GME News
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.
Read MoreToday 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.
Read MoreOn 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.”
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThis Women's History Month, GME pays tribute to Women Filmmakers from our catalogue of digital moving image publications in DSL, DVD, and/or Blu-Ray format, which we make available exclusively to academic institutions in North America in collaboration with an array of archives and boutique publishers worldwide, including Cameo Media, Flicker Alley, Index Edition, Kino Lorber, Light Cone, and Re:Voir, among others. The role of women filmmakers has been generally overlooked in the writing of film histories. GME has carefully curated a selection of works from these organizations so as to more fully represent the significant contributions that women filmmakers have made from the birth of moving pictures. The role of women filmmakers has been generally overlooked in the writing of film histories. GME has carefully curated a selection of works from these organizations so as to more fully represent the significant contributions that women filmmakers have made from the birth of moving pictures.
Read MoreAs a programmer at The Museum of Modern Art, Adrienne Mancia was an advocate of progressive “New Hollywood” filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola who, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, subverted the moral and aesthetic traditions (and limitations) of the studio system by producing thematically and stylistically challenging work influenced by European cinema, the American avant-garde, and the countercultural ethos of the era at large. This month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, GME presents Coppola’s debut feature film DEMENTIA 13 (1963), which screened in MoMA’s November—December 2023 tribute to Mancia.
Read MoreOn Sunday, February 2nd, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival screened Frank Urson and Cecil B. DeMille’s CHICAGO (1927) and Frank Lloyd and Josef von Sternberg’s CHILDREN OF DIVORCE (1927) at the San Francisco Jazz Center, as part of their celebration A Day of Silents. GME distributes CHICAGO on DVD and CHILDREN OF DIVORCE as a Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack to North American universities, in conjunction with Flicker Alley.
Read MoreOn Saturday, January 18th, at 7pm, Missouri’s New Music Circle will screen Warren Sonbert’s third film, HALL OF MIRRORS (1966), in a program of experimental films that were made in the first decade of the organization’s existence (1959—1969). 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 documents from the paper archive of his writings. HALL OF MIRRORS is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert’s film classes at NYU taught by Carl Lerner, the editor of such Hollywood features as 12 ANGRY MEN (1957) and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT (1962). Sonbert was provided with outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence.
Read MoreGME's Photo Licensing Reel comprises a vast array of photographs taken by Raimondo Borea (1926—1982) and Hugh Bell (1927—2012), whose collections are represented by Gartenberg Media Enterprises for licensing, exhibition, and placement.
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