NYPL Presents the City Symphony Program IN THE STREETS on April 17th, curated by Jon Gartenberg with Elena Rossi-Snook

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NYPL Presents the City Symphony Program IN THE STREETS on April 17th, curated by Jon Gartenberg with Elena Rossi-Snook

On Thursday, April 17th, at 5:30pm, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will present the program In The Streets in the Bruno Walter Auditorium. Curated by GME President Jon Gartenberg with Elena Rossi-Snook, NYPL’s Reserve Film and Video Collection Specialist. this screening will explore the spirit and structure of the “city symphony” film.

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

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

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, and 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.”

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The Sonbert Renaissance

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The Sonbert Renaissance

In recent years, the work of filmmaker Warren Sonbert has experienced a renaissance among film critics, scholars, cinephiles, and the general public. Sonbert’s films have proven especially popular with younger audiences around the globe who are discovering his work for the first time.

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March 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

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March 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

Today we recap screenings, events, and celebrations from March related to GME titles, artists, and colleagues. Notably, GME celebrated Women’s History Month by spotlighting works by women filmmakers that we distribute on DSL, DVD, and Blu-Ray. In the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, GME streamed Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES (which Mancia wrote about at length in Film Comment) and featured a number of rare archival treasures from Mancia's papers. Additionally, MIX NYC publicly shared the filmed Q&A session from their festival's closing night program in November 2024, which featured remarks from GME President Jon Gartenberg, commenting on GME associate Matt McKinzie's film and the other films in the program. At the end of the month, Gartenberg contributed program notes for Abigail Child's screening of her film THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers' Cooperative.

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Watch an Excerpt from the Closing Night Q&A at MIX Fest 2024, Featuring GME President Jon Gartenberg and GME Associate Matt McKinzie

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Watch an Excerpt from the Closing Night Q&A at MIX Fest 2024, Featuring GME President Jon Gartenberg and GME Associate Matt McKinzie

On November 23rd, 2024, QUEER DREAM TRIPTYCH, a found footage poem film by GME associate Matt McKinzie, screened at the Quad Cinema in the closing night program of MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. The post-screening Q&A session with the filmmakers involved rich, cross-generational discourse pertaining to depictions of pleasure versus depictions of trauma, as related to queer identity and sexuality, in the selected films. This Q&A session was filmed and made available to the public on March 21st. GME President Jon Gartenberg, in attendance that evening with GME Fine Arts Curator David Deitch, commended the filmmakers for “externalizing their interior struggles on the screen,” praising their willingness to be “vulnerable” in their work and remarking that he found this kind of filmmaking — wherein the artists confronted their trauma in their art — to be “new and refreshing.”

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Read Jon Gartenberg's Program Note for Abigail Child's THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

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Read Jon Gartenberg's Program Note for Abigail Child's THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

On Friday, March 28th, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child presented her feature-length cinematic triptych THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, of which she is a longtime member. THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY is comprised of three films Child created over the span of a decade: CAKE AND STEAK (2004), THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU (2004), and SURF AND TURF (2008—11). Child describes the trilogy as “prismatic” and being “about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post-WWII North American suburbs and… the war in Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation.” GME President Jon Gartenberg is a longtime friend and collaborator of Child’s and has programmed her work at film festivals internationally, including THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY, which was screened at the Pesaro Film Festival. Gartenberg contributed the program note for this screening at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which can be read here.

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Jack Mitchell: Artists

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Jack Mitchell: Artists

Photographer Jack Mitchell would have turned 100 years old in 2025. In recognition of the centennial of this creative and historically significant artist, GME now offers a series of readymade exhibitions that showcase Mitchell’s extensive photographic oeuvre.

Over the course of his half-century professional career, Mitchell documented a vast array of artists in the fields of music, dance, theatre, literature, and the fine arts. No exhibition encapsulates this history better than Jack Mitchell: Artists, which features over 50 silver gelatin and color photographs of noteworthy American visual, musical, and literary talents. This show first opened on May 16, 2021, at the Adtran, Jurenko & Thurber Galleries at the Huntsville Museum of Art, and is currently available to galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions both in the U.S. and abroad.

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Plus Experimental Shorts by Donald Richie and Rare Archival Treasures

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Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Plus Experimental Shorts by Donald Richie and Rare Archival Treasures

In addition to her work as a film programmer, Adrienne Mancia was an accomplished writer of film criticism and film treatments. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 avant-garde psychological thriller WOMAN IN THE DUNES was a film Mancia championed at length in Film Comment, and is one of the titles GME’s team has selected to stream this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room.

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February 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

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February 2025 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues

Today we recap screenings, events, and celebrations from February, in New York City and beyond, related to GME titles, artists, and colleagues. Notably, Jack Mitchell’s photographic oeuvre was highlighted on the occasion of Black History Month, in recognition of exhibitions and performances at the Whitney and Lincoln Center, and upon the passing of legendary singer-songwriter Roberta Flack. Furthermore, Francis Ford Coppola’s feature directorial debut streamed in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room beginning on February 12th.

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