming months.

Click here for the Program Brochure

[Note to reader: The Hebrew version begins from the top down, and the English version from the bottom up].

https://cca.org.il

Sheinberg explains the genesis of this series:

VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

“Two years ago, OFF 4 series explored various facets of the interrelations and mutual influences between Hollywood and the cinematic experimental avant-garde from the 1920s to our own time in terms of cinematic expression, visual aesthetics and themes. Following the success of that series, and as I kept researching this theme, Vivian Ostrovsky called my attention to one of the seminal figures in American experimental filmmaking – Warren Sonbert. Having discussed it, we decided to focus this time on this specific filmmaker and examine his relationship to classic postwar Hollywood cinema. Ostrovsky referred me to Jon Gartenberg, a world expert on Sonbert’s cinema, who served for 18 years as a curator in the film archive of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and as the experimental film programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival, and has been working for years on archiving and preserving the cineaste’s work and curating retrospectives of his films in many major museums and cinematheques all over the world.

For OFF 5, we came up with a program that connects Sonbert’s films with Hollywood cinema, and especially with innovative Hollywood auteurs who experimented with the medium and explored it, such as Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray – all of them directors that also inspired European modernist cinema. Based on the films’ formal, stylistic and thematic elements, the connection we draw between them is also associative at times. It is important to mention right from the outset that Sonbert was influenced by these directors as well as wrote articles on some of them. In addition, we have included in the series other American experimental filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and Jeff Scher, as well as Soviet documentarist Dziga Vertov, in order to point to the influence these filmmakers and their avant-garde films had on Sonbert’s films.”

For further information about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

All Sonbert Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert's CARRIAGE TRADE at the Cineteca Bologna

Warren Sonbert’s CARRIAGE TRADE was screened at the Cineteca Bologna along with Peter Hutton's IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC.

http://www.cinetecadibologna.it/…/ap…/from_2017-01-19/h_2215

Warren Sonbert Film "Short Fuse" The Museum of Arts and Design, NYC – August 18

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce that the Warren Sonbert film Short Fuse will be shown at The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City on August 18th, 7pm. The film is part of the museum's Eye on a Director series, which is currently presenting the films of Canyon Cinema. Short Fuse will be presented in the program Continuing Cadences: Fulton, Angerame, Sonbert.

Short Fuse (1992)

From The Museum of Arts and Design Website

"Robert Fulton (1939–2002) was a pilot, a gifted aerial cinematographer, a devout Buddhist, a close friend and collaborator of filmmaker Robert Gardner, and an inspired independent filmmaker. His exhilarating, densely edited, poetically sensitive films were admired by Canyon stalwarts Bruce Baillie and Stan Brakhage, and he was an inspiration for students including filmmaker and former Canyon Cinema Executive Director Dominic Angerame. An artist who traveled the world accompanied by his Bolex camera, he eschewed narrative as he gathered images with a spirit of wonder and generosity, translating the people and places he encountered into scenes of breathtaking beauty and elation, and editing with a dazzling rhythm whose cadences evoke a deep passion for and knowledge of music. Fulton left behind a substantial body of work that resonates with Warren Sonbert's exuberant and visually resplendent montage."

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex Camera.

---

For further information about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

---

All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert Films to Play at Glasgow International – Divided Loyalties Accompanied by Live Score, April 23

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce Warren Sonbert screenings to take place at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art. HALL OF MIRRORS (1966) will be shown together with his silent film DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978) that will be accompanied by a live score, performed by Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster. The event will take place April 23.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From the Glasgow International Website:

"In a special 16mm screening Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster will be performing a live mix in quadrophonic sound to score Warren Sonbert’s silent film Divided Loyalties. This performance of an original sound composition to accompany Sonbert’s silent film is made possible with the special permission of The Estate of Warren Sonbert. The performance will be accompanied by a screening of the Sonbert short Hall of Mirrors with its original sound.

Sonbert built upon his early experiments in camera movement, lighting, and framing to create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but also the larger sphere of human activity. In these films he commented upon such contemporary issues as art and industry, news reportage and its effect on our lives, and the interrelationship between the creative arts. His late works culminated in symphonic montages (both silent and sound) that unite universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry."

DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978)

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Dziga Vertov Films at Anthology Film Archives and The Jewish Museum

Dziga Vertov films are playing at Anthology Film Archives (January 29-February 7th) and at The Jewish Museum as part of the exhibition "The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film" (ends February 7th). GME carries several DVD publications of Vertov films for the North American university market (ENTUZIAZM; A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD; THE ELEVENTH YEAR; THREE SONGS OF LENIN; STRIDE, SOVIET!). 

Film Classic Loves of Pharaoh To Screen at Historic Niles Theater February 21st – Showing Of Restored Silent Costume Epic To Benefit Egyptology Outreach

GME is the proud DVD/Blu-ray distributor in North America of the Ernst Lubitsch film THE LOVES OF PHARAOH which is screening at the Historic Niles Theater, Fremont, CA, sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California (ARCE/NC). Click below for more details from the ARCE/NC:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1708117779419962

Warren Sonbert Retrospective at The Wexner Center for the Arts: January 20th & 27th, 2016

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio on January 20th & 27th.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From The Wexner Center Website:

"One of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema, Warren Sonbert began making films in 1966 as a precocious NYU student who found himself in the midst of Andy Warhol’s Factory. After graduating, he took his Bolex camera on his travels as he perfected a complex style of filming and editing that lyrically transforms mundane-yet-beautiful details into larger emotions, concepts, and visual splendors. Sonbert’s influences ranged from rock-and-roll to opera, from Douglas Sirk to Stan Brakhage. This vital retrospective featuring all newly restored prints cements his reputation as one of the most innovative and notable experimental filmmakers of the last half of the 20th century.

As a testament to his ongoing vitality, the spring 2015 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media is devoted to Sonbert’s writing. Pick up your copy at the Wexner Center Store."

---

WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)

Columbusalive.com wrote on Warren Sonbert in preparation for the event and interviewed Jon Gartenberg on Sonbert's career:

"Following the filmmaker’s death in 1995 of AIDS, Sonbert’s partner, Ascension Serrano, tasked Jon Gartenberg, through the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, with the preservation of Sonbert’s work. Gartenberg first became associated with Sonbert’s films while Gartenberg was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, during which time he acquired several of Sonbert’s films.

'[Sonbert's] idea was to engage the viewer in an accumulation of different shots that were not specifically narrative, but that were linear and poetic,' Gartenberg said. 'But more than any experimental filmmaker, his work was less about image abstraction and more about an experimental approach to narrative structure, through how he built a montage of images and scenes.'"

---

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films, Curated by Jon Gartenberg at NYU Tisch

Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor
Wednesday, October 28, 6:15 P.M.

Still from Empire II (Amos Poe, 2007)

DESCRIPTION:
 
Archivist and curator Jon Gartenberg (MA, Cinema Studies) provides an overview of the genre of City Symphony Films produced in New York City, extending from the period of early cinema at the dawn of the 20th century through to the digital works of the first decade of 21st Century, as seen through the lens of independent and experimental filmmakers.

This presentation is based on his article "NY NY: A Century of City Symphony Films” that was recently published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.

PROGRAM:

Interiors, N.Y. Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905, G. W. Bitzer). 5 min.
Empire of Steel: A Story of a Supreme Achievement in Steel Construction (1931, Otis Elevator Co.). 6 min.
The City (1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke). [Sequence: City Life]. 13 min.
New York: A Documentary Film (2001, Ric Burns). [Sequence: Introduction to Episode 7]. 3 min.
The D Train (2011, Jay Rosenblatt). 5 min.
N.Y., N.Y. (1957, Francis Thompson). 15 min.
Block Print (1976, George Griffin). 16 min.
Empire II (2007, Amos Poe),. [Sequence: Main Title Opening]. 5 min.
Native New Yorker (2005, Steve Bilich). 13 min.
NYC Weights and Measures (2006, Jem Cohen). 6 min.

TRT: 87 min.

This event is free and open to the public. Click here for the NYU Tisch Cinema Studies announcement for this event.

Jon Gartenberg With Nicola Mazzanti on First Night of Warren Sonbert at The L'Age d'Or Film Festival

Jon Gartenberg presenting with Nicola Mazzanti (director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive) on the first night of the Warren Sonbert retrospective as part of the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels. Below is also an image of Warren Sonbert's film WHIPLASH on the monitor of the festival theater's lobby.

View fullsize

Jon Gartenberg & Nicola Mazzanti

View fullsize

Shot of WHIPLASH on TV monitor.

Warren Sonbert Retrospective at the L'Age d'Or festival in Brussels October 4th to 9th, 2015

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium from October 4th to 9th. Each program in this series will be introduced by Jon Gartenberg, a noted authority on Sonbert's oeuvre.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From the Festival Catalogue:

"Warren Sonbert was one of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema. He began making films in 1966 while studying at the University of New York. Sonbert himself has taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College. He also wrote critical reviews on opera and film for San Francisco weeklies. His first films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were first inspired by academia, later by the figures of the Warhol scene.

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1967)

In the late 1960s, when Sonbert began to take his Bolex camera with him on travels, his cinematic strategy changes and he begins to weave his travel images together with sequences of previous films. It’s a period during which his work shows the filmmaker’s capacity to turn his first experiences into more accomplished works, using his characteristic ‘polyvalent cutting’, a technique where each sequence ‘can be combined with ambient sequences with, potentially, many dimensions.’ Sonbert drew on his early experiences on camera movement, light and design to create brilliantly cut masterpieces that not only zoom in on his New York environment but also, more generally, on the sphere of human activity. These are films in which he comments on art and industry, news reporting and its effects on our lives, or the interaction between artistic disciplines. His last works culminate in symphonic (silent or sound) arrangements that unite the universal gestures of Men into unique combinations. Over the course of his career, Sonbert made 18 films. Before his death in 1995, he worked on WHIPLASH. This last film was completed by filmmaker Jeff Scher, following Sonberts precise instructions."

WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)

HONOR AND OBEY (1988)

Copies of "Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings" (published by Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and guest edited by Jon Gartenberg) will be available for sale at the festival. For more information on the special issue of Framwork click here.

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective