FRIENDLY WITNESS
and other films by WARREN SONBERT
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Eyedrum, Atlanta, GA
Program:
Amphetamine (1966), 10 minutes
co-directed with Wendy Appel
Where Did Our Love Go? (1966), 20 minutes
Honor and Obey (1988), 21 minutes
Friendly Witness (1989), 30 minutes
all films screened in 16mm
Amphetamine
was made when Sonbert was a first-year film student at New York University. (An
early filmography lists the date as February 1966.) Sonbert later commented that
it was "designed to shock," which it certainly must have done at the time. While
this aspect of the film has clearly dated, Amphetamine remains of
interest both formally and for the remarkable extent to which it resonates with
Sonbert's later, much different work.
Amphetamine takes place in a typical-looking NYC apartment and features
young men, curiously clean-cut by the drug-culture standards of only a few years
later, shooting speed and making out for the camera. The opening scenes are a
direct documentation of Sonbert's male friends shooting up. These scenes provide
a graphic but distanced, nonjudgmental portrait of drug use in exactly the same
way as Lou Reed's landmark song "Heroin," written the year before Amphetamine
was made (though the Velvet Underground's recording of the song was not
released until mid-1967).
However, with the onset of the speed rush, the tenor of the film becomes more
subjective. First, there is a visual effect created most likely by a mis-threading
of the film inside the camera, giving the images a blurred, vertically elongated
quality evocative of the aggressive change in consciousness provided by speed.
Then, the film suddenly takes flight with an exuberant image of two young men
kissing passionately, Sonbert's handheld camera traveling around them in an
ecstatic circle. And along with this switch from observation to excited
involvement, the film also seems to change from documentary style to narrative,
for in this scene the two men seem to be at least nominally directed as actors by Sonbert (a practice he apparently continued in many of his later films).
Along with documentary and narrative, there is a third stylistic element to
Amphetamine. According to Callie Angell in her recently published study of
Andy Warhol's "Screen Test" films, Amphetamine was shot in the 8th
Avenue apartment of Debbie Caen, one of many figures in the tight-knit but
expansive world of the 1960s New York avant-garde. (Caen had dated Gerard
Malanga, a fixture in Warhol's Factory crowd.) Angell quotes a letter from
Sonbert to Malanga which indicates that Amphetamine was in part an
evocation of the filmmaker's very first encounter with the heady New York
underground:
the first time I met Debbie, I walked in to a room strewn with [Warhol film
star] Ondine's pornography collection and the Supremes's 'Where Did Our Love Go'
was playing on the record player (this is the opening shot of
Amphetamine). I met Debbie and the others and knew I was hooked to a new
world.
It's not hard to imagine the impact this new world would have on an intrepid,
precocious gay teenage filmmaker in the city at the height of the underground,
and, right down to the memory of the music that was playing, Amphetamine
is Sonbert's autobiographical account of a significant moment of discovery. Thus
the unusual mix of document, ambiguous narrative, and autobiography that marks
Sonbert's mature aesthetic is already visible here in his first film.
Where Did Our Love Go?, also filmed in 1966, was described by Sonbert as
"Warhol Factory days ... serendipity visits, Janis and Castelli and Bellvue
glances ... Malanga at work ... glances at Le Mepris and North by Northwest ...
girl rock groups and a disco opening ... a romp through the Modern." Leo
Castelli was a legendary New York gallery owner, who sold Andy Warhol's first
Campbell Soup can paintings. Speaking of Warhol, a circular pan shot of the
artist's fabled Factory studio is included in this film - one of the few film
images which provides a sense of the spatial dimensions of the Factory. Warhol's
longtime assistant Gerard Malanga also appears briefly (another shot of Malanga
at work in the Factory appears in Friendly Witness).
Tonight's beautiful print of Where Did Our Love Go?, projected per the
artist's instructions at silent film speed, or sixteen frames per second instead
of the usual twenty-four, provides rich proof of Sonbert's eye for color. The
film begins at a gallery, which is evidently having a retrospective of the works
of Tom Wesselmann. Giant, bright red lips (a Wesselmann motif) dominate the
compositions in this part of the film. Other gallery spaces provide the setting
for art world figures and attractive young couples and friends. As with many of
the shots of couples throughout tonight's films, it seems as if Sonbert is
ever-so-slightly directing the on-screen action. As a climax, two friends march
straight through the Museum of Modern Art. The camera pursues them in fast
motion, almost incidentally providing a witty, lightning-speed tour of the
masterpieces of the twentieth century. The soundtrack again consists of pop
songs - in this case by the classic girl groups of the early 60s.
These and other of Sonbert's early films brought him acclaim and notoriety in
the eventful world of 1960s underground cinema, but he was soon to reconfigure
his filmmaking into the style for which he is best known. Taking his Bolex 16mm
camera virtually everywhere he went, he would gather a "critical mass" of
footage, then deftly combine his brief shots into montages of seemingly endless
contrapuntal and cross-referential variation. The first product of this new
style was 1971's Carriage Trade, an hour-long epic still among his
most-admired films. After this, Sonbert tightened his films' running lengths to
twenty to thirty minutes each, and began a highly consistent and productive
mature phase which lasted until the end of his life.
-------------------
In a talk on "Film Syntax" published in 1980 in Cinemanews, Sonbert
revealed much about the meaning behind the surprising juxtapositions of shots in
his later films. He combined shots, particularly in the opening sequences of
films, in a way that seeks to undermine easy associations. For example, he
described a hypothetical four-shot sequence, consisting of A, a juxtaposition of
a priest eating in the background with a exchange of money in the foreground; B,
a "neutral shot" of an abstract image such as light on water; C, a mother
helping her young daughter put on an angel costume while a old derelict man
walks by in the background; and D, another abstract image.
Sonbert stated that the first image might set up the idea of the greed of
organized religion, while the third shot would balance this idea with the
suggestion of the possibility of miracles. Thus, ambiguity is established as a
hallmark - in contrast to the montage style developed by Sergei Eisenstein, whom
Sonbert attacked as the "great villain" of editing, because of the "knee-jerk"
associations Eisenstein used to make his grand political statements in film. In
fact, Sonbert said, "The job of editing...is to balance a series of ambiguities
in a tension-filled framework."
This ingrained ambiguity gave rise to a highly complex style of editing, in
which every conceivable element of a shot - color, duration, exposure, type of
film stock, choice of subject, framing of the subject, movement of the subject
within the frame, movement of the camera - could be contrasted with or
reinforced by any of these elements in the preceding or succeeding shots. Thus,
a given shot sequence in Friendly Witness (a list of all 645 shots in the
film were thoughtfully provided by Sonbert in the pages of the journal Motion
Picture) could read:
Arab boy portrait; Bear tiger pass; Pool reflection; TV fire ant farm; Sparkles on water; Debbie turn; Train tracks flare; Collapsing bldg; Man wrestling cow
Using the shot as his
basic unit, and the cuts between shots to create rhythms and meaning, Sonbert
could then use larger groups of shots to further extend the general narrative
concept he had assigned to a film. In the case of Honor and Obey, the
narrative idea seems to be a critique of social rituals enforced by church and
country. This critique is made through images of authority figures (obvious ones
like religious and military, as well as more subtle examples like a mother
iguana with her baby), combined, in large and small groupings, with images of
the natural world, amusement park footage, and other motifs.
Hand in hand with the complexity of Sonbert's cuts between images is the
effortless enjoyment provided by the images themselves. He has an unusually
precise, though highly unconventional, eye for color, composition, and shot
content, and among the hundreds of shots in Friendly Witness and Honor
and Obey, there are very few that are devoid of interest. What's more, a
high proportion of the shots are small masterpieces of composition: a market in
Marrakesh, lacerated by sunlight shining through a slatted ceiling (Friendly
Witness); a woman on a park bench in the foreground while two children chase
each other around a statue in the background (Witness); a shot from high
above a snow-covered lot, with two boys in a pushing match in the bottom corner
of the frame, contrasted against the bright white of the snow (Honor and Obey).
The sometimes remarkable content in these images derives in large part from
Sonbert's extensive travels. As Jon Gartenberg describes, Sonbert developed a
robust yet "finely balanced" way of producing his works. As a professional opera
critic, he would secure writing assignments which allowed him to travel
internationally. On these trips, he would screen his recently completed works
for audiences and also shoot footage for new films. In New York and San
Francisco, both cities where he lived, he would shoot further footage such as
images of his friends, alone or in couples, often engaged in mundane activities.
This contrast between everyday and more extraordinary images (often with an
undercurrent of menace or disaster) is just one of the many tensions inherent in
Sonbert's films. Thus, even the more conventional shots gain a heightened
interest with the unusual juxtapositions of the editing.
The critic Paul Arthur gives a glimpse of Sonbert's shooting style:
Every week for several years, Warren and I drove back to the city from a
small college on the Hudson. Cruising down the Taconic in my orange van, engaged
in some heated debate about Hollywood auteurism, he would from time to time
remove the Bolex from the knapsack at his feet, squeeze off a few seconds of
footage, screw on the lens cap and place the camera back in the bag. He would do
this maybe three or four times during the two hour trip, sometimes not at
all...occasionally, during a break, I would ask what he had shot and he would
say something uncharacteristically vague, like "trees," or "great color."
Images like this - trees,
great color - show up in Sonbert's films as what he called "neutral shots,"
abstract visuals which he compared to "after-dinner sherbets, there to cleanse
the palate before the next highly charged image." In Honor and Obey,
these take the form of rapid pans along neon lights against a dark background.
These lovely, energetic shots provide a contrast to the sober, vaguely
foreboding juxtapositions of church officials, soldiers, and social rituals
which form the bulk of the film. In Friendly Witness, the viewer's palate
is cleansed by multiple pans over colorful flowers and fauna, as well as a
series of stunning, rapid pans of the stained glass windows at Chartres. Such
shots as these are reminiscent of Stan Brakhage, Sonbert's film "hero" (as
opposed to Eisenstein's "villain").
Another mark of Brakhage's influence is Sonbert's preference for making silent
films; like Honor and Obey, all of Sonbert's films from the late 1960s
until 1989 are silent. He believed that "the divergent rhythms of film and sound
get in each other's way." Nevertheless, with Friendly Witness he returned
to sound film for the first time in twenty years, again using a soundtrack of
popular 60s songs, but concluding with Gluck's overture to his opera
Iphigenie in Aulis. The songs allow Sonbert to deepen the connections in his
images, such as cutting to a shot of his cat right on the chorus of "Runaway,"
or punning on the title of "Runaway" by showing fashion models on a runway. The
opera overture - the longest and final section of the film - contributes
significantly to one of the most magnificent passages in any of these films.
But far more magnificent than the daunting amount of craft and thought that went
into these films is the empathy and compassion Sonbert brings to the activity of
filming. Sonbert's images of people are neither clinically detached nor
voyeuristic. Because they avoid easy associations, his juxtapositions inspire
interest in the world around us, and impart dignity to both the animal and human
figures in his films. It is this dignity that makes Warren Sonbert's
compassionate, interested, friendly witnessing such a wonderful, human way of
seeing the world.
For assistance with
tonight's screening, thanks to Jonathan Kahana, Robbie Land, Sam Wells, and
William Wees.
Program notes 2006 Andy Ditzler
Andy Ditzler 12/28/2017