Three Warren Sonbert Films Screened at Doc Films at University of Chicago

(L-R): STILLS FROM WARREN SONBERT’S FRIENDLY WITNESS (1989), HALL OF MIRRORS (1966), and THE CUP AND THE LIP (1986). © The Estate of Warren Sonbert.

On Sunday, April 13th, at 7pm, three films by Warren Sonbert — 1966’s HALL OF MIRRORS, 1986’s THE CUP AND THE LIP, and 1989’s FRIENDLY WITNESS — screened at Doc Films at the University of Chicago on 16mm. This program was introduced by film scholar Fred Camper, who has written extensively about Sonbert’s films. GME is the custodian of Sonbert’s legacy, and since his passing 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 writings from his paper archive, which is now housed at Harvard University.

HALL OF MIRRORS, THE CUP AND THE LIP, and FRIENDLY WITNESS screened as part of a larger Doc Films series curated by Hannah Yang, titled Encounters in the Cinema. Yang describes the series as “draw[ing] attention to… the way in which both film and spectator shape each other, and cinema as a whole, in the dark space of the movie theater.” Of Sonbert and his films specifically, Yang writes:

Mentored under Gregory Markopolous and coming up in the same scene as [Nathaniel] Dorsky and [Jerome] Hiler, Warren Sonbert’s filmmaking charisma was evident from the very start with HALL OF MIRRORS, made during his time at NYU. He then spent a large part of his career making silent polyvalent montage works that sought to challenge the images he was putting together, and returned twenty years later to sound with FRIENDLY WITNESS.

To learn more about Sonbert’s life and career, or to inquire about institutional rental and/or purchase of his films, please contact info@gartenbergmedia.com.