Warren Sonbert Retrospective at The Wexner Center for the Arts: January 20th & 27th, 2016
/Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio on January 20th & 27th.
Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.
From The Wexner Center Website:
"One of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema, Warren Sonbert began making films in 1966 as a precocious NYU student who found himself in the midst of Andy Warhol’s Factory. After graduating, he took his Bolex camera on his travels as he perfected a complex style of filming and editing that lyrically transforms mundane-yet-beautiful details into larger emotions, concepts, and visual splendors. Sonbert’s influences ranged from rock-and-roll to opera, from Douglas Sirk to Stan Brakhage. This vital retrospective featuring all newly restored prints cements his reputation as one of the most innovative and notable experimental filmmakers of the last half of the 20th century.
As a testament to his ongoing vitality, the spring 2015 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media is devoted to Sonbert’s writing. Pick up your copy at the Wexner Center Store."
WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)
"Following the filmmaker’s death in 1995 of AIDS, Sonbert’s partner, Ascension Serrano, tasked Jon Gartenberg, through the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, with the preservation of Sonbert’s work. Gartenberg first became associated with Sonbert’s films while Gartenberg was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, during which time he acquired several of Sonbert’s films.
'[Sonbert's] idea was to engage the viewer in an accumulation of different shots that were not specifically narrative, but that were linear and poetic,' Gartenberg said. 'But more than any experimental filmmaker, his work was less about image abstraction and more about an experimental approach to narrative structure, through how he built a montage of images and scenes.'"
For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective
All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert