TONIGHT: Queer Avant-Garde Films Screen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, co-curated by Jon Gartenberg and Elena Rossi-Snook

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TONIGHT: Queer Avant-Garde Films Screen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, co-curated by Jon Gartenberg and Elena Rossi-Snook

Tonight, October 7th, at 5:30pm in the Bruno Walter Auditorium, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will screen experimental works from the Reserve Film and Video Collection that explores the history of queer filmmakers. The program, titled What’s Happening? Affirmations: A Celebration of the LGBTQ+ Gaze, includes 16mm prints from Jack Smith and Gregory Markopoulos as well as an important selection of films by women filmmakers (such as Barbara Hammer and Sadie Benning) and a seminal work by African-American artist Marlon Riggs.

This event is being held in recognition of LGBTQ+ History Month and is part of a larger series that looks at “deep cuts” from the Reserve Film and Video Collection's historic 16mm film and video holdings. Co-curated by GME President Jon Gartenberg and RFVC Film Collection Specialist Elena Rossi-Snook, this screening features films that carve out creative queer identities from an historically heteronormative society in celebratory fashion.

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GME Presents The Pierre Clémenti Collection

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GME Presents The Pierre Clémenti Collection

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to announce our distribution of the films of Pierre Clémenti as new 2K digital restorations to North American academic institutions.

Though best known as an actor, Clémenti's directorial work constitutes a fascinating and long overlooked chapter in 1960s avant-garde film history. To inquire about the institutional acquisition of Clémenti's films, click here.

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GME Presents The Warren Sonbert Collection

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GME Presents The Warren Sonbert Collection

Warren Sonbert (1947—1995) was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental film. His early films — from 1966’s AMPHETAMINE through to 1973’s CARRIAGE TRADE — are currently available from GME on an exclusive basis as new 2K digital restorations for acquisition by universities, museums, and other cultural institutions worldwide.

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GME Presents Steve Bilich's NATIVE NEW YORKER as a Digital Site License

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GME Presents Steve Bilich's NATIVE NEW YORKER as a Digital Site License

Shot before, during and after 9/11,  Steve Bilich's experimental short documentary Native New Yorker took several years of filming with a 1924 hand-cranked Cine-Kodak camera. It follows Shaman Trail Scout 'Coyote' as he takes a journey that transcends time, from Inwood Park (where the island was traded for beads and booze), down a native trail (now “Broadway”), and into lower Manhattan (a sacred burial ground, now including the newest natives of this island empire). 24 years since the 9/11 attacks,  Bilich's film remains as powerful and relevant as ever.

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Cool Off with SWISS TOUR, Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room

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Cool Off with SWISS TOUR, Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room

Over the past several months, 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 now turn 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 present Leopold Lindtberg's SWISS TOUR (1949) — a project that cuts across the various facets and activities of our company, including film archiving, distribution, and exhibition.

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Walther Ruttmann's Silent Classic BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY Opens MoMA's Silent Movie Week

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Walther Ruttmann's Silent Classic BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY Opens MoMA's Silent Movie Week

From July 30th to August 5th, The Museum of Modern Art will present its third annual Silent Movie Week. This year’s programming is comprised of seven recent silent film restorations screened over seven consecutive evenings. MoMA’s week-long celebration commences with the Museum’s digital restoration of Walther Ruttmann’s BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY (1927), which will be shown with live musical accompaniment in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. GME distributes BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY to North American universities as a DVD publication that also includes Ruttmann’s 1929 feature MELODY OF THE WORLD, and 12 short films by Ruttmann as bonus features. Also included in this release are a selection of Ruttmann’s paintings and drawings, lobby cards and original artwork for BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY, and an 86-minute long radio feature from 1987 about Ruttmann’s life and career.

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY

Jim McBride’s DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (1967), which streams this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, is widely regarded as one of the first “mockumentaries,” and was once described by eminent film critic Richard Brody as an “ingenious, scruffy metafiction… an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave.” Filmed on a shoestring budget over the course of several days, it is a work of experimental fiction presented as an autobiographical documentary about aspiring filmmaker David Holzman (played by L.M. Kit Carson), who decides to make a filmed diary of his life on the Upper West Side.

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Reflecting on "Love and Joy, Warren Sonbert"

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Reflecting on "Love and Joy, Warren Sonbert"

On Sunday, June 8th, Gartenberg Media Enterprises publicly presented the World Premiere digital restorations of a selection of the early films of Warren Sonbert (1947-1995) at Metrograph in New York City: Where Did Our Love Go?, Amphetamine, Hall of Mirrors (all 1966) and Carriage Trade (1973), as well as Jeff Scher’s Postcards from Warren (1998) and Warren (1991). We were delighted to welcome colleagues, friends, and family of Sonbert, GME, and the Film-Makers' Cooperative to this special event, which also launched the return of Sonbert's films to distribution at the Coop in digital format. All of these digital restorations were created with the intent of making Sonbert's films more accessible to a wide audience.

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Love and Joy, Warren Sonbert

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Love and Joy, Warren Sonbert

On Sunday, June 8th, at 2:15pm, Gartenberg Media Enterprises and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative will premiere new digital restorations of Warren Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE, WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, HALL OF MIRRORS, and CARRIAGE TRADE at Metrograph. This World Premiere screening also celebrates the return of these early films of Warren Sonbert to the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, from where they were originally distributed to be shown at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and elsewhere. The post-screening panel will be moderated by curator and archivist Jon Gartenberg and include the FMC’s Artist Liaison, Matt McKinzie, and Sonbert’s longtime friends, Emmy Award-winning animator and NYU professor Jeff Scher and fashion designer Barbara Hodes.

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: A King Double Bill

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: A King Double Bill

During her time as a curator in MoMA's Department of Film, Adrienne Mancia was a major proponent of unearthing important and often overlooked treasures from film history. As noted by her close friend and colleague Jon Gartenberg, “[Adrienne] celebrated American directors of a bygone era who had worked within the Hollywood studio system.” King Vidor's THE JACK-KNIFE MAN (1920) and Henry King's THE SEVENTH DAY (1922) are among the early Hollywood films Mancia championed. Both films, which were featured in MoMA's 2023 In Memoriam tribute to Mancia, stream this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room.

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