Film Jon Gartenberg Sonbert’s writings on cinema were prolific and far-ranging, and a number of his most significant texts are reproduced herein. He wrote on Hollywood cinema, foreign films and experimental works, and on the representation of homosexuality in cinema. His most significant discourses were about his theory of montage. Sonbert’s primary text on montage theory, “Film Syntax,” is reproduced herein.1 My hope is that the reproduction of this text, together with Sonbert’s other writings on film contained in the ensuing pages, will help reposition this artist as a major theoretician of montage, alongside Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Slavko Vorkapich, and others filmmakers. For this reason, we have also reproduced Sonbert’s shot lists from Rude Awakening,2 as well as several texts related to the evolution toward his making of Carriage Trade.3 The most illuminating document about Sonbert’s early career are his notes on “Lecture Topics”4 comprising all his sound films made between 1966 and 1968. This single piece of paper, heretofore previously unpublished, provides detailed information about each film—the months in which they were shot, screen format (single or twin screen), and accompanying sound (on film or on audiotape). Handwritten notes on this document are mine. Alongside it, we have reprinted his filmography that was published in Film Culture in 1983. As a professional archivist, I find two critically important points to note. First, the films Truth Serum (US, 1967) and Holiday (US, 1968) are listed in Film Culture as silent, when, in fact, they were originally shown as sound films. When we preserved the films in Warren Sonbert’s estate, the sound tracks for both films [End Page 155] were missing (evidently, they were missing when the filmography was prepared for publication). It is critical, in my mind, to underscore that all of Sonbert’s films made between 1966 and 1968 were sound works; this is better understood by looking at his overall creative career, including his relationship to music, as discussed in the prior section of this dossier. I discovered, in doing research in Sonbert’s papers, that he actually made another film in this period, that was shown publicly at the Jewish Museum on February 11, 1969. In his program notes for this series, P. Adams Sitney wrote: tuxedo theatre is Sonbert’s newest and best work. He has abandoned all the scores of rock music that accompanied all the earlier films; and he has clearly placed the perspective in the first person singular. The film is edited, obviously so. Yet it preserves in tone and development the sense of a diary. The montage creates parallels and illusions (such as the television butterfly cut into the line of sight of the young man looking up in the park) and above all, radical displacements. For instance, the film-maker approaches an airplane, up the gangplank, there’s a take off (logically of a different craft), a shot from inside the flying wing, a landing, and we are in a southern climate, perhaps California. Then suddenly after a few shots we are in a Moorish market, or overlooking a skyline of minarets. So the Tuxedo Theatre evolves a juxtaposition of traditional cinematic logic and ellipses.5 The only extant copy of this film was recovered in the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, and preserved at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences alongside Sonbert’s other films. It is a highly significant work, because it most clearly represents the filmmaker’s first movement away from a loosely structured narrative style toward a more radical montage practice. In his preceding films, Sonbert tracked, in relatively long takes, his youthful protagonists moving around New York City. In Tuxedo Theatre, Sonbert began to incorporate footage from his travels abroad. He also employed shots of shorter duration and devised an editing strategy that cut across such dimensions as form, color, texture, and movement. Through this process, Sonbert found the beginning of a montage theory that (in his later, more mature montage works) united, in temporally simultaneous fashion, the rich panoply of human activity on a global basis. The lesson in this is that no document must be left unexamined in the...
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Mar 27, 2015
Carl Senior + 1
Open Access
