The Sonbert Renaissance
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FILMMAKER WARREN SONBERT. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
In recent years, the work of filmmaker Warren Sonbert has experienced a renaissance among film critics, scholars, cinephiles, and the general public. Sonbert’s films have proven especially popular with younger audiences around the globe who are discovering his work for the first time.
Sonbert was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental cinema. He started making films as a student at New York University in the mid-1960s, when he was “in” with Andy Warhol’s crowd (Gerard Malanga and Rene Ricard are featured in his films), and at just 20 years old, he had a career retrospective at Jonas Mekas’ Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which was reviewed in Variety. Later, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Sonbert was a major figure of the avant-garde, and his films were regularly shown at the New York Film Festival, as well as other venues worldwide.
Gartenberg Media Enterprises was named 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, which are now housed at Harvard University.
THE EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVES OF WARREN SONBERT. SOURCE: MoMA.
In May 2023, The Museum of Modern Art mounted the series The Experimental Narratives of Warren Sonbert, which was organized by GME President Jon Gartenberg and Ron Magliozzi (Curator, MoMA’s Department of Film). This retrospective encompassed Sonbert’s complete body of work, spanning from 1966 to his death in 1995. Comprised of seven programs screened in 16mm, the series opened on the theme of queer identity with Sonbert’s transgressive debut film AMPHETAMINE (1966), and went on to explore the artist’s flirtation with Warhol’s Factory scene (in films such as 1966’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO), his travel diaries (such as 1973’s CARRIAGE TRADE), and the evolving styles, strategies, and poetics of his 16mm film work.
Of this retrospective, Gartenberg remarked: “Sonbert’s film CARRIAGE TRADE was shown in 1971 in the MoMA Cineprobe series, and it has been nearly two decades since the last retrospective of his films in New York City. This series can be considered a capstone to Sonbert’s creative career.” Programs in the MoMA retrospective were followed by post-screening conversations between Gartenberg and a number of Sonbert’s friends and colleagues, including filmmakers Abigail Child, Jeff Scher, and Jeff Preiss, as well as Carson Parish, Associate Producer in MoMA's Department of Film, and Drake Stutesman, Senior Editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, which has published two issues about Sonbert’s career. Highlights from these conversations can be viewed in the compilation video below:
In June 2024, Gartenberg adapted the programs from MoMA’s retrospective for the National Gallery of Art’s annual Pride Month event We Have Always Been Here.
The three Sonbert films that have garnered the most renewed interest in recent years are his pop music-infused debut AMPHETAMINE (1966), a film that directly references Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958); his silent montage masterwork CARRIAGE TRADE (1973), assembled from Sonbert's global travels; and his late-career fusion of music and montage, FRIENDLY WITNESS (1989). In September 2023, AMPHETAMINE screened in the exhibition Billy Bultheel & James Richards: Workers in Song at WIELS in Brussels. Bultheel and Richards’ show (which later traveled to the KW Institute of Contemporary Art) combined archival film and text with new music to explore the “boundaries between liveness and the pre-recorded” and the dynamic deconstruction of “songs and images,” as well as “interruptions, distortions, and homages.” Later that month, FRIENDLY WITNESS screened at NYU as part of Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) student Andrew Reichel’s program Three by Three by Three Hundred: Rare 16mm Films.
In February 2024, CARRIAGE TRADE — which plays in New York on a repertory basis as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema series — screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The film was shown in the Pompidou’s exhibition A History of Cinema, which “draws an alternative narrative to the dominant cinematic canons and constitutes the founding moment of the Museum’s film collection.” In April, writer and curator Joshua Minsoo Kim brought FRIENDLY WITNESS to Chicago’s Sweet Void Cinema as part of the program Pop Music in Prismatic Utopia, which also featured films by avant-garde luminaries Chick Strand, Bruce Baillie, and Thom Andersen. In August, AMPHETAMINE and its follow-up, WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (1966), screened at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, in the program The Motown Sound and the Queer Underground. Curated by GME associate Matt McKinzie, this program was featured in the ten-part series Sonic Visions: Experiments in Cinema and Music, presented by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
In Sonbert’s third film HALL OF MIRRORS (1966) — which he made while still a student at NYU — he combines outtakes from a Hollywood feature with his own footage of Gerard Malanga and Rene Ricard. Recently, HALL OF MIRRORS screened at Missouri’s New Music Circle in a program devoted to 1960s avant-garde film.
In addition to the aforementioned screenings and retrospectives, Sonbert’s films have continued to rent to colleges, universities, museums, and cinematheques around the globe, including (though not limited to) Duke University (U.S.), Cineinfinito (Spain), Cinémathèque Française (France), Ariona Hellas (Greece), Tel-Aviv Cinematheque (Israel), and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Germany).
SONBERT WITH HIS CAMERA, CIRCA 1970s. SOURCE: BERKELEY ART MUSEUM / PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE.
Sonbert’s films have been the subject of numerous essays, articles, and publications. In 2019, the queer film zine Dirty Looks published an experimental personal essay by Johnny Ray Huston, about Huston's experience watching Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE for the first time. A year later, Max Goldberg paid tribute to Sonbert’s oeuvre in the wide-ranging article “Charm Offensive: The Films of Warren Sonbert,” published online by the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive. Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE was referenced in Dr. Maurice Nagington’s 2025 book The Moral Lessons of Chemsex: A Critical Approach, published by Routledge, which “explores how gay and bi men’s lived experiences of chemsex intersect with its cultural representations.” Most recently, Volume 64, No. 2 of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media features Gartenberg as Guest Editor, and is devoted to contemporaneous writings about Sonbert’s early films.
For institutional rental and purchase inquiries, or to learn more about Sonbert’s life and career, please email info@gartenbergmedia.com. Stay tuned for forthcoming announcements about Framework 64.2, as well as the distribution of Sonbert’s work on digital formats.