SFMOMA | Exhibitions | William Sonbert

Friendly Witnesses: The Worlds of Warren Sonbert



	Warren Sonbert began making films in 1966, as a student at New York University's film school. His earliest films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were inspired first by the university milieu and then by the denizens of the Warhol art scene, including superstars René Ricard and Gerard Malanga. In these loosely structured narratives, Sonbert boldly experimented with the relationship between filmmaker and protagonists through extensively choreographed handheld camera movements within each shot. The mood of these films was further modulated by chiaroscuro effects, achieved primarily through natural lighting (in both interior and outdoor shots), combined with variations in the raw film stock and the exposure and the use of rock-and-roll music on the soundtrack.

Warren Sonbert
Whiplash
1997
Courtesy of Ascension Serrano
The estate of Warren Sonbert

		In the late 1960s, as Sonbert began to carry his Bolex camera on international trips, his cinematic strategy shifted to incorporate footage from these travels together with sections from his earlier films. This process resulted in his first major epic, Carriage Trade. Sonbert's works from this period show him perfecting his ability to transform his early experiments into the more accomplished works of a mature artist by using his own distinct brand of "polyvalent montage," a technique in which each shot "can be combined with surrounding shots along potentially many dimensions. That is, this style begins in the realization that a shot may either match or contrast with adjacent, preceding or succeeding shots in virtue of color, subject, shape, shade, texture, the screen orientation of object, the direction of camera or object movement, or even the stasis thereof."2 He built upon his early experiments in camera movement, lighting, and framing to create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but the larger sphere of human activity. In these films he commented on such contemporary issues as art and industry, news reportage and its effect on our lives, and the interrelationship between the creative arts. Short Fuse (1992), for example, incorporates themes from the Strauss opera Capriccio, while Noblesse Oblige (1981) is patterned after Douglas Sirk's Tarnished Angels (1958). Like Tarnished Angels, Noblesse Oblige contains themes of flying and falling, and the way media reportage shapes public perceptions of people and events; it also contains shots of Tarnished Angels on video monitors and of Sirk himself conversing in a café. During the years immediately preceding his death, Sonbert channeled all his energy into making his final film, Whiplash. Never discussing the nature of his affliction even with his closest friends, he tirelessly shot footage on a final trip to Spain in March 1994. (Whiplash's bullfight imagery is from this footage.) On his return to the United States, his vision and motor skills impaired, he gave his companion, Ascension Serrano, detailed instructions about the assembly of specific shots and the music to be used as a counterpoint to the images. Before his death in 1995, Sonbert asked filmmaker Jeff Scher (a former student of his at Bard) to complete the film, a process that involved literally trimming the ends of various shots that Sonbert had already assembled so that the imagery would conform to the rhythm of the music that he had selected. Scher's work was extremely consonant with Sonbert's working process: an inspection of Sonbert's outtake reels reveals that he had spliced back into these reels individual frames that he had removed while refining the editing of each of his films.

	Warren Sonbert in the 1960s Courtesy of Ascension Serrano The estate of Warren Sonbert

Whiplash, which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 30, 1997, is a compelling, multilayered portrayal of the filmmaker's struggle to maintain equilibrium in his physical self, his perceptual reality, and the world of friends and family around him. In it, Sonbert articulated the ideas and values for which he intended to be remembered. Most important among these is the theme of love between couples, a subject he had explored in his earliest films, including Amphetamine and The Bad and the Beautiful.

Sonbert was able to transform, in seemingly effortless fashion, globetrotting diaristic footage into exquisitely modulated visual symphonies of ritual, performance, and suggestion. As he perfected his unique brand of montage from one film to the next, he used this editing technique to engage the spectator in the process of viewing his films. By doing so, he wished "to juggle disparate reactions in a struggle against viewer complacency and easily derived judgements."3 His model in this was not the "knee-jerk" reaction produced by Eisensteinian montage, but rather the "images and editing riffs of poetry" in Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1929).4 Sonbert's strategy of actively engaging the spectator in the multifaceted readings of his individual works is perhaps his most enduring legacy.

Jon Gartenberg, guest curator

Notes 1. Byro, "Still NYU Student, Warren Sonbert's Wooster St. B.O.," Variety, 7 February 1968, 17. 2. Noel Carroll, quoted in Jon Gartenberg, "The Avant-Garde: Ernie Gehr & Warren Sonbert," Films in Review 33, no. 6 (June-July 1982): 370. 3. William Graves, written notes for eulogy given at Sonbert's memorial service, San Francisco, 1995. 4. Warren Sonbert, "Point of View," Spiral, no. 1 (October 1984): 5.