AMPHETAMINE (US, 1966, Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel)
/A heart-stopping film… beautiful and pure. —James Stoller, The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, 1967
Sonbert was… something of a prodigy, only 19 when he made AMPHETAMINE… This 10-minute black-and-white ode to sex and drugs echoes the work of Warhol and Morrissey in luring the viewer into a self-consciously decadent, queer closed space… The sense of transgressive pleasures is intense. —Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal, 2000
In 1966, while still in his teens, Sonbert wrote an essay, “Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality” for Film Culture magazine. The publication appeared in the same year as the production of his first film, AMPHETAMINE (1966). In his article, Sonbert considered VERTIGO (1958) to be “Hitchcock’s greatest and one of the best films ever made”. He was so entranced by that film that he inscribed homages to VERTIGO in his very first movie.
“The film focuses on a party of drugs and sex – young men with a deadpan expression injecting amphetamines. Sonbert shows it in a very detailed and meticulous way that makes the viewer almost feel the pain physically, while the joyful pop music creates a counterpoint that adds a playful aspects to these scenes. In this film, Sonbert pays tribute to VERTIGO (1958) [which he had first seen at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York (see WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?)]--- with its spiral and circular motifs. The film begins with a woman’s portrait (framed inside a circle) like the portrait of Carlotta at which Madeleine (Kim Novak) gazes in the museum scene.
AMPHETAMINE (US, 1966)
Director: Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel
- 10 minutes
- 16mm
- B&W
- Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server
Published By: Gartenberg Media Enterprises
Institutional Price: $500
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Click to view a comparison between scenes of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958) and Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE (1966)
The music and the structure of AMPHETAMINE are also repetitive, and in one scene the camera moves in a circle around two men embracing, similar to the famous kissing scene between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.
CLICK TO VIEW A SECOND COMPARISON BETWEEN SCENES OF HITCHCOCK’S VERTIGO (1958) AND SONBERT’S AMPHETAMINE (1966)
It’s an homage, but Sonbert subverts gender conventions, showing a homosexual kiss, three years before the Stonewall riots. If Madeleine represents Scottie’s obsessive fantasy world, the party in Sonbert’s film reflects the fantasies and desires of a decade later, the 1960s era – with its forbidden paradise.”
- Chen Sheinberg
Sonbert’s first film was made together with Wendy Appel (1944-2017), his classmate at NYU film school. After AMPHETAMINE, her path diverged from Sonbert’s. In the 1970s, she became involved with the video collective TVTV and then with documentary filmmaking as a producer, director, and editor for television, while Sonbert continued making movies in an experimental narrative vein. He inscribed the materiality of film – including leader, flares, varying camera exposures and other avant-garde tropes -- into his visual canvas. For example, in AMPHETAMINE, Sonbert misloaded the camera while photographing scenes of Times Square. The result produced abstract, streaked images -- a filming error -- which he then incorporated into AMPHETAMINE. These shots are thereby transformed to represent the hallucinogenic state of his male protagonists after shooting up drugs, and link Sonbert’s film even more closely to the dreamy visual atmosphere that Hitchcock created to represent the entranced state of Jimmy Stewart’s character in VERTIGO while embracing Madeleine, his romantic love.
This digital version of AMPHETAMINE is a 1080p transfer from 16mm materials.