WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (US, 1966, Warren Sonbert)
/WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? feels like both a valentine and a farewell to a generation… the generation which no one, probably, understands but which Sonbert, in a series of tender and moving moments, has revealed to us. I could watch this film a hundred times; it made me feel older than I am, but it also opened my eyes and my heart. —James Stoller, Village Voice, 1966
It is a film about The Group. About the tribal atmosphere that pervades New York Society. A randomly edited ‘home movie’ in which the people I care for most are inextricably mixed together, flowing from one to another. Faces appear and reappear, an ever-changing kaleidoscope. —Warren Sonbert, in a letter to Gerard Malanga, Summer 1967
WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? is an homage to the artistic and social milieu of New York City in the 1960s, as portrayed by the youthful protagonists in the film. Sonbert chronicles his friends and colleagues at the Janis and Castelli galleries, MOMA, Warhol’s Factory, the Bleecker Street Cinema, a rock concert, shopping, dancing, partying, and simply hanging out. These group activities have a contemporary and poignant relevance (cf. HALL OF MIRRORS), since WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? represents a way of life – clusters of friends – before social distancing was necessitated by Covid-19.
A SCENE FROM WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?
WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (US, 1966)
Director: Warren Sonbert
- 15 minutes
- 16mm
- Color
- Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server
Published By: Gartenberg Media Enterprises
Institutional Price: $250
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By the time he was fifteen years old, Sonbert was regularly attending screenings at the Bleecker Street Cinema. He quickly became friendly with the theater personnel, who regularly programmed foreign classics, contemporary French New Wave movies, documentaries, and independent American and experimental films, all of which invariably became a center of Sonbert’s film education.
In the basement of the theater, the management published a film journal, NY Film Bulletin. In 1964 (at age 17!) Sonbert became Editor-in-Chief of the special issue on Jean-Luc Godard. Further underscoring Sonbert’s precocious understanding of cinematic form and structure, he interviewed Godard for this issue. Sonbert illuminates for Godard the French filmmaker’s use of the motif of spherical objects and motions in BANDE À PART (1964). Sonbert’s awareness of this visual strategy anticipated his own use of spiral and circular motifs in his first film, AMPHETAMINE).
Writing in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1968, Gene Youngblood reflected on the importance of Sonbert’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? in relation to Jean-Luc Godard’s CONTEMPT (1963):
“One day several weeks ago my office mail included a photo of Brigitte Bardot in CONTEMPT, which appears in Warren Sonbert’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?. I’m very interested in this matter because both Jonas Mekas and James Stoller in the Village Voice proclaim Sonbert as a genius. Mekas speaks of Sonbert creating a new narrative form which, he said, surpasses Godard. New York critics have nothing but praise for this young filmmaker (20 years old), who seems to be dealing with some new form of nostalgia or sentiment exclusively 60’s oriented. Writing of WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, Mekas emphasized its multidimensional moods. ‘The film is made up of a complex web of spontaneously, intuitively shot and edited (mostly during the shooting) scenes. It’s a post -Godardian cinema. I am not sure in exactly what way, but I have a feeling that Godard has been assimilated and transcended here, by the use of freer techniques that permit putting on film more feeling than intellect. The Brakhage aesthetics are winning out.’
“If WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? includes a reference to CONTEMPT, it’s a film I definitely want to see: I’ve long felt that CONTEMPT is perhaps a pioneer work of New Nostalgia. For me at least CONTEMPT and L’ECLISSE [1962, Michelangelo Antonioni] are ultimate statements on early 1960s nostalgia and sentiment, a kind of post-existentialist romanticism. From what I hear, Warren Sonbert could be the artist to take up where Godard and Antonioni have left off, moving away from a cinema of emotions toward a cinema of ideas.”
As Sonbert’s career evolved, he continued to pay homage within his own films to those filmmakers that he admired (see references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film VERTIGO in Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE). In WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, the scene of a bathroom attendant brushing the jacket of a young man directly references F.W. Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH (1924).
Click image to play a comparison of scenes from F.W. Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH (1924) and Warren Sonbert’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (1966)
This digital version of WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? is a 1080p transfer from 16mm materials, with a newly-recorded music track.