24th Leeds International Film Festival Program Celebrates The Films of Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert (1947 - 1955) 

Director               Warren Sonbert

Country                USA

Running Time:      60 mins

Sun 21st Nov, 2010 - 16:00 @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

A celebration of just a small part of the superb oeuvre of Warren Sonbert, one of the seminal figures of American wondermental film and rarely shown in the UK. He started making films in 1966 and was given a retrospective before he was 20! His early films feature denizens of the Warhol scene, with his late works culminating in astonishing symphonic montages, both silent and sound, uniting universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry. A prolific theorist and critic as well as filmmaker, his films display a deep love and understanding of cinema. The programme, curated by Jon Gartenberg, is entitled ‘Silent Rhythms / Sound Symphonies II’ and includes the films ‘The Cup and the Lip’ (1986, colour, silent) and ‘Short Fuse’ (1992, colour & b/w, sound), both on 16mm.

Read more: http://www.leedsfilm.com/film/warren-sonbert-1947-1995/#ixzz15xneKLQd

GME Presentations at AMIA 2010 Conference, November 2-6, in Philadelphia

In 2010, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) will come together for the first time in a joint conference: November 2-6, Philadelphia, PA.

GME is represented at two of this year’s Conference Events:

Friday - November 5                                                                                                 7:30pm - 10:00pm                                                                                             International House Theater

Archival Screening Night

Archival Screening Night is the traditional centerpiece of AMIA's annual conference.  It is a unique snapshot new preservation work, footage from recent discoveries and curatorial discoveries.  Submissions are drawn from for-profit and non-profit institutions, and individual members and we work with host venues to support the full range of film and electronic formats submitted.

The Lady and the Stock Exchange (1962)                                                           Institution:  Gartenberg Media Enterprises                                                               Presenter:   Jon Gartenberg

    This film is particularly relevant given the current financial crisis.  Sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange, it dates from the prosperous Eisenhower-Kennedy era.  The film stars Janet Blair and Eddie Bracken as a couple making their first purchase of stock.  A revealing excerpt from this rare I.B. Technicolor print will be shown. 

Saturday - November 6                                                                                         10:30am - 12:00pm                                                                                                 Loew's Hotel Philadelphia (conference meeting room)

The Life and Times of Siegmund Lubin: King of the Movies

Chair: Bill Morrow - Footage File

Speakers: Jon Gartenberg - Gartenberg Media Enterprises                                                   Joseph P. Eckhardt - Betzwood Film Archive                                                                       Peter Decherney - University of Pennsylvania

    In early motion picture history we all know the names of such film pioneers as Edison, Lumiere and Griffith, but may not be familiar with the name of Lubin. Siegmund Lubin, born in Germany in the 1850s, later moved to Philadelphia where he established a thriving motion picture business.  The presentation will trace the growth of Lubin's film production enterprise as well as his personal evolution.  Though at first regarded as a shameless pirate, Lubin became the first to vertically integrate the movie industry, taking on the roles of Producer, Director, Distributor, and Exhibitor, with equal enthusiasm. Emerging as one of the best-known figures in the film industry by 1910, he crowned himself the "King of the Movies."  The session will also focus on Lubin's success within the larger context of early cinema, other studio production, and the issue of early film piracy.

“Warren Sonbert: Friendly Witness and Other Films” in Atlanta Celebrates Photography Film Series

ACP FILM SERIESEYEDRUM

Warren Sonbert: Friendly Witness and Other Films

Atlanta Celebrates Photography and Film Love         present three nights of films by this crucial figure             of the American avant-garde.  

A "friendly witness," Warren Sonbert (1947-1995) holds a unique place in American independent film. On one hand he shows the distinct influence of Hitchcock and the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and on the other he was a rigorous avant-gardist. Sonbert's films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum and other institutions, but remain available only in 16mm prints and are too rarely screened.

Film Screening: Tue, Oct 26, 7pm - 9pm                                                                     

PROGRAM ONE - Juxtaposing early and late works, tonight's program (one of three) explores the maturation of Sonbert's style as well as his masterful use of music. His early trilogy of short films, set to exuberant rock and roll and documenting the seedy glamour of the 60s New York art world, established Sonbert's notoriety while he was still a teenage film student at NYU. Twenty years later, Sonbert returned to the music soundtrack in his masterpiece Friendly Witness - an intricate and deeply moving mosaic of people and places around the globe.

Film Screening: Thu, Oct 28, 7pm - 9pm                                                               

PROGRAM TWO - Sonbert's later filmmaking combines his precise but unconventional eye for color, composition, and shot content with his intricate and highly personal editing technique. 

Tonight's program presents Sonbert's magnum opus in this style (and his longest film), Carriage Trade.

Film Screening:  Fri, Nov 19, 7pm - 9pm                                                               

PROGRAM THREE - Program three explores Sonbert's career-long fascination with coupling - the dynamics of communication, romance, and desire. Honor and Obey, made at the peak of Sonbert's late period, and The Bad and the Beautiful, a restored 1960s film set to an effective popular music soundtrack. Also screened are films by two of Sonbert's influences, Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken.

Presented by ACP, Film Love and Eyedrum. Curated and hosted by Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals.  Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the critics of Creative Loafing in 2006.

Free Admission

EYEDRUM290 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr,  Suite 8                                                                         Atlanta, GA 30312  [map: Google Maps]                                                                                                             p: (404) 522-0655                                                                                                                                               web: http://www.eyedrum.org

J’ACCUSE and SLOW SUMMER Featured in MoMA’s Eighth International Festival of Film Preservation

To Save and Project: The Eighth MoMAInternational Festival of Film Preservation                                                  

October 15–November 14, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art11 West 53 Street  New York, NY 10019                                                                                                                                   

J’ACCUSE

1919. France. Directed by Abel Gance. With Romuald Joubé, Marise Dauvray, Séverin-Mars. Stunningly restored to its full 1919 length with its original color tinting by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in collaboration with Lobster Films, and accompanied live on piano by Robert Israel, one of the world’s finest silent-film composers, J’Accuse is a milestone of silent cinema. It also endures as one of the most damning antiwar films ever made, said to have influenced Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and later championed by Susan Sontag and the film historian Kevin Brownlow. Made in the last, brutal year of the Great War, Gance’s technically groundbreaking film chronicles the decimation of a Provençal village as the sons of France go off to fight, either dying on the front or returning as shell-shocked, hollow men. Gance (La Roué, Napoleon) and his brilliant cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel filmed several sequences alongside the United States Army during the battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918. Gance would later recall the unforgettable “return of the dead” sequence that ends the film: "The conditions in which we filmed were profoundly moving….These men had come straight from the Front—from Verdun—and they were due back eight days later. They played the dead knowing that in all probability they'd be dead themselves before long. Within a few weeks of their return, eighty per cent had been killed." Silent. Approx. 161 min.

Friday, October 22, 2010, 7:00 p.m. , Theater 2, T2

Sunday, October 24, 2010, 1:15 p.m. , Theater 2, T2

LANGSAMMER SOMMER (SLOW SUMMER)

1976. Austria. Directed by John Cook, in collaboration with Susanne Schett. Screenplay by Cook, Michael Pilz. With Cook, Pilz, Helmut Bozelmann, Eva Grimm. A successful Canadian-born fashion photographer who became “Viennese by choice,” Cook is often cited as one of the most important Austrian filmmakers of the past fifty years—a true auteur who created a deeply personal and vital vision of his adopted city. This screening of Slow Summer, with its sardonic and at times disturbing blurring of fantasy and autobiography, serves as a prelude to a retrospective that will begin this December at Anthology Film Archives of new prints restored by the Austrian Film Museum. Cook takes the uncanny Viennese landscape and his demimonde of artist friends and collaborators as the subject of this fascinating experimental film, which he shot on Super-8 color stock and then printed on black-and-white 35mm. “[Slow Summer] is a strange film,” the critic Olaf Möller observes, “a bit unsettling in its relentlessness, even if one doesn’t know the people in it. The characters bear the same names as the actors, and the line between truth and dare is so thin it’s often just not there; one can never be certain whether the self-loathing and disgust expressed by these people is real, or part of the fiction.” Preserved in 2006 by the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, and the film’s producer, Michael Pilz. In German; English subtitles. 83 min.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 8:00 p.m. , Theater 1, T1

Friday, November 5, 2010, 4:30 p.m. , Theater 1, T1

J’ACCUSE Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.

SLOW SUMMER Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.

International Tour of Films by Warren Sonbert Previewing in Paris on September 15

     On the evening of September 15, 2010, two programs of films by Warren Sonbert will be featured in public projections at Cinema Action Christine (4 rue Christine, 75006 Paris, Métro St-Michel, price: 6€).  The programs will be introduced by curator Jon Gartenberg, and are held as part Light Cone’s Preview Show, an annual event gathering experimental film programmers from around the world.  The two programs, which span Sonbert’s entire artistic career, announce the launch of an international tour of his films by Light Cone, the exclusive European distributor of his films.

     Warren Sonbert was one of the seminal figures of American experimental cinema.  He began making films in 1966 while a student at New York University.  Sonbert built upon his early experiments with camera movement, lighting, and framing to subsequently create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but also the larger sphere of global activity.  Sonbert’s passionate interest in film, music, experimental poetry, and travel is reflected in his films; he lived a completely engaged life, and the images culled from that life formed the raw material of his artistic expression.  His late works culminated in symphonic montages (both silent and sound) that unite universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry.

     Following Warren’s untimely death in 1995, a project was undertaken under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, in conjunction with curator Jon Gartenberg, to restore his final film, WHIPLASH, to public view as well as to preserve his entire extant body of work.  A complete set of preservation negatives of Sonbert’s films are now housed at the Academy Film Archives in Los Angeles. 
Sonbert retrospectives have subsequently taken place at the Guggenheim Museum (1999), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000), the Centre Pompidou (2002), the Austrian Filmmuseum (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2006), and the Harvard Film Archive (2008).

     Prints of Sonbert’s films are now available for European distribution exclusively from Light Cone.  Light Cone, in collaboration with Gartenberg Media Enterprises, will present a new tour of Warren Sonbert’s films throughout European cinematheques, festivals, and other cultural institutions beginning in the fall of 2010.

For more information visit: www.lightcone.org

Or contact us at:  info@gartenbergmedia.com

          

24th Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna

Jon Gartenberg & Jeff Capp had the pleasureto be in Bologna for Il Cinema Ritrovato.

This year's festival, the 24th Edition, ran from June 26 - July 03, 2010.

Among this year's award winners for DVD excellence was THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN

(a GME catalog title), was recognized for the "Best Critical Research On A DVD."  

For more information on this year's festival visit here:

www.cinetecadibologna.it

46th Pesaro Film Festival

Jon Gartenberg attended this year's 

Pesaro Film Festival, from June 19-26, 

where he presented Dustin Thompson's 

experimental narrative THE TRAVELOGUES, 

featured in the festival section "Bande à Part".

For more information on this year's festival,

awards and highlights, visit here:

www.pesarofilmfest.it

Recent GME News: AMIA Newsletter - “Lubin Photos” Episode on PBS’s History Detectives

AMIA Newsletter |volume 87Winter 2010| page 18

Notes from the Field

“Lubin Photos” Episode on PBS’s History Detectives

Who was Siegmund Lubin?  Was Herbert Lubin a movie star?

Jon Gartenberg, President of Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) and, GME Project Manager Jeff Capphelp PBS’s History Detectives answer these and other questions while examining two albums of “centuryold photos that may have captured the dawn of American movie-making – nearly 3000 miles fromHollywood.”

In Episode 4 of Season 7 Tukufu Zuberi calls “upon film archivists and historians Jon Gartenberg and Jeff Capp to shed some light on the Lubin film studios.  They were able to use their expertise and knowledge to reveal a forgotten history of film production in Philadelphia, assisting History Detectives in examining century old photos.”

The entire episode, originally aired on July 13, 2009, is viewable online at:
http://www.pbs.org/video/1176774004/

NY Press Praises TFF Experimental Programs

"One of the most incredible movies at Tribeca is, at 49 minutes in length, probably the least commercial: Dustin Thompson’s avant-garde documentary Travelogues, one of curator Jon Gartenberg’s invaluable annual outside-the-bell-curve contributions to the festival’s slate. Thompson films a diary of sorts, with accompanying text, comprised of tableaux from his journeys, mainly in Germany, Italy, France, and California. He is a democratic tourist: a lover, an Italian cathedral, and surfers in a Munich river carry equal narrative weight. The mini-narratives, however, are distinguished by differing angles and speeds; form sets them apart. This is fantastic stuff, a festival film that makes you feel that life is worth living, and Tribeca worth attending."

Howard Feinstein, Filmmaker Magazine

04/19/2010

Full article: www.filmmakermagazine.com

"Visionaries, one of the 85 features to be screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, covers the origins of the city's avant-garde film movement...

Now in its ninth year, the Tribeca Film Festival continues to jointly celebrate both narrative and experimental filmmaking traditions. Every category of the festival includes a number of experimental films in its line-up.

'Often these films are shown in venues where people are often familiar or accustomed to experimental film. One thing we do at Tribeca, which is very unique and in contrast distinction to other festivals, is all the experimental programming that I select is incorporated in the festival sections,' says Tribeca experimental programmer Jon Gartenberg. 'It's not segregated.' "

Donna Karger, NY1.com

04/22/2010

Full article & video: www.NY1.com

Experimental Film Programs at Tribeca Film Festival, April 21 – May 2, 2010

Experimental Film Programs at Tribeca Film Festival, April 21 – May 2, 2010

Jon Gartenberg has programmed experimental and avant-garde films for the Tribeca Film Festival since 2003.   This year’s selections include three programs offering a range of movies spanning 3 continents & 6 countries.

Check www.tribecafilm.com for screening times, venues and tickets.

Program 1:

VISIONARIES(2010, Chuck Workman), 88 min.  World Premiere.

In Precious Images, his 1986 Academy Award®-winning short, director Chuck Workman assembled a breathtaking eight-minute collage of singular images from classic Hollywood movies. In Visionaries, Workman brings alive, in counterpoint to the commercial film industry, the vibrant history of the American avant-garde cinema. In engaging interviews with renowned underground filmmakers and critics including Ken Jacobs, Robert Downey, Su Friedrich, P. Adams Sitney, and Amy Taubin, Workman reveals how this artistic movement highlights subjective vision, sensory experience, and dreams over plot and storyline. The director skillfully intersperses these intimate conversations with a stylistically diverse array of extracts from experimental films of all stripes. Dating from the 1920s to the present, avant-garde films by such pioneering artists as Man Ray, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Sadie Benning vividly illustrate for the general audience a qualitatively different kind of moviegoing experience distinct from that promulgated by the commercial cinema. Workman's documentary pays special tribute to filmmaker, curator, and critic Jonas Mekas and Anthology Film Archives, the organization that he founded. It is the premier American institution dedicated to the preservation and promotion of avant-garde film culture, assuring a long-term home for this alternative cinema right alongside the Hollywood classics.

--Jon Gartenberg

Program 2:

TRAVEL DIARIES

YANQUI WALKER & THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION(2009, Kathryn Ramey), 33 min.  New York Premiere.

THE TRAVELOGUES(2009, Dustin Thompson), 49 min.  World Premiere.

Co-Presented with Black Maria Film + Video Festival.

The travel diary genre provides the format for experimental filmmakers Dustin Thompson (TheTravelogues) and Kathryn Ramey (Yanqui Walker and the Optical Revolution) to explore, in richly textured and multilayered pictorial and audio fashion, journeys of adventure and conquest. Ramey portrays American expansionist William Walker's ascent to the presidency of Nicaragua in 1856. This film is densely structured. Threading together educational film clips, expressive animation, location photography, on-screen text, voiceover narration, and an array of experimental filmmaking techniques, the filmmaker raises compelling questions about visual perception and the construction of history.

In The Travelogues, Dustin Thompson creates a more personal story. He travels with his film camera across two continents and compiles a series of mini-narratives, suggestive of loves gained and lost. He generates lyrical images, shot at oblique angles and developed with shifting camera speeds; in each scene, the heightened film grain tends to move the depiction of the natural universe toward abstraction. From the prologue through to the epilogue of his journey, this artist travels a fine line between real and imagined worlds.

--Jon Gartenberg

Program 3:

EXPERIMENTAL COLLISIONS[Short Film Program]

The 10 experimental films in this program portray locales found in both natural and urban landscapes across three continents. A few of these artist-filmmakers literally embed the earth (soil and mud) into the fabric of the celluloid. Moreover, they portray these environments with a riveting array of avant-garde techniques that range from mirror images to extended tracking shots leading directly into the mind's eye. They further infuse these found footage, animation, and live action experimental films with dynamic editing rhythms that radically reshape the viewer's perception of reality, leading to Rorschach-like impressions. In experimental cinema, everything culminates in abstract patterns ingrained in the landscape of the film frame.

--Jon Gartenberg

   Films include:

• Grandmother’s Eye (2010, Sweden, Jonathan Lewald), 5 min.  North American Premiere.

• Release (2010, US, Bill Morrison), 12 min.  World Premiere.

• Walkway (2009, US, Ken Jacobs), 9 min.  North American Premiere.

• Lachen Verlernt(2009, Great Britain, Tal Rosner), 10 min.  World Premiere.

• This disk is the same as the other one(2009, France, Jean-Jacques Palix), 9 min.                        North American Premiere.

• Collision of Parts (2010, US, Mark Street), 15 min.  World Premiere.

• Berlin (2010, Canada, Martin Laporte), 8 min.  World Premiere.

• The Delicate Art of the Bludgeon (2009, France, Jean-Gabriel Periot), 4 min.                                North American Premiere.

• Black White Black White(2009, US, John Thompson), 15 min.World Premiere.

• TheVisible and Invisible of a Body Under Tension(2009,France, Emmanuel Lefrant), 7 min.        North American Premiere.