August 2024 Roundup Related to GME Titles, Artists, and Colleagues
/As the summer season winds down, we reflect on screenings, events, and celebrations from August related to GME titles, artists, and colleagues. Notably, GME President Jon Gartenberg curated a program of politically-trenchant New York city symphony films that screened at Allied Productions Artist Space, while GME associate Matt McKinzie included two films by Warren Sonbert in a program of 1960s queer avant-garde shorts featuring Motown music at Spectacle Theater.
OFFICIAL POSTER FOR JON GARTENBERG’S PROGRAM POLITICALLY-TRENCHANT NEW YORK CITY SYMPHONY FILMS (1984-2006).
August 9th — Allied Productions Project Space
On Friday, August 9th, 2024, at 8pm, curator Jon Gartenberg presented five politically-trenchant New York city symphony films at Allied Productions Project Space (368 East 8th Street). Spanning the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the five films in this program posit New York City as a backdrop, and conduit, for political discourse pertaining to the AIDS crisis, economic gentrification, and 9/11. This program is the latest example of Gartenberg’s commitment to excavating and exhibiting city symphony films, a project he began cultivating in the early 1970s as a curator for MoMA’s Department of Film. To learn more about Gartenberg’s various city symphony programs and publications, click here.
JAMES BALDWIN, PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAIMONDO BOREA IN 1979. SOURCE: THE ESTATE OF RAIMONDO BOREA, COURTESY GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
August 26th — GME
On the occasion of the centennial celebration of writer and activist James Baldwin’s birth, GME paid tribute to his life, body of work, and lasting cultural impact with this photograph, taken by Raimondo Borea in 1979. An integral figure of both the civil rights and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, Baldwin unabashedly tackled themes of racial inequality, masculinity, sexuality, and class in his writings. Many of these writings are heralded as significant works of 20th-century American literature. The issues Baldwin addressed in his work have gained renewed relevance in present-day social and political discourse.
OFFICIAL POSTER FOR MATT MCKINZIE’S PROGRAM THE MOTOWN SOUND AND THE QUEER UNDERGROUND. SOURCE: MATT MCKINZIE, THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE.
August 30th — Spectacle Theater
On Friday, August 30th, at 7:30pm, Warren Sonbert’s first two films AMPHETAMINE (1966) and WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (1966) screened at Spectacle Theater (124 S. 3rd St.) in the program The Motown Sound and the Queer Underground. This program was curated by GME associate Matt McKinzie as part of the series Sonic Visions: Experiments in Cinema and Music, presented by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Sonbert, who began making experimental films as a teenager, was one of the seminal figures of the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s. As the custodian of his legacy, GME has worked on an extensive project to preserve, distribute, and curate career retrospectives of his films on an international basis, as well as publish original documents from the paper archive of his writings