August 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues
/Today we recap screenings, events, and celebrations from August related to GME titles, artists, and colleagues. For lighter, end-of-summer fare, GME showcased Leopold Lindtberg’s SWISS TOUR in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room. We also announced a 20% sale on all DVD and Blu-Ray titles in our collection, ahead of our shift to focusing on the distribution of moving image works available as Digital Site Licenses (DSLs). Furthermore, GME was pleased to discover the mention of Warren Sonbert and Jon Gartenberg in two recent book publications.
August 15th — GME
Over the past year, GME has paid homage to Adrienne Mancia by showcasing films in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room that she championed throughout her prolific career as a film exhibitor and curator. We have now turned our focus to one of our company’s major projects: the excavation of libraries of celluloid films that have been abandoned in warehouses which GME has subsequently repatriated to archives for preservation and exhibition.
For lighter, end-of-summer fare, we presented Leopold Lindtberg's SWISS TOUR (1949) on August 15th — a project that cuts across the various facets and activities of our company, including film archiving, distribution, and exhibition.
August 26th — Anthology Film Archives
Beginning on August 26th, Anthology Film Archives screened a number of features and shorts by Charlie Chaplin as part of their Essential Cinema series. On August 26th and 28th, Chaplin’s feature-length classics MODERN TIMES (1936) and THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) were screened, followed by a program on the 30th featuring Chaplin’s shorts A WOMAN, EASY STREET, THE CURE, and PAY DAY.
GME distributes A WOMAN in the Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack CHAPLIN’S ESSANAY COMEDIES, as well as EASY STREET and THE CURE in the Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES. Both collections are published by Flicker Alley, and cover the work produced during Chaplin’s time under contract to the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company and Mutual Film Corporation, respectively.
GME also distributes a number of Chaplin’s early films in the Flicker Alley DVD collection CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, which covers the filmmaker’s rise to fame and establishment of his iconic “Tramp” character at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in the mid-1910s.
August 27th — GME
Over the past several decades, GME has embarked on a distribution project to release DVDs and Blu-Rays of moving image works that are destined exclusively for purchase by the university market in North America. As the transition to server-based media has grown, we felt that this was the appropriate moment, due to the shift in technology, to offer our catalogue of DVD and Blu-Ray titles at a 20% discount. A number of these titles are out-of-print editions for which GME still retains copies.
We announced this DVD and Blu-Ray sale at the end of last month, shortly followed by the announcement of new titles of moving image works that are only available as digital files from GME, including the early films of Warren Sonbert (1966—73) and the films of Pierre Clémenti (1967—1988), as well as the Kong Ngee Company's Nanyang Trilogy (1957). Stay tuned for a full slate of DSL releases for the fall semester.
August 28th — GME
At the end of last month, GME was pleased to discover mention of filmmaker Warren Sonbert in Ben Davis’ 2017 book Repertory Movie Theaters of New York City: Havens for Revivals, Indies and the Avant-Garde, 1960-1994. Davis’ book documents the rise of repertory cinemas (described as “movie houses [that] specialized in presenting films ignored by mainstream and art house audiences”) in New York City, within the context of economics and film culture.
Davis writes of Sonbert on page 46: “The early films of the acclaimed underground filmmaker Warren Sonbert, made while he was a student at New York University, were first shown at the Bleecker and the Film-makers’ Cinematheque on Wooster Street. ‘I spent the better part of my ill-spent youth at the Bleecker,’ David Ehrenstein wrote on Cinema Treasures. ‘And most of all I remember Sunday mornings when… Sonbert showed his films to all his friends.’” The subsequent chapter in Davis’ book explores the evolution of the New York film scene — including avant-garde cinema — in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of which Sonbert was a key figure.
Bleecker Street Cinema played a significant role in Sonbert’s early life as a cinephile and filmmaker. He began attending screenings at Bleecker Street Cinema at the age of 15, and when he turned 16, he served as Editor-in-Chief for a special issue of the New York Film Bulletin devoted to Jean-Luc Godard, which was edited in the basement of the Cinema. Furthermore, one of Sonbert’s early films, 1966’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, featured footage of his friends at the Bleecker Street Cinema (among other notable locations, including The Museum of Modern Art and Andy Warhol’s Factory).
Click here to learn more about Sonbert’s early films, which are currently distributed by GME to cultural institutions worldwide as Digital Site Licenses (DSLs).
August 28th — GME
At the end of last month, GME was pleased to discover mention of Jon Gartenberg in Erica Stein’s 2021 book Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York. Stein’s book shows how “a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City… imagined different way[s] of developing, using, and living in the city.” Specifically, Stein explores how New York avant-garde filmmakers “subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.”
The scholarship of Jon Gartenberg — who has conducted extensive research into New York City Symphony films (especially as represented in avant-garde, experimental, and independent movies) since the early 1970s — is invoked by Stein between pages 18—23 of her book. Stein writes, “For Gartenberg, city symphonies are not part of historically determined cycles but instead a constant impulse within and aspect of the production of moving images in New York. They include early actualités and panoramas like CONEY ISLAND AT NIGHT, feature films like Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin's LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953), and contemporary documentaries like Mark Street's FULTON FISH MARKET (2003).” Click here to read the section from Stein’s book that references Gartenberg, which the author based on Gartenberg’s article NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films, originally published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.