International Tour of Films by Warren Sonbert Previewing in Paris on September 15

     On the evening of September 15, 2010, two programs of films by Warren Sonbert will be featured in public projections at Cinema Action Christine (4 rue Christine, 75006 Paris, Métro St-Michel, price: 6€).  The programs will be introduced by curator Jon Gartenberg, and are held as part Light Cone’s Preview Show, an annual event gathering experimental film programmers from around the world.  The two programs, which span Sonbert’s entire artistic career, announce the launch of an international tour of his films by Light Cone, the exclusive European distributor of his films.

     Warren Sonbert was one of the seminal figures of American experimental cinema.  He began making films in 1966 while a student at New York University.  Sonbert built upon his early experiments with camera movement, lighting, and framing to subsequently create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but also the larger sphere of global activity.  Sonbert’s passionate interest in film, music, experimental poetry, and travel is reflected in his films; he lived a completely engaged life, and the images culled from that life formed the raw material of his artistic expression.  His late works culminated in symphonic montages (both silent and sound) that unite universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry.

     Following Warren’s untimely death in 1995, a project was undertaken under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, in conjunction with curator Jon Gartenberg, to restore his final film, WHIPLASH, to public view as well as to preserve his entire extant body of work.  A complete set of preservation negatives of Sonbert’s films are now housed at the Academy Film Archives in Los Angeles. 
Sonbert retrospectives have subsequently taken place at the Guggenheim Museum (1999), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000), the Centre Pompidou (2002), the Austrian Filmmuseum (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2006), and the Harvard Film Archive (2008).

     Prints of Sonbert’s films are now available for European distribution exclusively from Light Cone.  Light Cone, in collaboration with Gartenberg Media Enterprises, will present a new tour of Warren Sonbert’s films throughout European cinematheques, festivals, and other cultural institutions beginning in the fall of 2010.

For more information visit: www.lightcone.org

Or contact us at:  info@gartenbergmedia.com

          

46th Pesaro Film Festival

Jon Gartenberg attended this year's 

Pesaro Film Festival, from June 19-26, 

where he presented Dustin Thompson's 

experimental narrative THE TRAVELOGUES, 

featured in the festival section "Bande à Part".

For more information on this year's festival,

awards and highlights, visit here:

www.pesarofilmfest.it

NY Press Praises TFF Experimental Programs

"One of the most incredible movies at Tribeca is, at 49 minutes in length, probably the least commercial: Dustin Thompson’s avant-garde documentary Travelogues, one of curator Jon Gartenberg’s invaluable annual outside-the-bell-curve contributions to the festival’s slate. Thompson films a diary of sorts, with accompanying text, comprised of tableaux from his journeys, mainly in Germany, Italy, France, and California. He is a democratic tourist: a lover, an Italian cathedral, and surfers in a Munich river carry equal narrative weight. The mini-narratives, however, are distinguished by differing angles and speeds; form sets them apart. This is fantastic stuff, a festival film that makes you feel that life is worth living, and Tribeca worth attending."

Howard Feinstein, Filmmaker Magazine

04/19/2010

Full article: www.filmmakermagazine.com

"Visionaries, one of the 85 features to be screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, covers the origins of the city's avant-garde film movement...

Now in its ninth year, the Tribeca Film Festival continues to jointly celebrate both narrative and experimental filmmaking traditions. Every category of the festival includes a number of experimental films in its line-up.

'Often these films are shown in venues where people are often familiar or accustomed to experimental film. One thing we do at Tribeca, which is very unique and in contrast distinction to other festivals, is all the experimental programming that I select is incorporated in the festival sections,' says Tribeca experimental programmer Jon Gartenberg. 'It's not segregated.' "

Donna Karger, NY1.com

04/22/2010

Full article & video: www.NY1.com

Experimental Film Programs at Tribeca Film Festival, April 21 – May 2, 2010

Experimental Film Programs at Tribeca Film Festival, April 21 – May 2, 2010

Jon Gartenberg has programmed experimental and avant-garde films for the Tribeca Film Festival since 2003.   This year’s selections include three programs offering a range of movies spanning 3 continents & 6 countries.

Check www.tribecafilm.com for screening times, venues and tickets.

Program 1:

VISIONARIES(2010, Chuck Workman), 88 min.  World Premiere.

In Precious Images, his 1986 Academy Award®-winning short, director Chuck Workman assembled a breathtaking eight-minute collage of singular images from classic Hollywood movies. In Visionaries, Workman brings alive, in counterpoint to the commercial film industry, the vibrant history of the American avant-garde cinema. In engaging interviews with renowned underground filmmakers and critics including Ken Jacobs, Robert Downey, Su Friedrich, P. Adams Sitney, and Amy Taubin, Workman reveals how this artistic movement highlights subjective vision, sensory experience, and dreams over plot and storyline. The director skillfully intersperses these intimate conversations with a stylistically diverse array of extracts from experimental films of all stripes. Dating from the 1920s to the present, avant-garde films by such pioneering artists as Man Ray, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Sadie Benning vividly illustrate for the general audience a qualitatively different kind of moviegoing experience distinct from that promulgated by the commercial cinema. Workman's documentary pays special tribute to filmmaker, curator, and critic Jonas Mekas and Anthology Film Archives, the organization that he founded. It is the premier American institution dedicated to the preservation and promotion of avant-garde film culture, assuring a long-term home for this alternative cinema right alongside the Hollywood classics.

--Jon Gartenberg

Program 2:

TRAVEL DIARIES

YANQUI WALKER & THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION(2009, Kathryn Ramey), 33 min.  New York Premiere.

THE TRAVELOGUES(2009, Dustin Thompson), 49 min.  World Premiere.

Co-Presented with Black Maria Film + Video Festival.

The travel diary genre provides the format for experimental filmmakers Dustin Thompson (TheTravelogues) and Kathryn Ramey (Yanqui Walker and the Optical Revolution) to explore, in richly textured and multilayered pictorial and audio fashion, journeys of adventure and conquest. Ramey portrays American expansionist William Walker's ascent to the presidency of Nicaragua in 1856. This film is densely structured. Threading together educational film clips, expressive animation, location photography, on-screen text, voiceover narration, and an array of experimental filmmaking techniques, the filmmaker raises compelling questions about visual perception and the construction of history.

In The Travelogues, Dustin Thompson creates a more personal story. He travels with his film camera across two continents and compiles a series of mini-narratives, suggestive of loves gained and lost. He generates lyrical images, shot at oblique angles and developed with shifting camera speeds; in each scene, the heightened film grain tends to move the depiction of the natural universe toward abstraction. From the prologue through to the epilogue of his journey, this artist travels a fine line between real and imagined worlds.

--Jon Gartenberg

Program 3:

EXPERIMENTAL COLLISIONS[Short Film Program]

The 10 experimental films in this program portray locales found in both natural and urban landscapes across three continents. A few of these artist-filmmakers literally embed the earth (soil and mud) into the fabric of the celluloid. Moreover, they portray these environments with a riveting array of avant-garde techniques that range from mirror images to extended tracking shots leading directly into the mind's eye. They further infuse these found footage, animation, and live action experimental films with dynamic editing rhythms that radically reshape the viewer's perception of reality, leading to Rorschach-like impressions. In experimental cinema, everything culminates in abstract patterns ingrained in the landscape of the film frame.

--Jon Gartenberg

   Films include:

• Grandmother’s Eye (2010, Sweden, Jonathan Lewald), 5 min.  North American Premiere.

• Release (2010, US, Bill Morrison), 12 min.  World Premiere.

• Walkway (2009, US, Ken Jacobs), 9 min.  North American Premiere.

• Lachen Verlernt(2009, Great Britain, Tal Rosner), 10 min.  World Premiere.

• This disk is the same as the other one(2009, France, Jean-Jacques Palix), 9 min.                        North American Premiere.

• Collision of Parts (2010, US, Mark Street), 15 min.  World Premiere.

• Berlin (2010, Canada, Martin Laporte), 8 min.  World Premiere.

• The Delicate Art of the Bludgeon (2009, France, Jean-Gabriel Periot), 4 min.                                North American Premiere.

• Black White Black White(2009, US, John Thompson), 15 min.World Premiere.

• TheVisible and Invisible of a Body Under Tension(2009,France, Emmanuel Lefrant), 7 min.        North American Premiere.

2009 BEST OF AFA: BERYL SOKOLOFF PROGRAM

2009 THE BEST OF ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

As 2009 draws to a close, we offer up a brief series representing that rarest of phenomena: the Second Chance. We’ve combed through our calendars from the last couple years and assembled a selection of a few films, videos, and programs that we feel were the major discoveries of our past half-dozen calendars, but still have not been discovered enough! The Best of AFA represents a second chance to see these films or a chance to see them for the second time. Either way, join us as we ride out 2009 with a look back at some of the more unusual and little-known gems that graced our screens in recent months.

BERYL SOKOLOFF PROGRAM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20 6:30 PM

Sokoloff (1918-2006) was a creative artist who worked in many different art forms: as a painter, a photographer, a photojournalist, a musician, and a filmmaker. In his filmmaking career, which spanned the 1950s-90s, Sokoloff focused on portraits of numerous artists and the process of making art, observations of politics and society, and poetic evocations of both New York City and landscapes encountered through his travels, frequently weaving these various threads together in individual films.

The two programs screened at Anthology last fall helped bring attention to Sokoloff’s creative vision, as well as the importance of archiving, restoring, and distributing his films. Here we have selected from the two programs to display the full range of Sokoloff’s subjects and themes.

The films in this program have not yet been precisely dated, but were all made between the 1960s-1990s.

Curated by Jon Gartenberg, in consultation with Crista Grauer, and with archival project assistance from Jeffrey P. Capp and Crystal Rangel. 

Preservation print of MY MIRRORED HOPE by BB Optics.

MY MIRRORED HOPE (17 minutes)
FIRE (11 minutes)
GAUDI (8 minutes)
LINE (11 minutes)
CHROMOCHROMO (10 minutes)
KAPITOL (9 minutes)
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

DISCOVERING BERYL SOKOLOFF

Anthology Film Archives (New York City)

DISCOVERING BERYL SOKOLOFF

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is engaged in a project to archive and restore the experimental films of Beryl Sokoloff (1918-2006), who – as a painter, photographer, photo-journalist and musician - was a permanent fixture of the New York art world. For more information, go to: www.anthologyfilmarchives.org