Kino21’s Warren Sonbert triptych concluded last Thursday evening with the “Narrative Vertigo” program featuring A Woman’s Touch and Short Fuse. Afterwards, a fellow gawker puzzled over whether Sonbert’s work made him want to see more films or live more life—the blurring of these lives is profound and seems to me, after a very limited exposure to the work, quintessentially Sonbertian. It’s evident watching the films that Sonbert was simultaneously interested in everything—narrative and abstraction, opera, sexuality, friendship, cats, architecture, the world—and wholly indifferent to establishing a restrictive platform or program for his work. The formal apparatus is closely controlled, but the effect of Sonbert’s films is deeply freewheeling. One thing’s for sure: the images—even when they’re repeated—leave you greedy for more, and one longs for a marathon setting to maybe begin to get past the visual sensuousness of the films and start to understand why he never lingers on a given image of beauty, why he doesn’t develop an association so much as have send it to ricochet in feverish multiplicity.
Konrad Steiner and Johnny Ray Huston programmed this series together, and the two were kind enough to submit to some of my questions when I embarked on the quixotic task of writing about a filmmaker sight unseen. I’m sorry to admit I hadn’t even heard of Sonbert until I first heard about these screenings, in spite of his being an admired film artist and critic, and a notable San Franciscan (he gave Vertigo tours to friends and periodically turned up to lecture at the PFA—Steiner and Huston are hoping to include his exacting analysis of Marnie in a Sonbert chapbook they’re putting together). It makes me wonder what other ghosts might be waiting to whisper in my ear. With an artist like Sonbert, the “currency” of their work is what they’ve put into it—i.e. their hobbies and hallucinations, affects and affections. There’s nothing commodifiable about it—though Johnny makes a good point below that the work sprouts unexpected historical value in its zesty documentation of different milieus—so after the artist is gone, the work is all too easily lost or glossed. With a culture hyped on its capacity for simultaneity, we must keep digging.
Konrad and Johnny each responded to my questions over email, and I’ve joined most of their respective texts here. It is long, but if you go the distance you will find treasure in their thoughtful reflections. Konrad’s instructive paragraphs on polyvalent montage and Johnny’s elegant situating of Sonbert’s creative personality both demonstrate a hearty capacity to really engage a filmmaker’s individualistic style.
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MG: What was your first experience of Sonbert’s work? Do you have any personal impressions of him?
Konrad Steiner: I believe I first saw him at 80 Langton Street in May of 1983 giving his talk at the panel on avant-garde film. He bit the hand that fed him there by criticizing Langton for spending money on the panel instead of giving it to the artists for a residency. He was pretty strident about that, and it got him into hot water on the occasion, and at the same time I think he enjoyed stirring things up that way, since he was well-established by that time. I was impressed by him, and it reinforced my own sentiments to hear him speak for the film artist over and against the critic and the institution. He came across as someone who spoke his mind in public and was a strong advocate for both the art and the artist in a world that had not yet really taken experimental film seriously enough as an art form. I was introduced to Warren in the mid 1980s, but we were not even really acquaintances. It was just hard to avoid meeting, since at the time I was first getting involved in the SF poetry and film worlds. I only saw his films later in the 1980s, after I had started making my own work.
Johnny Ray Huston: I never met Warren Sonbert. I first encountered his name through the Bay Area Reporter, a gay weekly paper in San Francisco, when I moved to the Bay Area in the early ’90s. At the time, Warren wrote film reviews for the B.A.R., as well as occasional pieces about books and music. When I read Warren’s pieces back then, I had no idea he was a filmmaker, let alone an esteemed one — I responded to his learned, witty candor. At the time, the gay press, or the B.A.R.’s version of it, included a wider array of voices. Over time, I’d encounter references to Warren’s films in books by Gregory Battcock and Winston Wheeler Dixon, and also discovered Warren’s thoughts on filmmaking in an essay/speech contained in an issue of Film Culture that I bought from Skyline Books in New York. My first experience of Warren’s films has been through assembling this program with Konrad, and it’s been a revelation.
MG: Can you speak to some of what you value in the films? In terms of their style, sensibility, sociological value? Do you find that his polyamorous affection for different forms (Hollywood movies, opera, poetry, postcards, etc) still comes across?
KS: I was immediately curious about his work when I saw it, because he was also working in a form of pure montage, which is what I was doing too, and we shared few of the same influences, in Brakhage and Dorsky, although they were his peers and my elders. So I valued seeing how someone else was exploring this same territory, although my work was much more materialist at the time (scratching, hand processing, and working against the photographic image).
JRH: Maybe I should address the “Pop Witness” program. I wanted to see — and thus show — these early works partly due to simple curiosity about their contents. I knew that Sonbert was utilizing soundtracks built from pop music in some cases, and I wanted to see how his use of such songs might vary from Kenneth Anger’s — especially because most writing about Anger tends to either downplay or outright miss the currents of camp irony and sincerity and charged lyricism within such music.
I wanted to see (1966’s) Hall of Mirrors partly to see the poet and critic Rene Ricard, and indeed the film presents Ricard in all of his mop-topped ne’er-do-well glory of the time. But Hall of Mirrors contained a much greater surprise: the title extends beyond the Op Art societal gallery realms navigated throughout most of the film — though Op is a realm I have a fresh interest in as of late — into a specific piece of art filmed by Sonbert. It’s my favorite piece that I’ve encountered by one of my favorite artists. (I don’t want to name names.) Its presence, I think, speaks to or hints at the glorious excess of Sonbert’s more sophisticated work to come.
MG: What drew you to programming this series and how long has it been in the works? Did you always have the sense that you wanted to do three evenings to emphasize the different facets of Sonbert’s filmmaking?
KS: For myself, I’ve wanted to revisit this work for a long time, and in mentioning it to friends, they’ve also encouraged the idea. It’s been 8 years since SFMoMA showed all the films, and since then I can’t think of any program devoted to his work in the Bay Area. So it’s about time.
JRH: The structure really fell into place quite naturally. I knew I wanted to present a pop program of sorts, and for me the question became which of Sonbert’s later works might make for an apt second act to his initial short films with pop soundtracks. At first, I thought the answer or final touch might be A Woman’s Touch (1983), since it also has connections to popular culture via an overt interest in the cinema of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. But through discussion and screening it became clear that one of Sonbert’s last films with sound, either 1972’s Short Fuse or 1989’s Friendly Witness, would provide an effective counterpoint.
Viewing Friendly Witness in relation to Sonbert’s early films is a bit like déja-vu, complete with the increased complexity that’s inherent to such an experience. Sonbert deploys popular music again, and he uses personal archival material — he goes back through his memories, as it were. But he does so with his sharply developed and very individual approach to editing, an approach that, comparatively speaking, was scarcely formed in his first films.
MG: It’s striking to me how fragile this kind of body of work can be, how quickly it can lose popular currency. Sonbert was a highly regarded artist, a social giant bridging a few different key milieus and a local legend to boot, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much about him before starting this research. It seems to me that were he a experimental musician of analogous repute, his name would be in better circulation. I’m curious to know your thoughts on this and how it played into the particulars of your programming (are you thinking of it as an overview? an introduction? a selection of favorites?)…
JRH: I have no illusions about this being a definitive presentation of Sonbert’s work, which is far-ranging. In fact, I feel I’m still near the surfaces of all he has created.
To put it one way, I think I could have had some great conversations about Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock with Warren Sonbert, because both of us know the depths of those directors’ films, or at least the depths of some of them in my case. As for Sonbert’s own movies, I’m only just seeing them now, and the late-era works in particular aren’t the kind that can be interpreted or for lack of a better word ingested anywhere near as quickly as traditional narrative cinema. They do have an immediate impact, though!
The delicacy or fragility of Sonbert’s movies, to me, stems partly from the fragility and outright endangered quality of film itself in this digital-amnesiac era. Sonbert has way too much ‘joy of life’ racing through these movies for their at times quite learned aspects — tons of references that sail over my head — to come off as effete in the manner of some off-putting (to me) avant-garde work. I suppose any fragility at the very core of Sonbert’s movies has to do with survival and mortality: I get the sense that Sonbert put his life into his movies, which adds subtexts to the final ones in particular. But I also get a sense that his films ‘just’ capture moments of an extremely active life.
MG: Researching Sonbert’s work a lot of the same names and institutions (e.g. Estate Project for Artists with AIDS) come up again and again. Did you receive any support from these usual suspects? Or have any correspondences with his many friends and fans?
KS: The support we got for this series is strictly from our pockets and the willing collaboration of kino21’s venues, Artists’ Television Access and SF Camerawork. A shout out is due here to them for being among the last spaces in SF that will not charge you for the space. We salute them! Johnny is mostly in charge of the chap, so I’ll just chip in that it will have writings from many of Sonbert’s admirers and artistic compatriots in addition to his own words including Bay Area poets Alan Bernheimer and Carla Harryman, and filmmakers Abigail Child and Jeff Scher from New York.
MG: I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about the chapbook you’re putting together for the events…Are any of his writings (Scottie Ferguson or otherwise) going to be included?
JRH: Sonbert’s friendships with poets mean that there already is — and there could be more — writing or spoken observation by people who choose words wisely. He’s far from the first filmmaker of his realm to have connections with poets, but his particular ties are distinct, and they don’t relate to his work in obvious ways. Sonbert also taught, and some of his lectures have been printed. I’ve done some research into Sonbert’s film reviews in the gay press. I’m in the early stages. Looking through microfilm/microfiche is time consumingly slow in a way that’s hard to bring across to most people in the current era. But it’s also rewarding. I’ve gotten a kick out of Sonbert’s writings on everything from Marcel Proust to Steve Martin’s L.A. Story.
MG: More specific to the films: a lot of the early films traffic in the Factory culture, but obviously Sonbert was able to move past the scene. Are there particular flashpoints of maturation for you in his filmography?
KS: We wanted to show Carriage Trade because it is such a quantum leap for Sonbert’s approach handling the variety of imagery he was gathering. That film was the pivot for him, in terms of style and in terms of theorizing his aesthetic.
The return to sound is another amazing cusp, with Friendly Witness, and then Short Fuse, where the silent montage style that he developed over the 70s and 80s united with the pop-song driven episodic structure of the earlier 60s work. That was a culmination of these two strands in his aesthetic and it took a long time for him to find a way to marry them. At the same time it was the beginning of a new more complex phase of his work. It’s a measure of what we lost that he didn’t get to take this joining of musical and narrative ideas even further.
I find Paul Arthur’s writing particularly valuable in this respect because it is measured, critical and insightful at once. He’s able to give some anecdotes that sum up Sonbert’s dedication to his craft.
MG: Much of Sonbert seems like a siren song from a fading era of 16mm cinephilia…and gay culture. Specifically with the way Sonbert’s films embody and deflect desire and sensuousness, I’m curious to what extent you find his filmography to be transgressive, subversive, etc. Is there a sense in which (kudos to Paul Arthur), his body of work have strangely become equivalent to Douglas Sirk’s in its tensions and magnificent obsessions?
JRH: Sirk is so rigid tonally, while Sonbert’s films almost verge on violent in their bursts of action and activity. But I do respond to these siren songs, and suspect that younger generations would even moreso if given the opportunity. In the immediate ’90s and early 21st century aftermath of the AIDS epidemic’s catastrophic impact on generations of gay men, I think there’s been an understandable hesitancy and reluctance to look back at gay culture and people who were lost. In fact, after his death in 1995, Sonbert has received more attention — via the Whitney, SFMOMA, and other institutions — than many artists.
There’s a new group of young queer artists — someone like Matt Wolf, who just made a film about the late Arthur Russell, or Jacob Sperber, a DJ here in SF — who take creative inspiration from that generation of people only twice their age who in many cases aren’t alive anymore. It’s heartening to see them, because capitalism and the commodification of identity, what once was gay culture has been erased and repeatedly thrown away in the last decade. Maybe it can come back..
MG: Sonbert’s concept of “polyvalent” montage is, like everything else, personal, but I’m wondering how you might contextualize it in terms of other forms of montage…Do you see overlap with any of the Russians, Debord, etc?
KS: I just want to make sure one thing is clear about that genetive there: “polyvalent” is not a concept that Sonbert invented, but one that many filmmakers avail themselves of when speaking about the multiplicity of links between images (or sounds and images) in a montage. To construct some broad categories to try to sketch and answer:
From Warren’s remarks about Eisenstein (in his talk published in Hills 6/7) you’d get the impression he’s an Eisenstein hater. But Paul Arthur finds this disingenuous (Film Comment, “Dancing on the Precipice”). I think the best way to reconcile the record here is to think of how Eisenstein’s montage was intended to move forward “dialectically” under the force of a unitary narrative.
Eisenstein’s proto-camp ‘music video’ Romance Sentimentale (1930), is a big exception, but it points to another different approach which is more like a Bruce Conner film than a Sonbert film. Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland are more ‘associative’ than polyvalent, in the sense that the sequences build like layers of imagery in a dream, and Conner assembles them into a single unitary atmospheric mood, or say, a “trip” to evoke the drug culture overtones.
I would group Debord with Marker, and even Craig Baldwin as closer, but still distinct from Sonbert, because they engage the meaning potentials (”valences”) of the imagery through voiceover, sound effects and “movie music” that are basically typically supportive of a singular reading of the montage.
Sonbert does make use of this a lot in his 60s “pop soundtrack” films. Then he abandoned that for a long journey through silence in the 70s and 80s. When you get to the late sound films (Friendly Witness, Short Fuse and Whiplash), the sound is not operating as movie music anymore, because the image reciprocally affects the meaning of the music.
Brakhage and Dorsky are really Sonbert’s peers in this polyvalent mode of linking images in time. Dorsky’s late work is very consistent, in terms of what each cut is doing, which is a kind of holistic but particular reaction to the current shot or cluster of shots. Brakhage works more with a phenomenological flow of perception. But in each, and in common with Sonbert, the cutting always involves either *many* aspects of the shot, or *one* aspect (say movement, spatial, composition or color) for one cut, and the next cut based on a completely different aspect (say the object, or a visual pun), so that over the course of the film all visual aspects of the image are available at any moment, and the reading the linkages involves being open to their many aspects. This formal strategy is what allows them cut together such a huge variety of images.
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Abigail Child’s films like Surface Tension, or Su Friedrich’s early films are also related closely to Sonbert’s mode, in the way they create sequence without through-line. But something about the utter voracious openness of the montage in Sonbert is unique to him.
JRH: …There is great humor and energy to Sonbert’s montage, no matter how systematic it may be in overall principle or specific execution.
As travelogues (and they don’t exactly fit the term), many of his films are more personal than commercial cinema representations of that form. He can create an image as glorious or breathtaking, but slender means and keener aesthetics keep him from indulging in over-familiar practices such as time-lapse sequences.
One potentially rich current of Sonbert’s films is their historical aspect. Though he shares sights from all over the world, like some other Bay Area filmmakers, he provides views of San Francisco, and specific times in SF, that you won’t find in newspapers or commercial cinema. Considering an offhandedly revelatory piece of celluloid like the artful porn director Wakefield Poole’s film of one SF pride parade can recently make it to DVD, gay historians — and any people with money who know them — should not be ignorant regarding Sonbert’s work.
