AMPHETAMINE (US, 1966, Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel)

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A heart-stopping film… beautiful and pure. —James Stoller, The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, 1967

Sonbert was… something of a prodigy, only 19 [sic] when he made AMPHETAMINE… This 10-minute black-and-white ode to sex and drugs echoes the work of Warhol and Morrissey in luring the viewer into a self-consciously decadent, queer closed space… The sense of transgressive pleasures is intense. —Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal, 2000

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. —Jon Gartenberg

“AMPHETAMINE (1966) was made together with Wendy Appel (1944—2017), Sonbert’s classmate at NYU film school. After AMPHETAMINE, her path diverged from Sonbert’s. In the 1970s, she became involved with the video collective TVTV and then with documentary filmmaking as a producer, director, and editor for television, while Sonbert continued making movies in an experimental narrative vein. He inscribed the materiality of film — including leader, flares, varying camera exposures and other avant-garde tropes — into his visual canvas. For example, in AMPHETAMINE, Sonbert mis-loaded the camera while photographing scenes of Times Square. The result produced abstract, streaked images — a filming error — which he then incorporated into AMPHETAMINE. These shots are thereby transformed to represent the hallucinogenic state of his male protagonists after shooting up drugs, and link Sonbert’s film even more closely to the dreamy visual atmosphere that Hitchcock created to represent the entranced state of James Stewart’s character in VERTIGO while embracing Madeleine, his romantic love.

“While still in his teens, Sonbert wrote an essay, “Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality” for Film Culture magazine. The publication appeared in 1966, the same year as the production of AMPHETAMINE. In his article, Sonbert considered VERTIGO (1958) to be “Hitchcock’s greatest and one of the best films ever made”. He was so entranced by that film that he inscribed homages to VERTIGO in his very first movie.” —Jon Gartenberg

“The film focuses on a party of drugs and sex – young men with a deadpan expression injecting amphetamines. Sonbert shows it in a very detailed and meticulous way that makes the viewer almost feel the pain physically, while the joyful pop music creates a counterpoint that adds a playful aspects to these scenes. In this film, Sonbert pays tribute to VERTIGO (1958), which he had first seen at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York (see WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?), with its spiral and circular motifs. The film begins with a woman’s portrait (framed inside a circle) like the portrait of Carlotta at which Madeleine (Kim Novak) gazes in the museum scene.

AMPHETAMINE (US, 1966)

Director: Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel

  • 10 minutes
  • 16mm
  • B&W
  • Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server

Published By: Gartenberg Media Enterprises

Institutional Price: $500

Rental Price: $250

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Click to view a comparison between scenes of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958) and Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE (1966)

 

“The music and the structure of AMPHETAMINE are also repetitive, and in one scene the camera moves in a circle around two men embracing, similar to the famous kissing scene between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.

 

CLICK TO VIEW A SECOND COMPARISON BETWEEN SCENES OF HITCHCOCK’S VERTIGO (1958) AND SONBERT’S AMPHETAMINE (1966)

 

“It’s an homage, but Sonbert subverts gender conventions, showing a homosexual kiss, three years before the Stonewall riots. If Madeleine represents Scottie’s obsessive fantasy world, the party in Sonbert’s film reflects the fantasies and desires of a decade later, the 1960s era — with its forbidden paradise.” —Chen Sheinberg

This digital restoration of AMPHETAMINE, which theatrically premiered at Metrograph in New York City on June 8th, 2025, follows a period of renewed scholarly interest in Sonbert’s debut film. Namely, Dr. Maurice Nagington’s 2025 publication The Moral Lessons of Chemsex: A Critical Approach (Routledge), Juan Suarez’s 2024 book Experimental Film and Queer Materiality (Oxford University Press), and GME associate Matt McKinzie's 2024 film program The Motown Sound and the Queer Underground (presented by Spectacle Theater and The Film-Makers' Cooperative), invoke AMPHETAMINE as a key filmic text integral to discourse surrounding 1960s avant-garde cinema, queer representation on film, popular music, chemsex, and connection.

While each scholar engages with Sonbert's film through distinct academic frameworks — specifically, public health (Nagington), film materiality (Suarez), and music history (McKinzie) — they reach similar conclusions about the combined effect of the various visual and aural elements that make up Sonbert’s film. Specifically, they illuminate how Sonbert’s synthesis of gay intimacy, drug use, and Motown music reframes chemsex as a conduit for pleasure, self-affirmation, and community-building.

THE SUPREMES’ 1964 ALBUM WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? PLAYS ON A TURNTABLE IN WARREN SONBERT’S AMPHETAMINE.

Nagington writes: “The [Motown] music reinforces the blissful nature of the experience of sex on drugs: the cheerful melodies repeat one another but not in a paranoid fashion… marimbas attack hard, and melt away into sensations of love and warmth. A wistful feeling of fluidic yet tangible connection is formed whilst upward key changes signal a continuing triumphant form of ever-increasing pleasure… The Supremes continue to herald the increasing ecstasy… [and the film] stresses how gay men and drugs can produce spaces that provide for connections which refuse shame or trauma but instead allow exploration of new potentials for subjectivity.”

Nagington’s observations parallel those of Suarez and McKinzie. Suarez writes in his book that “the songs in the soundtrack suggest a narrative from despair to plentitude that contrasts with the sustained affability and hedonism in the images. The overall tone is of warm affection, not only toward the group, its habits, love affairs, and hangout but also toward the more abstract enjoyment of light and motion, and toward the driving rhythm of the pop songs. They all seem to exist on the same plane of equivalence as exchangeable, interrelated pleasures.” McKinzie similarly remarks: “Motown’s ‘60s catalog… cultivated an ethos of inclusivity, thereby uniquely touching the lives of marginalized folk — particularly people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community… AMPHETAMINE begins with The Supremes’ 1964 album WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? playing on a turntable. Over the sounds of that LP’s title track, ‘Baby Love,’ and ‘I Hear a Symphony,’ an intoxicating mélange of homoerotic images unfold: preppy young gay men lounge, canoodle shirtless, take intravenous drugs, and passionately kiss each other… Here, Motown’s best-selling group becomes the de facto Greek chorus of a euphoric night of gay passion, their reputation of ‘apoliticism’ complicated by the transgressive and liberating imagery with which the filmmakers have fused them. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard’s sumptuous harmonizing seems to elucidate the chemical high the men on screen are experiencing; Sonbert and Appel’s visuals imbue that harmonizing with new, queerer meaning in return.”

This digital version of AMPHETAMINE is a 1080p transfer from 16mm materials.