NOW PLAYING: Warren Sonbert's HALL OF MIRRORS, In Celebration of Short Film Week
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December 21st is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and has therefore been declared Short Film Day in Germany. December 28th is also recognized as Short Film Day in the United States, in honor of the Lumière brothers’ first public screening of moving pictures (all of which were short films) at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28th, 1895. GME has thus declared December 21st—28th “Short Film Week.”
Now through December 28th, celebrate Short Film Week with Warren Sonbert’s shortest film — 1966’s HALL OF MIRRORS — now available to view for free in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room.
GERARD MALANGA IN HALL OF MIRRORS (1966). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
HALL OF MIRRORS is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert’s film classes at NYU. It was taught by Carl Lerner, the editor of (among other films) ON THE BOWERY (1956), 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), COME BACK AFRICA (1959), and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT (1962). Sonbert was provided with outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence. As a result, HALL OF MIRRORS is Sonbert’s only film to use found footage. One can conjecture that Sonbert’s early contact with Carl Lerner in the editing sphere may have influenced his later evolution into the silent montage films he made beginning with TUXEDO THEATRE (1968) and CARRIAGE TRADE (1973).
During the mid-1960s, Sonbert was one of the denizens of Andy Warhol’s social circle (as made evident by a sequence he filmed inside of Warhol’s “Factory,” which appears in WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, 1966). Adding to the found footage that opens HALL OF MIRRORS, Sonbert included scenes he shot of Warhol’s “Superstars” Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga in more private and reflective moments.
In brilliant and deft fashion, Sonbert created a circular structure to his movie, beginning with actress Florence Eldridge trapped in a fun house hall of mirrors from the film AN ACT OF MURDER (1948), and ending with Gerard Malanga caught in the reflective web of artist Lucas Samaras’ 1966 sculpture Mirrored Room. Samaras wrote that with this work he was engaging with the entire history of mirrors, from their appearance in fairy tales to fun houses. He felt the end result created ‘a space, an environment, a fantasy, a world of artificiality, a complicated panorama.’ He continued: ‘Being imbedded in this huge crystalline structure that has no top, bottom, or sides, this feeling of suspension, this feeling of polite claustrophobia or acrophobia, this feeling of fakery or loneliness seems complex, associatively enveloping and valid to me as a work of art, wonder, sensuality, pessimistic theory, and partial invisibility.’ Sonbert’s HALL OF MIRRORS is an especially poignant film in this era of Covid-19, as it expresses in emblematic fashion the sadness, anxiety and disorientation caused by solitude as a result of social distancing. —Jon Gartenberg
HALL OF MIRRORS is part of the DSL collection THE WARREN SONBERT COLLECTION. This digital version of HALL OF MIRRORS is a 2K transfer from 16mm materials, with a newly-recorded music track.
The Estate of Warren Sonbert has previously named GME as the custodian of his legacy. Since Sonbert’s untimely passing in 1995, GME has worked on an extensive project to preserve, distribute and curate career retrospectives of his films on an international basis, as well as publish original documents from the paper archive of his writings, which are now housed at Harvard University and reprinted in a special 2014 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. A second issue of Framework, consisting of contemporaneous writings about Sonbert’s early films (from 1966’s AMPHETAMINE through to 1973’s CARRIAGE TRADE) was published in 2024. Jon Gartenberg was Guest Editor for both Framework issues.