Warren Sonbert's HALL OF MIRRORS Screens at New Music Circle on January 18th

On Saturday, January 18th, at 7pm, Missouri’s New Music Circle will screen Warren Sonbert’s third film, HALL OF MIRRORS (1966), in a program of experimental films that were made in the first decade of the organization’s existence (1959—1969). GME is the custodian of Sonbert’s legacy, and since his passing 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.

HALL OF MIRRORS is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert’s film classes at NYU taught by Carl Lerner, the editor of such Hollywood features as 12 ANGRY MEN (1957) and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT (1962). Sonbert was provided with outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence.

New Music Circle foregrounds the “creation and performance of improvisational and experimental music” in their mission. This program, titled An Evening of Experimental Films (1959—1969), highlights the stylistic and methodological parallels between experimental music-making and experimental filmmaking by showcasing avant-garde films from the late 1950s and 1960s that “play with the physicality of film itself and use film as a medium for conceptual art. The abstract and experimental films from this time period differed from conventional models of filmmaking in many ways; embracing change, collaging, technical innovation, and also freeing the filmmakers to create personal films that reflected their lives and social beliefs.”

Sonbert’s film is featured in this program alongside the work of such avant-garde luminaries as Maya Deren (1959’s THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT), Stan VanDerBeek (1959’s SCIENCE FRICTION), Pat O’Neil (1967’s 7362), and Edward Owens (1967’s REMEMBRANCE: A PORTRAIT STUDY).