GME News
A series of films by Warren Sonbert, curated and presented by GME President Jon Gartenberg, will screen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in June as part of the museum’s annual Pride Month event We Have Always Been Here. Gartenberg adapted these Sonbert programs from the Sonbert retrospective that played at The Museum of Modern Art in May of last year.
Read MoreGME would like to remind you of the recently made availability of a premiere selection of experimental and independent films from the Re:voir Collection, now available as digital files for streaming on university intranet servers. For more than 20 years, Gartenberg Media Enterprises has partnered with Re:voir in making available a diverse and fragile body of experimental and independent films, both classic and contemporary, that merits exposure to a wider audience.
Read MoreGME is pleased to announce the availability of a premiere selection of experimental and independent films from the Re:voir Collection, now available as high quality digital files for streaming on university intranet servers. For more than 20 years, Gartenberg Media Enterprises has partnered with Re:voir in making available a diverse and fragile body of experimental and independent films, both classic and contemporary, that merits exposure to a wider audience. We have kept current with the technological changes in formats for the delivery of these cutting edge works to our educational clients, first by releasing editions of Re:voir publications in VHS, then DVD, and now, in high quality digital files as digital site licenses.
Read MoreGartenberg Media wishes the best for our university colleagues in these trying times. Due to the sudden advent of remote teaching beginning in March, we decided to suspend our announcement of our spring semester DVD releases until the fall of 2020. Nevertheless we are fully prepared to fulfill prospective orders to the academic community from our entire catalog of more than 200 titles. For a complete list of our DVD/Blu-ray titles and pricing, please click here. There are live links from each title to its individual web page description. We thought this listing would be helpful for university librarians who need to expend their budgets before the end of this academic year in May, as well as for professors anticipating teaching material for their fall curricula.
Read MoreDuring this semester, Gartenberg Media Enterprises has offered an extensive slate of new DVD and Blu-ray publications for distribution to the North American academic community. These digital editions were selected from film archives and boutique publishers worldwide, and represent the entire breadth and depth of moving image history. They encompassed trick films by George Méliès, dating from the 1890s, through to 21st Century experimental filmmakers working in both France and the United States, including Jacques Perconte, Jeff Scher, and Robert Todd.
Read MoreGME takes you underground with Jeff Scher’s TUNNEL VISION (2013).
Read MoreUNIONDOCS • 322 UNION AVE •BROOKLYN, NY 11211
Decasia by Bill Morrison
The Fragile Emulsion curated by Jon Gartenberg
Sunday, December 5th at 7:30pm $9 suggested donation.
Jon Gartenberg in attendance for discussion.
One of the most vital and richly textured art forms threatened with extinction centers around the practice of avant-garde filmmaking, particularly in 16mm format. These filmmakers treat the celluloid film emulsion as a living organism: it is an organic substance, a shimmering silver onto which they directly imprint the delicacy of their emotions. They work in relative isolation, creating their films with the hand of an artist, rather than as products for consumption by a mass audience. The style of their films most frequently challenges the conventions of linear narrative. These filmmakers recognize not only the ephemeral nature of the celluloid film stock, but also the perilous state of human existence in the modern world. They begin with their direct experiences of everyday reality and often move toward a process of abstraction in their films. They filter found objects from the world around them, and through a wide array of filmmaking techniques, including use of outdated film stock, over- and underexposure, scratching directly on the film emulsion, re-photography, and optical printing – articulate distinct, individually defined processes of creation. They evoke spiritual visions of the world in which their own livelihood is inextricably linked to the vibrancy of the film emulsion – both literally and figuratively – as a matter of life and death.
Program Runtime 73 minutes.
In Bill Morrison’s found footage opus, Decasia, decomposition reaches into the farthest corners of the natural and manmade world, penetrating continents, military and religious powers, the entire animal kingdom, architectural constructions as well as the celluloid film stock itself onto which all these delicate images are imprinted.
In Sanctus, Barbara Hammer addresses in compelling fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the artist’s raw material onto which she creates images. The filmmaker transforms historic scientific x-ray films into a lyrical journey, reworking this found footage material into a celebration of the body as temple.
In Her Fragrant Emulsion, images of 1960’s B-movie actress Mimsy Farmer float on the surface of the film emulsion, evoking erotic meditations on loves gained and lost. “The images I use are outmoded, and there’s a way that they’re dead. By working with them I’m kind of re-animating them, so I don’t really think of myself as an animator, as much as a re-animator that’s bringing these things back into some kind of life.” – Lewis Klahr
Throughout Hall of Mirrors Sonbert underscores the materiality of film and the self-referential aspect of the filmmaking enterprise. Sonbert incorporates black and white outtakes from a Hollywood movie with new scenes that he photographs in color; the filmmaker works the exposed leader of the film rolls in the fabric of his movie, and captures his own reflected image while shooting one of his protagonists (Warhol superstar Gerard Malanga) in artist Lucas Samaras’ Mirrored Room. Hall of Mirrors begins and ends with the protagonists’ movements enmeshed within multiple reflecting mirrors. The film’s imagery, combined with the rock and roll soundtrack, underscores the sense of visual entrapment of the characters in their respective environments, in a manner that conveys both youthful longing and human vulnerability.
Jeff Scher turns the table on his former teacher and mentor, Warren Sonbert (at a time when Sonbert was secretly afflicted with AIDS), creating an intimate dialogue between friends and colleagues, as well as a tense battle of directorial wills.
Whiplash is a compelling, multilayered portrayal of filmmaker Warren Sonbert’s struggle to maintain equilibrium in his physical self, his perceptual reality, and the world of friends and family around him, as his own mortality pressed upon his psyche. In it, Sonbert articulated the ideas and values by which he intended to be remembered. Most important among these is the theme of love between couples.
Jon Gartenberg is an archivist, distributor, and programmer. He began his career on the curatorial staff of The Museum of Modern Art, followed by jobs in the business sector both at Broadway Video and Golden Books. In 1998, he established Gartenberg Media Enterprises (www.gartenbergmedia.com), a company that is dedicated on the excavation, repurposing, and distribution of library assets in film, television, photographic, and print media.
In terms of experimental cinema, Gartenberg acquired avant-garde movies for the permanent collection of MOMA’s Film Department and restored the films of Andy Warhol. He also initiated a film preservation project with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, which culminated in the conservation of films by artists Warren Sonbert, David Wojnarowicz, Curt McDowell, and Jack Waters.
Currently, his company distributes avant-garde films on DVD and licenses them as well for documentary film productions. GME also advises and supports cutting edge filmmakers on the economics of experimental film production, distribution and exhibition. Gartenberg has programmed experimental films for the Tribeca Film Festival since 2003.
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