DIVIDED LOYALTIES (US, 1978, Warren Sonbert)

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DIVIDED LOYALTIES limns the polarities of Warren's universe, both social and filmic (the image and the cut; the narrative and the formal). —Paul Arthur, Millennium Film Journal

Warren Sonbert described DIVIDED LOYALTIES as a film “about art versus industry and their various crossovers.” According to film critic Amy Taubin, “there is a clear analogy between the filmmaker and the dancers, acrobats and skilled workers who make up so much of his subject matter.”

In a lecture on film syntax at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, Sonbert elaborated upon his role as the film's omnipotent and omnipresent voice: “The job of editing is to balance a series of ambiguities in a tension-filled framework.” Interpreting a multiple-shot sequence from DIVIDED LOYALTIES (in which a close-up of a Cézanne paiting is being cleaned), he elaborated that “the image of art naturally refers back to the artist-filmmaker, saying that art is both objective and merciless, the filmmaker being both callous and opportunistic... the artist is cool and detached, but the reason is to shake up and disturb... art is being revealed in the causal link of images... nothing has a valid reality outside of the whole chain of images.”

Sonbert’s precise approach to each shot’s singularity, and the meanings that emerge in transitions, effectively slows everything down by insisting that viewers vigilantly attend to every frame. This contradictory feeling of time moving quickly and slowly at once seemed especially pronounced in… DIVIDED LOYALTIES… Sonbert’s cinema is witty, exhausting, sentimental, and full of rage. But it is never facile, and it never concedes to being any of these things all the time. To me, that seems to be its fundamental power. —Brandon Brown, Art in America

DIVIDED LOYALTIES
(US, 1978)

Director: Warren Sonbert

  • 22 minutes
  • 16mm
  • Color
  • Silent
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server

Published By: GME

Institutional Price: $250

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