Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings

FRAMEWORK
FRAMEWORK
FRAMEWORK
56.1 | SPRING 2015
THE JOURNAL OF CINEMA AND MEDIA VOL. 56, NO. 1 | SPRING 2015
Drake Stutesman POETRY

Editorial Jon Gartenberg
Ascension Serrano Introduction
Preface Warren Sonbert
Jon Gartenberg “Warren Sonbert Interview”
Introduction “Film Syntax”
ART FILM
Jon Gartenberg Jon Gartenberg
Introduction Introduction
Warren Sonbert Warren Sonbert
“Point of View” “Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art
“Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?” Institute, August 1979”
“Jerome Robbins” “Rude Awakening Shot List”
Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and
56.1
TRAVEL Jerome Hiler
Jon Gartenberg “Program Notes: Carriage Trade”
Introduction “Program Notes for Screening of Carriage
Warren Sonbert Trade and Rude Awakening”
“Vita” “Lecture Topics”
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, “Warren Sonbert Filmography”
Germany, 1987 “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”
“Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality”
MUSIC Letter [excerpt 2] to Nathaniel Dorsky and WARREN SONBERT
Jon Gartenberg Jerome Hiler Selected Writings
Introduction “Warren Sonbert on Marnie”
Warren Sonbert “Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama” Guest Editor
“Malefic Overtures” Postcard to Jeff Scher [and] Suzanne Fedak,
JON GARTENBERG
“Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on US, c. 1980
Capriccio’” “Factory Work”
“Some Notes on Capriccio” “Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky”
“Capriccio Script” “Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in Person”
“Record Review” “Aggressive Genius”
“Cruising: Some Afterthoughts/Views from an
Outsider”
SPRING 2015
“Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema”
FILMOGRAPHY
Warren Sonbert
www.frameworknow.com
PPI = 544
Figure 1. A youthful Warren Sonbert during the time he was a film production student at New York
University.
VOL. 56, NO. 1 SPRING 2015
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial 5
Acknowledgments and Accreditations 7
Ascension Serrano
Preface 9
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 11
ART
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 21
Warren Sonbert
“Point of View” 23
“Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?” 27
“Jerome Robbins” 31
TRAVEL
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 33
Warren Sonbert
“Vita” 35
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, Germany, 1987 40
MUSIC
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 43
Warren Sonbert
“Malefic Overtures” 46
“Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on Capriccio’” 52
“Some Notes on Capriccio” 55
“Capriccio Script” 71
“Record Review” 140
POETRY
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 143
Warren Sonbert
“Warren Sonbert Interview” 145
“Film Syntax” 150
FILM
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction 155
Warren Sonbert
“Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979” 160
“Rude Awakening Shot List” 177
Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler 186
“Program Notes: Carriage Trade” 190
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade and Rude Awakening” 191
“Lecture Topics” 195
“Warren Sonbert Filmography” 196
“Interview with Jean-Luc Godard” 197
“Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality” 200
Letter [excerpt 2] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler 204
“Warren Sonbert on Marnie” 208
“Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama” 214
Postcard to Jeff Scher [and] Suzanne Fedak, US, c. 1980 220
“Factory Work” 221
“Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky” 223
“Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in Person” 224
“Aggressive Genius” 225
“Cruising: Some Afterthoughts /Views from an Outsider” 226
“Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema” 233
Filmography: Warren Sonbert 239
Credits 241
Appendices 24
Stutesman
EDITORIAL
You have to be ready to carry all that you need on your person.
—Warren Sonbert
Jon Gartenberg is the guest editor of Framework 56.1, a special issue of writing by
avant-garde filmmaker, Warren Sonbert. Sonbert, as Jon’s introduction, and this
issue’s content, makes clear, was a man of eclectic interests, ranging from opera
to experimental poetry. He applied compelling ideas about filmmaking to many
other arts and took many ideas from other arts. Most of Sonbert’s writings are
out of print, unpublished, or hard to find, so this has been a great opportunity
and an unprecedented one: this issue is the first collection of Sonbert’s writings.
Sonbert film clips and other materials to accompany this issue can be found on
the Framework website, www.frameworknow.com.
Materials have been scanned, rather than transcribed, so they appear in the
original form. (Some are accompanied by transcriptions of pages with handwrit-
ten annotations and are in the Appendix.) Some are typed manuscripts, with or
without annotations, and some are handwritten letters; others are prints from
books, newspapers, or magazines. These visible pages, by appearing as they did in
the time they were written or published, can give today’s reader a sense of the real
feeling in these works and of Sonbert’s life and times.
Jon’s choices of what to include also reveal some sense of Sonbert’s lived life
and show him as a man of great curiosity, strong opinions, and brilliant talent,
who wrote skillfully and with polyvalent imagination on many subjects. He was
5
Stutesman
a man of his times but, fascinatingly, he was more radical, and in multiple ways
more modern, in his opinions than many are today.
Ascension Serrano, Sonbert’s partner, has contributed a loving preface.
Jon, Ascension, and I hope this is just the beginning of deeper discussions about
Sonbert’s work and of more publications to come.
—Drake Stutesman
6
Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND ACCREDITATIONS
Framework greatly thanks the following people and institutions for their generous
leads, contributions and permissions to reprint: Amanda Bowen, Terry Cannon,
Elizabeth Coffey, Ralph Drew, Anita Duquette, Karey Fowler, Rudy Franchi,
Michael Friedman, Max Goldberg, Nancy Goldman, Bette Gordon, Larry
Gottheim, Robert Haller, Jeff Hendricks, Adam Hyman, David James, Denah
Johnston, Ed Landes, Lori Landes, Jonas Mekas, Kari Mozina, Mona Nagai, Steve
Polta, Ascension Serrano, Charles Silver, P. Adams Sitney, and Michael Yamashita.
Framework especially thanks the Harvard Film Archive for their support of
this project from the outset. Thanks to Wayne State University Press for creating
this unusual issue. Most particular thanks go to Jon Gartenberg for proposing this
idea, for his enthusiasm and discerning intelligence, and for his joy about Sonbert’s
work and person; and to Alex Westhelle for his meticulous applied work.
Accreditations: “Aggressive Genius” and “Factory Work”: reprinted by
kind permission of the Bay Area Reporter. “Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama,”
Marnie, and “Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky”: courtesy of
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Carriage Trade: Warren
Sonbert, Carriage Trade, 1967–72, Press Notes for October 11–17, 1973. The New
American Filmmakers Series. Frances Mulhall Achiles Library, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York. “Film Syntax”: reprinted by kind permission of
Canyon Cinema/San Francisco Cinematheque. “Interview with Jean-Luc
Godard”: reprinted by kind permission of the NY Film Bulletin. “Warren
Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979”; “Program Notes
for Screening of Carriage Trade”; “Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality”;
7
Acknowledgments
and “Warren Sonbert Filmography”: reprinted by kind permission of Film

Culture and Anthology Film Archive. “Malefic Overtures”: reprinted by kind
permission of Curtain Call. “Point of View”: reprinted by kind permission of
Spiral. “Record Review”: reprinted by kind permission of The Advocate. “Reel
Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema”: reprinted from Tikkun vol. 5:5.
© 1990 Tikkun Magazine; all rights reserved; republished by permission of the
rights holder, and current publisher, Duke University Press. Ticket Collage:
reprinted by kind permission of Max Goldberg, courtesy of the Warren Sonbert
Collection, 1966–1997. Harvard Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
University. “Warren Sonbert Interview”: reprinted by kind permission of the
journal Shiny. All material is from the estate of Warren Sonbert, now held as the
Warren Sonbert Collection, Harvard Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
University. All draft material: copyright of the Estate of Warren Sonbert.
Every effort has been made to source all publications and find complete article
information.
8
Serrano
PREFACE
This issue is dedicated to the works of my partner, soul mate, and teacher,
Warren Sonbert. It has been a dream of mine and Jon Gartenberg’s to witness
the publication of a collection of Warren’s thoughts. The challenge was to select
material to inspire and teach present and future artists. Warren wrote to reflect
on his works—little did he know that these writings would come together in a
publication so others could learn and understand his thought process.
What comes to mind when reflecting on my life with Warren is our trips
to New York and Spain. This is during the time he was filming his last film,
Whiplash. Warren would emphasize the importance of light and how everyone
and everything has its own beauty. As artists, it is up to us to bring out the splendor
of subject matter.
It is with great pleasure that I present the writings of Warren Sonbert for the
readers of Framework. May my teacher be your teacher.
—Ascension Serrano
9
Figure 2. Whiplash (Warren Sonbert, US, 1995)
INTRODUCTION
A Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert’s

Creative Legacy
Jon Gartenberg
For the very first time, a selection of writings by filmmaker Warren Sonbert
is assembled together in this special edition of Framework.1 Although known
primarily as an experimental filmmaker, Sonbert and his career extended deeply
into other realms of the creative arts. He was an opera, music, and film critic; a
kindred spirit to the Language poets; a screenplay author who adapted Strauss’s
1940–41 opera Capriccio; a collaborator on other filmmaker’s productions (Gerard
Malanga’s In Search of the Miraculous [US, 1967] and Charles Henri Ford’s Johnny
Minotaur [US, 1971]); an essayist on both the fine and performing arts; and a
leading theoretician on cinematic montage. The objective of these collected
writings, then, is to expand the narrow categorization of Sonbert as a now-
deceased, marginalized experimental filmmaker into a broader reconsideration
of his entire creative career. This endeavor should serve to reposition his legacy
as a truly Renaissance thinker who articulated, in both profound and coherent
fashion, how diverse forms of artistic expression can be so deeply connected to
the human condition.
Organizational Approach
Even for students of film history who are familiar with Sonbert’s cinematic
output,2 the texts assembled in this publication are sure to be a revelation. “Film
Syntax,” Sonbert’s most renowned essay, which so lucidly articulates his unique
theory of montage, has been printed numerous times in various publications.3
Aside from this text, however, the other articles authored by Sonbert and
Framework 56, No. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 11–20. Copyright © 2015 Jon Gartenberg.
11
Jon Gartenberg
Figure 3. Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.
reproduced herein are from more obscure publications or now defunct journals,
including Shiny, Motion Picture, Tikkun, CinemaNews, Spiral, and the NY Film
Bulletin. In addition, numerous unpublished notes, reflections, and essays that
were authored by Sonbert—both handwritten and typed—have been gathered
together to be published for the first time in this journal.4
My Framework editor, colleague, and collaborator, Drake Stutesman,
suggested (in brilliant fashion) that we reproduce these documents in the form
in which Sonbert initially committed his thoughts to paper and in the original
format of the journals in which these articles first appeared. The obsessive focus of
our moving-image culture on the final product, especially in terms of the overall
work of avant-garde artists, tends to obscure the more significant aspect of their
working process. Our concerted effort in this publication was to reverse this
paradigm. Like his writings, Sonbert’s finely tuned, montage masterworks were
created in handcrafted fashion, using a handheld Bolex camera, rewinds, and a
splicer to simulate the cinematic rhythms developed in the artist’s mind’s eye.5 This
working process is further manifested by the publication of Sonbert’s typed shot
12
Introduction
lists, not only of his completed films, but also of the production and work reels
from which these shots were selected.6
The reproduction of Sonbert’s draft texts provides a more precise view of
Sonbert’s thought processes, especially when comparing them with the published
form in which they appeared. As a particular case in point, we have reprinted both
Sonbert’s typed notes for a screening of Nathaniel Dorsky’s films at the Pacific
Film Archive and the program note published by that institution. In his typewrit-
ten draft, Sonbert employs the term “mammoth” when describing Dorsky’s Hours
for Jerome (US, 1982), yet this single, but significant word is not included in the
published program note. For Sonbert, “mammoth” refers not so much to the size
and length of Dorsky’s movie, as to the great ambition of Dorsky’s filmmaking
enterprise. Sonbert later affirms (in another omitted section), “Deep in design
and exhilarating in execution, these films provide generous affirmations of faith
in the future of cinema.”7
This specific example illustrates the precision and great care with which
Sonbert put his thoughts to paper with words. The careful choice and placement
of every word in a sentence paralleled Sonbert’s conscious selection and placement
of individual images in expressing the larger themes coursing throughout his own
montage films of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. No wonder that Sonbert became closely
allied with the Bay Area Language poets during this period.
We have reproduced other draft texts because they include Sonbert’s more
detailed, candid (and often critical) reflections on the subject at hand than that
which appears in the published texts. As another example, Sonbert’s unpublished,
typewritten response to a panel on “Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist” is only
very partially reproduced in the publication Spiral. In his longer, unpublished
response, Sonbert caustically critiques critics, as well as the spending priorities of
the panel’s sponsors.8
We have organized Sonbert’s writings into the following broad classifications:
art, travel, music, poetry, and film. These are not designed to be rigid categoriza-
tions, but rather as points of departure to demonstrate Sonbert’s facility in his
dialogue between all the art forms. Our inclusion of the travel category represents
the central role Sonbert’s own journeys across time and space—both physical
and creative—played in the development of the artist’s own practice of his craft.9
Only in considering Sonbert’s entire creative output as a coherent entity—filmed,
written, and spoken, as well as his lived experiences through travel—can we truly
appreciate his genius both as an artist and humanist.
13
Jon Gartenberg
Sonbert’s Career Evolution10

Warren Sonbert was born in 1947 in New York City. By the time he was fifteen
years old, he was regularly attending screenings at the Bleecker Street Cinema.
This theater was owned by filmmaker Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery [US,
1956]; Come Back, Africa [US, 1959]), and regularly screened foreign classics,
contemporary French New Wave films (including those by Godard and Truffaut),
documentaries, and independent American and experimental films—all of which
invariably became a center of Sonbert’s film education.11 Sonbert quickly became
friendly on all fronts with the theater personnel, attending film screenings, sug-
gesting filmmakers to show, and reading film criticism.
In the basement of the theater, the management published a film journal, NY
Film Bulletin. As a teenager, Sonbert served as editor-in-chief of a special edition
of the NY Film Bulletin on Jean-Luc Godard. This special edition includes a
one-on-one interview between Sonbert and Godard, which is republished herein.
This reveals Sonbert’s already precocious insights into artistic expression through
visual means, as well as a deep appreciation of the voice of the cinematic auteur.12
During the mid-1960s, Sonbert became associated with Andy Warhol’s
Factory scene.13 At this time, Gregory Markopoulos, who became, for a brief
period, his companion and mentor, befriended Sonbert. Sonbert once remarked
in an interview that, “I was his protégé for a while and he did open up the entire
new world of films for me . . . he is one of the great film-makers in independent
film—really freeing film.”14
Sonbert began making films beginning in 1966, as a student at New York Uni-
versity. Sonbert’s 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.
Sonbert’s films were shown publicly at the Bleecker Street Cinema, and, by
the time he was only twenty years old, Sonbert already had been afforded a career
retrospective at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. He immediately received wide
critical acclaim, including reviews in The Village Voice, The Independent Film
Journal, and The New York Free Press. A reviewer in Variety wrote, in the article
“Still NYU Student, Warren Sonbert’s Wooster St. B.O. [Box Office]”:
14
Introduction
Probably not since Andy Warhol’s “The Chelsea Girls” had its first showing
at the Cinematheque . . . almost a year and a half ago has an “underground”
film event caused as much curiosity and interest in NY’s non-underground
world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at
the Cinematheque’s new location on Wooster Sf. last weekend (Thurs.–Sun.,
Jan. 25–28). And as before, the crowds (many turned away each night) were
attributed to press reports.15
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. (He also relocated from New York City to
San Francisco). This process resulted in his first major epic, Carriage Trade.16 He
built on his early experiments in camera movement, lighting, and framing to create
brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu,
but also the larger sphere of global human activity. Sonbert developed his own
distinct brand of montage, “not strictly involved with plot or morality but rather
the language of film as regards time, composition, cutting, light, distance, tension
of backgrounds to foregrounds, what you see and what you don’t, a jig-saw puzzle
of postcards to produce various displace effects.”17
In Sonbert’s montage 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 (US, 1992), for example, incorporates themes
from the Strauss opera Capriccio, while Noblesse Oblige (US, 1981) is patterned
after Douglas Sirk’s Tarnished Angels (US, 1958). Like that film, Noblesse Oblige
considers 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 cafe. A Woman’s Touch (US,
1983) is modeled on Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (US, 1964), in exploring the
“schizophrenic split between the visualizations of closure and escape.”18
During this period, Sonbert was developing a finely balanced system of film
production. He created his domestic and international travel itineraries based
on operas he was planning to review as a professional critic; then he arranged
simultaneous showings of his films in the cities he would be visiting. On these
extended journeys, often lasting weeks or months, Sonbert shot footage for new
projects.19
Upon his return to San Francisco, he assembled these shots on large work
reels. These often incorporate a succession of shots of the same subject, revealing
that he frequently filmed multiple takes, akin to practices in Hollywood cinema.
After composing a reel, he created a detailed typewritten shot list recording its
15
Jon Gartenberg
contents. He then selected shots from these large work reels in order to construct
his montage films.
At the same time that he was making these films, Sonbert wrote extensively
about international opera performances, music recordings, and the Hollywood
cinema; these articles were most frequently published by The Advocate, The Bay
Area Reporter, and The San Francisco Sentinel. He would often write under the
pseudonym of Scottie Ferguson, the character Jimmy Stewart plays in Hitchcock’s
Vertigo (US, 1958).20
Sonbert was also involved with the work of the Language poets, especially
those from the Bay Area, including Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejin-
ian.21 This deep creative connection occurred on a structural level of language
itself—the juxtapositions of individual words by the Language poets and the
linkage of individual shots in Sonbert’s montage practice.22
During the years immediately preceding his death from AIDS, Sonbert
channeled all of his energy into making his final film, Whiplash (US, 1995)—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 the film, 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, such as The
Bad and the Beautiful (US, 1967).
Sonbert was able to transform, in seemingly effortless fashion, globetrot-
ting 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, to paraphrase Sonbert, he wished
to juggle disparate reactions in a struggle against viewer complacency and easily
derived judgments.23 This approach permeated not only his filmmaking practice,
but also his writings about life and art—a constantly shifting and perennial ten-
sion between disequilibrium and balance. Sonbert’s strategy of actively engaging
the reader and spectator in this process is perhaps his most enduring legacy.
Furthering Sonbert’s Legacy24

Little did I know, in the mid-1970s, when I purchased Warren Sonbert’s films
Amphetamine (US, 1966) and Rude Awakening (US, 1976) for the permanent
collection of the Museum of Modern Art, that I would be charged by the Estate
of Warren Sonbert with the task of furthering this artist’s legacy.25 When Sonbert
died of AIDS in 1995, I embarked on a project, under the auspices of the Estate
Project for Artists with AIDS, to preserve Sonbert’s entire cinematic oeuvre in
16
Introduction
cooperation with the Academy Film Archive, which now houses Sonbert’s camera
originals, preservation negatives, and archival prints. From an exhibition point
of view, I curated the first posthumous retrospective of Sonbert’s films at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1999.26 This program was then adapted for
showing at the Centre Pompidou in 2002 and the Vienna Filmmuseum in 2006.
To make Sonbert’s films available and distributed to a wider international
audience, I created an international touring retrospective of Sonbert’s films in
conjunction with Light Cone, the European distributor.27 Additional prints of
Sonbert’s films are available from Canyon Cinema and the New York Film-Makers
Cooperative. The Light Cone touring show retrospective has been screened
at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2012); the Cinemateca Portuguesa (2012); the
International House, Philadelphia (2013); and the Tate Modern (2013).
It was important that the extensive archive of papers, 16mm production
reels, and equipment be recognized as having significant value in terms of the
artist’s working process and system of thinking. Haden Guest at the Harvard
Film Archive readily comprehended this, and he proceeded to acquire not only a
complete set of archival prints of Sonbert’s films, but also the rest of the material
from Sonbert’s estate.28
The publication of this special edition of Framework, based on a selection of
material from the collection now at Harvard, goes far in furthering a more robust
appreciation of Sonbert’s artistry. The goal of this publication is also to encourage
more research into the treasure trove of Sonbert’s papers now archived at Harvard.
Following the publication of the special edition on Warren Sonbert in this
journal, we also planned, as part of Light Cone’s e-book series, the creation of
an edition devoted solely to Sonbert’s individual films. This is part of an effort
to position Sonbert as one of the great montage theorists and practitioners of
cinema, alongside Vertov, Hitchcock, and other masters.
My next dream would be to facilitate the publication of a DVD boxed set of
Sonbert’s films. Interested parties, please contact me at jon@gartenbergmedia.
com.
Then I would feel I have done all I could to help further Sonbert’s legacy for
future generations.
Over the course of this larger Warren Sonbert project, a number of individu-
als have provided significant practical and moral support and I would like to thank
them here: Christophe Bichon, Randall Bourscheidt, Jeff Capp, Liz Coffey, David
Deitch, Nathaniel Dorsky, Michael Friend, Max Goldberg, Haden Guest, Scott
Hammen, John Hanhardt, Emmanuel Lefrant, Jonas Mekas, Patrick Moore, Mike
Pogorzelski, Jeff Scher, Ascension Serrano, P. Adams Sitney, Drake Stutesman,
Martine Vigouroux, and Alex Westhelle.
Last, and most importantly, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Warren
17
Jon Gartenberg
Sonbert, whom I have known in both flesh and spirit. My ongoing work with
his legacy—that continues now, twenty years past his death—never ceases to be
an ongoing source of inspiration to me, for the magnificent insights his legacy
continues to provide about the deep connection between artistic expression and
universal aspects of the human condition.
Jon Gartenberg is a film archivist, distributor, and programmer. While working for nearly two decades as
a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film, he acquired numerous avant-garde films
for the permanent collection and initiated the preservation of the films of Andy Warhol. He has also
authored many articles on film history and preservation, including “The Fragile Emulsion,” which has
been published in both the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ journal Moving Image as well as in
the International Federation of Film Archives’ Journal of Film Preservation. In 1998, Gartenberg estab-
lished his own company, Gartenberg Media Enterprises (www.gartenbergmedia.com; jon@gartenberg-
media.com). Among other projects, his company distributes silent, documentary, and experimental films
in DVD and Blu-ray format for the North American university market. From 2003 to 2014, he programmed
experimental films for the Tribeca Film Festival. In June 2014, he curated “A Panorama of American
Experimental Narratives in the New Millennium,” a major retrospective program for the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Pesaro Film Festival that was subsequently presented at the 8th Athens Avant-garde Film
Festival in November of the same year.
Following Warrren Sonbert’s untimely death in 1995, Gartenberg has served as the exclusive repre-
sentative for the filmmaker’s estate in all matters concerning his creative career. He has devised and exe-
cuted a comprehensive plan for furthering this artist’s legacy. All of Sonbert’s films are preserved at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Harvard University has acquired a complete set of
master prints of Sonbert’s films, in addition to his 16mm work reels and papers. An international touring
show retrospective of Sonbert’s films is available from Light Cone, the European distributor of his films.
Posthumous retrospectives of Sonbert’s films have been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum (New York), the Beaubourg (Paris), the Austrian Filmmuseum (Vienna), Anthology Film
Archives (New York), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Cinemateca Portuguesa (Lisbon), Interna-
tional House (Philadelphia), and the Tate Modern (London).
This Framework publication represents the first time a selection of Sonbert’s writings have been
published together in one place.
NOTES
1. A very special note of appreciation is due to Drake Stutesman, the editor of Framework, who
so readily committed to our preparing this special issue on Sonbert, for which I have served as
guest editor.
2. See Sonbert filmography in the end matter.
18
Introduction
3. See item, “Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979.” This article
was originally entitled “Film Syntax” and has been previously published in HILLS magazine
and CinemaNews. More recently, Sonbert’s lecture has been reprinted in Canyon Cinema: The
Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, ed. Scott Macdonald (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008) and in A Guide to Poetrics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field,
1982–1998, eds. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2013).
4. These documents have been culled from the papers formerly residing in the Estate of Warren
Sonbert, acquired by Harvard University in 2013. This material is formally known as “Warren
Sonbert Collection, Harvard Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.” For an
overview of the collection and accompanying finding aid, see http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/
collections/sonbert.html.
5. See fig. 15, “Warren Sonbert display case at the Harvard Film Archive, assembled by Max
Goldberg,” which contains Sonbert’s camera and splicer, alongside other items.
6. See, for example, item “Rude Awakening Shot List.”
7. See and compare items “Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky” and “Filmmaker
Nathaniel Dorsky in Person, PFA.”
8. See and compare items “Point of View” and “Does The Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?”
9. See item Postcard to Jeffrey Scher, graffiti wall on cover, Germany, 1987.
10. This section has been adapted and expanded from my essay in the catalogue accompanying
the exhibition, “Friendly Witnesses: The Worlds of Warren Sonbert” at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum (April 21–May 8, 1999).
11. For more information on the history of Bleecker Street Cinema, see Ben Davis, “The Bleecker
Street Cinema: From Repertory Theater to Independent Film Showcase,” Cineaste (Winter
2012): 14–19.
12. See item “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard.”
13. See item “Factory Work.”
14. See “Warren Sonbert Interviewed by David Ehrenstein, December 1978,” Film Culture no.
70–71 (1983): 191–92.
15. Variety, February 7, 1968: 17.
16. See item “Lecture Topics.”
17. See item “Program Notes: Carriage Trade.”
18. See item “Warren Sonbert on Marnie.”
19. See Sonbert’s CV “Vita,” which incorporates his global travels to show his films.
20. See “Record Review” and “Malefic Overtures.” See the finding aid at Harvard University for
the Warren Sonbert Collection; the university holds hundreds of his reviews. These definitely
merit a more in-depth study, especially Sonbert’s articles about music and opera.
21. See “Warren Sonbert Interview.”
22. See Alan Bernheimer, The Grand Piano, Part 8, Mode A, Detroit, 2009
19
Jon Gartenberg
23. See especially “Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979,” Film
Culture, no. 70–71 (1983): 159–75.
24. For an overview of my conceptual framework and practical approach to promoting an artist’s
legacy, see, “The Fragile Emulsion,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving
Image Archivists 2, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 142–53.
25. The author worked as a curator in MOMA’s film archive from 1973–1991.
26. “Friendly Witnesses: The Worlds of Warren Sonbert” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum (April 21–May 8, 1999).
27. See “Warren Sonbert Retrospective: Touring Programs,” Light Cone, Paris, http://lightcone
.org/pdf/sonbert/w.sonbert-brochure.pdf.
28. This archive of material is formally known as the “Warren Sonbert Collection, Harvard
Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.” For an overview of the collection and
accompanying finding aid, see: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/collections/sonbert.html.
20
ART
Warren Sonbert was conversant about the varied manifestations of creative

expression, including the fine and performing arts, as well as literary forms. His
eclectic interests encompassed painting, motion pictures (of all types), classical
concerts and operas (and their related disc recordings), dance performances, and
poetry and novels (ranging from Charles Dickens to Anne Rice). Often, Sonbert
would refer to multiple forms of art within a given text.1
Sonbert reserved his greatest admiration for artistic integrity, as in the career
biography he compiled on Jerome Robbins.2 Robbins briefly appears in a panning
shot of one of Sonbert’s films, and the pair was romantically attached for a period
of time. At other moments, Sonbert did not hesitate to stir up the art world by
expressing strongly worded, caustic opinions about the critical establishment.3
—Jon Gartenberg
NOTES
1. “Point of View”
2. “Jerome Robbins”
3. “Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?”
Framework 56, No. 1, Spring 2015, p. 21. Copyright © 2015 Jon Gartenberg.
21
Figure 4. Warren Sonbert.
“Point of View”
23
“Point of View”
24
“Point of View”
25
“Point of View”
26
“Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?”
27
28
29
30
“Jerome Robbins”
31
“Jerome Robbins”
32
TRAVEL
In my introduction to this collected volume of Sonbert’s writings, I articulated

how Sonbert developed a finely tuned system of producing and exhibiting his
films. He linked the shooting of his movies to extensive trips abroad where he
attended opera performances (as a critic), while simultaneously showing his films
at various European cinematheques. The role travel played in Sonbert’s creative
evolution cannot be overestimated. Reproduced here is the CV Sonbert compiled
up until 19891 and a postcard he wrote to Jeff Scher, his former film student, col-
league, and friend2: “Scored 28 film shows, 51 operas, 35 cities in 80 days.”
For further illustration of the capital impact that travel had on Sonbert’s own
creative transition in his filmmaking practice—from loosely structured narratives
following the young denizens of New York going about their daily activities to
montage works that cut across time and space—the reader has to go no further
than the film section of this dossier, which includes excerpts of a letter Sonbert
wrote to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler about his travels through the African
desert.3
—Jon Gartenberg
NOTES
1. “Vita”
2. Postcard to Jeff Scher, graffiti wall on cover, Germany, 1987.
3. Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler.
33
Figure 5. Short Fuse (Warren Sonbert, US, 1992)
“Vita”
35
“Vita”
36
“Vita”
37
“Vita”
38
Figure 6. Warren Sonbert at Pont du Gard, France.
39
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, Germany, 1987
40
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, Germany, 1987
41
MUSIC
Sonbert’s relationship to music is a subject worthy of more in-depth analysis and

study, especially as his own thinking about this subject evolved over time.
All of the films he made between 1966 and 1968 (Amphetamine [US, 1966]
to Holiday [US, 1968]) were sound films that employed contemporary pop music
scores (by the Supremes, the Four Tops, and other recording artists of the time).
Then, beginning with Tuxedo Theatre (US, 1969), he made silent films for a period
of twenty years. Sonbert invariably perceived accompanying sound as distracting
from the musical and poetic rhythms of his montage films.
During this twenty-year period of silent works, Sonbert also actively wrote
music reviews. Two in-depth recaps of the music scene—one of opera perfor-
mances1 and the other of classical music records2—clearly demonstrate Sonbert’s
mastery of the history of music and the art of its presentation. (Indeed, Sonbert’s
knowledge of music recordings was so sophisticated that when he returned to
making sound films in 1989, he knew exactly which recording of music he wished
to use in counterpoint to his images).
My theory is that Sonbert’s motive for reintroducing music into his films
(beginning with Friendly Witness [US, 1989]) can be traced to the expertise he
developed reviewing classical music and opera. His films were also attacked for
lacking plot and character,3 which prompted him to write a full-length screenplay
for Strauss’s opera Capriccio.4 Capriccio dramatizes the story of a countess whose
affections are torn between a musician and a poet. On a metaphoric level, the
opera poses a question about which is the greatest art, poetry or music. Having
worked through his own script of Capriccio, Sonbert could renew this dialogue
43
Jon Gartenberg
within his own films, exploring whether the images or sounds predominate. Also
included in this dossier are Sonbert’s notes about the casting and filming of his
screenplay, together with ample references to other filmmaker’s styles.5 “Some
Notes on Capriccio” has never before been published, yet it provides fascinating
insight into Sonbert’s thinking about the representation of his own written work
as a motion picture.
—Jon Gartenberg
NOTES
1. “Malefic Overtures”
2. “Record Review”
3. “Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on Capriccio’” (Marginalia notes by Margie Keller.)
4. “Capriccio Script”
5. “Some Notes on Capriccio”
44
Figure 7. Ticket Collage by Max Goldberg, using ticket stubs of operas attended by Warren Sonbert.
“Malefic Overtures”
46
47
48
49
50
51
“Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on Capriccio’”
52
53
54
“Some Notes on Capriccio”
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
“Capriccio Script”
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
“Record Review”
140
“Record Review”
141
POETRY
Sonbert’s creative relationship with poets is another subject worthy of further

in-depth exploration. From his teenage years until his death, Sonbert was exposed
to poetic discourses. Early influences (in New York in the 1960s) on his creative
thinking in this field include Gregory Markopoulos, Gerard Malanga, Willard
Maas (and Marie Menken), and Charles Henri Ford. Later, in San Francisco in
the 1970s, Sonbert was surrounded by the likes of Language poets Lyn Hejinian,
Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten.1 We have also reproduced an interview with
Sonbert from 1990 that was published in Shiny, a journal of poetry.2
—Jon Gartenberg
NOTES
1. “Film Syntax”
2. “Warren Sonbert Interview”
143
Figure 8. Hall of Mirrors (Warren Sonbert, US, 1966), with Gerard Malanga
“Warren Sonbert Interview”
145
146
147
148
149
“Film Syntax”
150
“Film Syntax”
151
“Film Syntax”
152
“Film Syntax”
153
FILM
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 art-
ist 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
155
Jon Gartenberg
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 radi-
cal 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 restora-
tion of an artist’s legacy.
Sonbert was a very precocious teenager. At age eighteen or nineteen, he
interviewed Jean-Luc Godard,6 and, as a young teenager, he wrote an article on
156
Film Introduction
Alfred Hitchcock that was published in Film Culture magazine. Altogether, we

have reproduced three texts that Sonbert developed on Hitchcock—an article
on Hitchcock’s treatment of morality,7 handwritten reflections on the structure
of the master’s films,8 and typewritten notes for a Pacific Film archive lecture on
Marnie.9 This latter text, as far as I know, has never been published in printed form.
Our objective in publishing it here is that it may stand alongside important texts
on Hitchcock and Marnie by Laura Mulvey, Robin Wood, and others.
Sonbert thought that the two most subversive directors in the Hollywood
studio system were Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. Sonbert’s significant texts
on these two filmmakers are included in this section. He admired Hitchcock’s abil-
ity to manipulate the spectator into identifying with the guilt of the protagonists
onscreen. For Sonbert, this resulted in a more emotionally and viscerally active,
rather than passive, viewing experience. Sonbert subsumed these realizations into
his montage practice to create a more open-ended reading of the narrative tropes
in his own films.
Sonbert saw in Sirk a very modernist approach to filmmaking. Sirk’s nar-
ratives were constantly reflected through mirrors and other surfaces, creating
a tension between the prescribed, self-contained, shallow world of his postwar
protagonists and the deeper dimensions of their relationships lurking beneath
this veneer. Sonbert must have been pleased when his insights about Sirk’s films
were published by the Pacific Film Archive alongside those by Jean-Luc Godard
and R.W. Fassbinder.10
For me, Sonbert is the singular experimental filmmaker, who, in his own
cinematic practice of montage, worked on developing a narrative language that
ran on a parallel plane to that of commercial cinema. Sonbert’s montage works are
less about experimental techniques (flares, over-and under-exposed images, and
so on) than about narrative structure, that is, the relationship between successive
shots. Instead of leading to the predictable resolution of conflict so ever-present
through conventional editing techniques in Hollywood cinema, however, Son-
bert’s montage was laced with a strategy to elicit an open-ended reading of the
relationship between successive shots.
We have also reproduced here a selection of Sonbert texts on experimental
filmmakers Andy Warhol, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Curt McDowell, as well as some
reflections on the representation of gays in cinema. Most noteworthy among these
is Sonbert’s praise of William Friedkin’s Cruising,11 a film that was anathema to the
homosexual community at the time. This text reveals Sonbert’s unapologetically
contrarian view—his reasoning about the film was entirely consistent on a level
of critical discourse, with Sonbert’s interest in creative works that foreground
ambivalence, ambiguity, and personalities in inner conflict. More than anything
157
Jon Gartenberg
else, Sonbert’s world view—the tension between balance and disequilibrium—

was applied dispassionately toward all of the creative arts.
— Jon Gartenberg
NOTES
1. “Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979”
2. “Rude Awakening Shot List”
3. Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler; “Program Notes: Carriage Trade”;
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade”
4. “Lecture Topics”
5. Sitney, P. Adams. “The Avantgarde film Tuesday Series at the Jewish Museum, 1969, arranged
and conducted by the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque; February 11th: Warren Sonbert: Where
Did Our Love Go?; Tuxedo Theatre” (February, 1969).
6. “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”
7. “Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality”
8. Letter [excerpt 2] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
9. “Warren Sonbert on Marnie”
10. “Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama”
11. “Cruising: Some Afterthoughts / Views from an Outsider”
158
Figure 9. Warren Sonbert with his camera on European travels.
“Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979”
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
“Rude Awakening Shot List”
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
186
187
188
Figure 10. Carriage Trade (Warren Sonbert, US, 1972)
“Program Notes: Carriage Trade”
190
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade and Rude Awakening”
191
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade and Rude Awakening”
192
Figure 11. Amphetamine (Warren Sonbert and Wendy Appel, US, 1966)
Figure 12. The Tenth Legion (Warren Sonbert, US, 1967)
“Lecture Topics”
195
“Warren Sonbert Filmography”
196
“Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
Figure 13. A Woman’s Touch (Warren Sonbert, US, 1983)
“Warren Sonbert on Marnie”
208
209
210
211
212
213
“Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama”
214
215
216
217
218
219
Postcard to Jeff Scher [and] Suzanne Fedak, US, c. 1980
220
“Factory Work”
221
“Factory Work”
222
“Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky”
223
“Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in Person”
224
“Aggressive Genius”
225
“Cruising: Some Afterthoughts/Views from an Outsider”
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
Reprinted from Tikkun vol. 5:5 © 1990 Tikkun Magazine. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the rightsholder, and
current publisher, Duke University Press.
233
234
235
236
Figure 14. Friendly Witness (Warren Sonbert, US, 1989)
WARREN SONBERT FILMOGRAPHY
note: All films are by Warren Sonbert and were produced in 16mm.
Amphetamine (with Wendy Appel, US, 1966), B/W, sound, 10 min.

Where Did Our Love Go? (US, 1966), color, sound, 15 min.
Hall of Mirrors (US, 1966), B/W and color, sound, 7 min.
The Tenth Legion (US, 1967), color, sound, 30 min.
Truth Serum (US, 1967), color, sound, 13 min.
Connection (US, 1967), color, sound, twin-screen film, 13 min.
The Bad and the Beautiful (US, 1967), color, sound, 34 min.
Ted and Jessica (US, 1967), B/W, sound, twin-screen film, 4 min.
Holiday (US, 1968), color, sound, 13 min.
Tuxedo Theatre (US, 1969), color, silent, 21 min.
Carriage Trade (US, 1972), color, silent, 61 min. (Also shown publicly in 1971 in
a 75-minute version.)
Rude Awakening (US, 1976), color, silent, 36 min.
Divided Loyalties (US, 1978), color, silent, 22 min.
239
Filmography
Noblesse Oblige (US, 1981), color, silent, 25 min.

A Woman’s Touch (US, 1983), color, silent, 22 min.
The Cup and the Lip (US, 1986), color, silent, 20 min.
Honor and Obey (US, 1988), color, silent, 21 min.
Friendly Witness (US, 1989), color, sound, 22 min.
Short Fuse (US, 1992), color, sound, 37 min.
Whiplash (US, 1995), color, sound, 20 min.1
NOTE
1. This film was essentially completed by Warren Sonbert before he passed away in 1995.
Following his death, filmmaker Jeff Scher, Sonbert’s former student, executed some slight
trims to the ends of various shots that Sonbert had already assembled so that the imagery
would conform to the rhythm of the music that Sonbert had already selected. Whiplash had its
world premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 30, 1997.
240
CREDITS
“Aggressive Genius,” Bay Area Reporter, date unknown.

“Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality,” Film Culture, no.41 (1966): 35–38.
“Capriccio Script,” Motion Picture, no. 1–6 (Spring/Summer 1986–1989).
“Cruising: Some Afterthoughts / Views from an Outsider,” [unpublished or
unknown publication after 1980.]
“Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?,” [c. 1984; unpublished.]
“Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama” [original typed manuscript], “Program
Notes on Sirk,” 3–12 April 1975, Pacific Film Archive.
“Factory Work,” Bay Area Reporter, 25 January 1990, 25, 30.
“Film Syntax,” CinemaNews (1979): 9, 20–21.
“Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in Person,” 7 June 1983 [as published on Pacific
Film Archives website].
“Interview with Jean-Luc Godard,” NY Film Bulletin, no.46 (1964): 13.
“Jerome Robbins” [c. 1987; unpublished or unknown publication].
“Lecture Topics” [c. 1968; unpublished].
Letter [excerpts] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, c. 1970.
“Malefic Overtures,” Curtain Call, September 1987.
“Point of View,” Spiral, October 1984, 2, 4–6.
241
Credits
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, graffiti wall on cover, Germany, 1987.
Postcard to Jeff Scher [and] Suzanne Fedak, Jimmy Carter on cover, U.S.,
c. 1980.
“Program Notes: Carriage Trade,” 11–17 October 1973, for The New American
Filmmakers Series, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.
“Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky,” [original typed manuscript],
program notes 7 June 1983, Pacific Film Archive.
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade,” Film Culture, no. 70–71
(1983): 197.
“Record Review,” The Advocate, no. 391 (April 3, 1990).
“Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema,” Tikkun Magazine 5, no. 5
(1990).
“Rude Awakening Shot List” [c. 1976; unpublished].
“Some Notes on Capriccio,” Motion Picture, no.1 (Spring/Summer 1986).
“Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on Capriccio’” [c. 1986; unpublished].
“Vita” [c. 1989; unpublished].
“Warren Sonbert Filmography,” Film Culture, no. 70–71 (1983): 199.
“Warren Sonbert Interview,” Shiny, no. 5 (1990): 5–18.
“Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979,” Film
Culture, no. 70–71 (1983): 159–75.
“Warren Sonbert on Marnie,” 8 July 1986, audio recording, Pacific Film
Archive.
Original material, such as “Capriccio Script” and “Some Notes on Capriccio,” and
all draft material is copyright of the Estate of Warren Sonbert, now held as the
Warren Sonbert Collection, Harvard Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
University. Status of all source material, as listed above, is per December 2014
research.
242
Figure 15. Warren Sonbert display case at the Harvard Film Archive, assembled by Max Goldberg.
243
editors’ note on the appendices
Every effort has been made to accurately transcribe Sonbert’s handwritten notes
and typed edits within the documents cited in the appendices. For appendices 1
and 2, these transcriptions have been restricted to the most hard-to-read words
and phrases. The notation “(unclear)” designates words and phrases that we
could not definitively decipher.
Appendices 3, 4, and 5 have been transcribed in their entirety. For Appendix
5, all handwritten annotations that Sonbert made to the typed manuscript
are designated in brackets “[ ]”. Words that were replaced are noted with a
strikethrough like this. Words that were misspelled by Sonbert have been
transcribed as is. Sonbert’s handwritten marginalia appears as endnotes for
Appendix 5. The notation “(unclear)” designates words and phrases that we
could not definitively decipher.
APPENDIX 1
Literal Transcription of Original Handwritten

Annotations in “Some Notes on Capriccio”
p. 55 – Love, scene in rain
p. 58
■ Rain? Running?
■ (Save for Suggestion of Oliver + Flamand)
p. 61
■ Like “Capriccio”
p. 65
■ Gives the signal
■ ( Joined by the fan during 4) – Then switch during 24 with thief
■ Box F on Left
■ ( Joined by the house doctor during 6)
■ By the fan during 24
■ Later storm trooper – Major Pomo
p. 67
■ Will seduce Bobo at party
p. 68
■ pixillated NY ride
Framework 56, No. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 244–263. Copyright © 2015 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
245
APPENDIX 2

Annotations in “Rude Awakening Shot List”
SHOT 22
■ Blond Model – Mirror Truck – Model
■ Fireworks Bridge Super – Dragon B&W
SHOT 23
■ CU Street ring pull
SHOT 29
■ L to R
SHOT 30
■ FIFO (L to R)
SHOT 34
■ Lions + Tigers together
SHOT 35
■ Divided by Chinese B&W Dance – Girl
SHOT 36
■ – 2 shots
SHOT 40
■ Castro fair – pan MOVT Rt to L
246
Appendices
SHOT 42
■ Still
SHOT 64
■ Divided by Brief Handball still moving L to R
SHOT 68
■ FIFO
SHOT 78
■ Police blockade Castro – still
SHOT 110
■ Some shooting wheat dragon STILL
SHOT 138
■ 138a – Pico + Wettler & all in black (Still MOVT L To R) (unclear)
SHOT 146
■ CU
SHOT 149
■ Krishna flags R to L
SHOT 166
■ Masked Train
SHOT 178
■ B&W Chinese Man + Cabbage MOVT Forward L
SHOT 184
■ 2 shots divided by Chinese Girl + Tri BLDG MOVT R to L
SHOT 241
■ Girl on Swing 2 STIL
SHOT 254
■ 254a – Tree Cutter above STILL
247
Appendices
SHOT 264
■ Gr Benito St Walker 264a (unclear)
SHOT 303
■ Appendix 431 to 565 then 304 to 431 Still 566
SHOT 305
■ Still Slanted Yosemite
SHOT 306
■ Waterfall going Top R to bottom L
SHOT 366
■ Waterfalls slant down
SHOT 433
■ Slant Trees Slant Trees R to L
SHOT 440
■ Gordon at Window pointing
SHOT 459
■ Circus Acrobats
SHOT 461
■ Elliott R to L MOVT R to L
SHOT 482
■ 482a blond Model
248
APPENDIX 3

Jerome Hiler
What happened to that Africa idea? I can only clue you in on a few practical ideas
from my Moroccan sojourn and how I seem to be organizing present efforts.
Saw the footage I shot there in London and finally feel somewhat satisfied
in capturing the flavor especially in the Sahara sequences (although I still have a
tendency for my shots to be too quick and much of the Swiss shots are underex-
posed thanks perhaps to that fancy Lunar-6 light meter that I finally lost in a daze
of frenzied filming at the Botanical Gardens at Kew in England and replaced by
good old Western). Morocco was the first land I’ve tried to get in depth going from
the coast of small and big cities, to Atlas mountain Berber villages, to Marrakech
market places, to desert, plains, and forest greenery. But it took a good three moths
dependent upon public transportation, the fortunate presence of old friends’
campers — Mary Flanagan and even Ron Zimardi. But, there are always the
drawbacks of extended travelling in primitive straits; shaking the scorpions out of
your desert sleeping bag, heat rash and sun burn, flea bites from one-night hotels
of the interior that only seem to blossom and bother on the next day’s bus ride
across the local dirt paths, through swamps, around rains of ranchipur mountain
roads crumbling away before your eyes. It’s an exhausting way to get around. And
to proceed any further into the continent you need a $10,000 Land Rover, plus
another 10 ‘G’s worth of equipment. The authorities won’t let you cross the desert
without all this. Many of the highlights you come across, those moments you
remember most — stumbling with Vivian into a mod nest of dancing Blue Men
one full moon night at a Backdoor Tan-Tan tea house, or a feast of couscous +
tagine atop a Berber shack, the mystic displays of the freaked-out Djemma El-Fna
in Marrakech — well, they never seem to find their way into your camera. You
never feel you’ve gotten as much as you could’ve.
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So wherever I find myself certain traits of the land fall into place. You record
the similarities and the differences of the people - their dress, gestures, attitudes, the
market place, what and how they work at, what they do for leisure; games, pastimes,
diversions, their religion in rituals and structures, their authorities in the military and
government; what controls their various lifestyles, the bourgeois and the poor, the
Berbers and the Muslims or the Cockneys and the Establishment. Then comes the
contrasts and counterpoints in the physical, geological natures of the land; city and
country, flora and fauna, heights and depths, the four elements. Once you’ve got all
those variations in one country it multiplies itself in conjunction with the
neighbor next door, and after that the comparisons of continents is limitless. At
the same time you get what is unique about wherever you are, but most important
how everything is really alike, similar, how things extend from one another.
Whew! Quite an order. My favorite TV series have always been “Expedition”
and “Journey to Adventure” but to do a thorough job in any place requires a good
five years. And you have to be prepared to give up a fair amount of accustomed
comforts - like all media, Mozart and good movies, flexibility, strengthening
human contact, possessions, solitude, rest. You have to be able to carry all that
you need on your person. Get into 18th century activities like reading, sewing,
letter-writing and dialectic conversation exchanges; your soul becomes an island
on which all responsibility is yours. You look forward to the sunsets or cloud
variations not to an exhibition or concert . . .
If money, time and energy hold out after my Turkish trip, I’ll go to Afghani-
stan, Pakistan, Nepal, India and Ceylon. From there three possibilities arise for the
next direction. Either to continue on round the world into the Orient — Thailand,
Japan and Polynesia, or sail down to Madagascar up through Kenya + Ethiopia,
or back to, certain by-passed European spots — Venice, Vienna, Salzburg and
Scandinavia. Or I could be back in the States tomorrow depending on physical
+ mental pressures.
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APPENDIX 4

Jerome Hiler
You’re right Nick [Dorsky] about “Strangers On A Train” - every shot carries
the motion along like gang busters; all movement seems to have sprung forth
organically from what has preceded it. Do they ever revive “Under Capricorn”?
his most romantic work and second color film; those slanted diagonal tracks
up and down and back up and back down one-takes breathlessly pursuing all
these characters - every one of whom makes a sacrifice, deceives, confesses, feels
shame, gives up but in the end gets back what he really wants: shading like the
most contrapuntal of string quartets. I think sometimes most of the films biggest
“moment” falls in the center; that point when the main character (the one we
identify with most but traces of whom can be found in all the other figures)
discovers the truth about himself, his accumulated life style, and the situation
he’s now in. This revelation is usually climactic, sensational, central in time
though precipitating the actions on either side like a pebble dropped into a still
pool causes concentric circles to emanate outwards. I’m recalling “Shadow of a
Doubt” when Charlie (Teresa Wright) madly rushes down main street U.S.A,
her home town boulevard she’s crossed every complacent day of her life, to get to
the library before it closes and confirm dark suspicions about her uncle Charlie
( Joseph Cotton) as a killer. But she also loves him, believes herself to be like him
(as Norman Bates is a dangerous extension of neurotic Marion Crane in “Psycho”)
and would even give herself to him as sacrificial cleanser. Why else does she wear
black at the finale if she doesn’t long to ritualize some kind of exchange in death?
Or Cary Grant’s outdoor, unprotected trial in the cornfields cut off from all
those accumulations of civilization - monuments, cities, cars, trains, vehicles that
place and necessarily contain all the action in the sequences before and after. For
the first and last time he is alone, dependent on himself, perhaps questioning
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standards of existence. Again that pasty pastel phony shimmer of a hill in “Tom
Curtain” when Andrews is reassured that Newman is okay, and it’s now safe to
accept him again - a film that is disquieting in that Hitch so dislikes these people
and the whole tone is half-hearted involvement, but that sweeping away camera
still makes that central revelatory point albeit now the surrounding sequences are
so leaden that the various finales trail off into a whimper. Does the callous prostitu-
tion of the central characters reflected in the difficulty to kill a man mirror also
the ineptitude of the artist unable to keep up a good show any longer after years
of selling his wares in the marketplace? Let me make one more comparison and
I will leave master Alfred to stew in his juice; coming round again to “Strangers”
and the party sequence in which everybody finally discovers certain unsettling
truths pertaining to each individual self. First Guy who is subjected to that visual
reenactment of his wife’s strangling, a sign or a punishment for his guilt, hardest
on him for he is tested like in a dream, a nightmare to the fruition of evil thoughts
towards those who get in our way. He sees the malice in action that he is only weak
enough to feel and repress. When Pat Hitchcock whose physical resemblance
ignites the ritual appeasement of troubled passions; she who felt murder to be
romantic, felt no compassion for a fellow being’s demise, laughed then and quakes
now before the horror. Put yourself in any place and the responsibility is equally
spread thick. Now Bruno, the aggregation of all the other characters’ nastiness and
spite who out of desperation first seduces his party victim then madly punishes,
tries to destroy (just like Hitchcock who laughingly gets his audience to join in
all this macabre fun, then turns tables and implicates us all). He collapses, faints,
released from this horror, like certain opium clouds in whose sleep the dark part of
our natures steals up, possesses us as daemon incubus, and the furies are unleashed.
We all share in this central revelation once more. So right now this is where I
believe the marrow of Hitchcock to be despite the dazzling glare of certain extra
skeleton dances on the very necessary fringes.
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APPENDIX 5
Literal Transcription of Original Typed Notes

and Handwritten Annotations in “Warren
Sonbert on Marnie”
1
Not that one can exhaust a film as rich as Marnie, but one of the work’s calling
cards, [and] one that it shares with the output of Sirk, is an articulate ambiguity
of utterance, of pictorialization, of montage — but of which of course so do the
best filmmakers [partake].
One of the major concerns of the film seems to be the schizophrenic split
[(]contained within the same frame[)] between the visualizations of blockage
[closure] and escape. This is rendered in the [very] first image (after the storybook
telling entry titles — pages turning — though in the opposite direction of the way
they normally do) with the back of a brunette [Raven – haired woman] walking
with a yellow handbag away from the camera from CU, then the camera tracking
with her down the platform of a deserted train station. The converging lines of
tracks [, ]columns and trains seem to point to both a point of destination, of flight
but as well [to] a cul de sac of constraint.
The first cut away from this quest — and they will be inextricably linked from
here on in — comes with a CU of Strut’s outraged “Robbed” delivered against
the yellow-walled background of his office. Struts’ complaints and Marnie’s
psychosi[e]s act throughout the film as spurs and catalysts to one another.
The second cut feature[s] a duo (more conspicuously incompetent for being a
pair rather than the stature a single detective might visually inspire and emphasize)
of typically ineffectual Hitchcockian policemen engaged in the investigation
[placed] in midforeground R while on backforeground L stands in bemused
observance Strut’s slut of a secretary (someone obviously more suited to her
bosses’ extracurricula demands than the more demure Marnie — one is reminded
of Mark’s later line: “Being cornered by a bullish boss” . . . etc. The secretary (as
the 2nd woman glimpsed in [this] the film’s 3rd shot) moreover both links with
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the so far unseen heroine (both share black hair) but whose demeanor — slovely,
comely, inviting, loose — is in marked [contra]distinction to the even only
glimpsed from behind ice queen statuesque posture of Marnie — the woman of
the first image. Still talking only about the 3rd image now — behind the couple
of dicks and the single siren — an open door looms that seems to scream for some
body to fill its frame.2 Sure enough after a shot back to Struts kvetchings — (an
unsympathetic father figure that [to which] Mark’s soon to appear presence will
eventually [form] be a rebuttal — as well as to Mark’s own father’s ineffectual
side of the other fence’s choice of father figure options — either a lout or a wimp,
while Mark is (almost) at least “ideal” — that doorway is at last filled by Mark’s
initial appearence sliding into place: Assured, direct, full face forward — unlike
the mysterious, devious Marnie (false black hair, in isolation, head turned away)[.
Marnie is] both distinuished — coat & tie — yet casual — raincoat over shoulders
(and rain & water will indeed be called into play in great detail later on[)]. The
camera will track[s] in to Mark as he utters his ironic “Resourceful” in reference to
the yet unseen Marnie. But the track in to both Mark & Marnie within the film’s
first half dozen images provides a link between the film’s [2] major characters (not
for nothing are they called “Mark & Marnie”.) in which Marnie’s psychoisis is a
more extreme outgrowth of Mark’s neurosis (a little like the situation between
Norman and Marion — also similar sounding names — in “Pyscho” but there
the sexes are reversed in their more dangerous developments). Just a little more
digressing on this business of names (and this will be underlined with the parade
of Mary-derived Social Security cards shortly to come — Margaret, Marion
(again), Mary even and so on): In the major masterworks of Hitchcock’s late
’50s and early ’60s films the heroines have been Madeleine (“Vertigo”), Marion
(“Psycho”), Melanie (“The Birds”), Marnie (“Marnie”). Obviously Hitchcock’s
Jesuit-oriented education divides women up into the Virgin Mary and Eve (the
name of the h[e]roine of “North by Northwest”) — and by extension of that [,]
Lil (from Lilith) in “Marnie” [(Marnie’s opposite in style + personality + her
doppelganger]
3
Marnie continues on her path through the hotel lobby, the [her] yellow hair
is finally revealed after a washing away (later referred to us as a washing away of
our sins) with a significant light on the wall in the background (these lights and
lamps will figure significatly for both the hero & heroine — as they do in most of
the Robert Burks’ photographed Hitchcocks of the 50s and 60s — with all the[ir]
usual baggage of illumination & revelation. The 2nd overwhelming statement of
blockage & escape comes with the packages, suitcases, handbags motifs on the
bed [throughout the film]. These after all are apparatas/vehicles of both escape/
flight/travel/destination [+ departure] but also of [metaphors for breaking away
as well as that impossibili] containment. Closed worlds accumulate & overwhelm
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the screen’s frames: bags, suitcases, sewer grates (suggesting the initial motif of
bathrooms [as] secret recesses) keyes, identity cards (of course a schizo like Marnie
would have many of those — both on a pragmatic and on a personal level). [CU
of a] Yellow key is pushed down the grate — throughout the work it isn’t red
(color of blood, death, lust, passion, excitment, irresponsibility’ fire, heat — all
the things that Marnie is not) that is linked with Marnie but yellows and browns
and greens — tasteful, muted, unassertive — colors that Mark also shares and
cultivates. Her remarks to Forio: “Bite me” and the stableman’s “Spoiled Baby” on
Forio (something Marnie obviously was not) coming in such close contact with
the first of a series of elusive mother figures — [(]the woman at the inn desk[)] —
to balance the father figures [that also] balance Mark & Marnie. ([This woman
is] Almost a Marnie lookalike, almost a fantasy projection of an ideal world for
Marnie’s future[:] a 50ish Marnie overseeing only limitless stables of horses) sets
in motion itself the infamous false backdrop rocking horse rear projections fantasy
escape ride for Marnie (horses — traditionally the father in Freudian interpreta-
tion of dreams): False background, false pleasures, false escape. Cut to another
image of blockage & escape: from above the cab proceeding down the Baltimore
street. Red brick houses making another [more] converging lines of cul de sac with
a ship as the dead end in the background — a ship takes you away (the latter south
seas honeymoon is suggested here — as well as the “Aloha” pillow of Marnie’s
dream (or reality) of the night of her initiation into murder.) [Ship + Rocking
horse — Toy World — Arrested Development]. Naturally a yellow cab & children
at play (here Sirk’s children invariably growing up to repeat the mistakes (and here
crimes) of their parents [The disturbing cycle endlessly repeated]: their chant of
“Doctor, Nurse & Alligator Purse” will have their obvious correlatives in the core
of the work to follow. The little girl & Marnie alternate points of view. Red gladioli
suffusions are due to this bout of jealously with Jessie. The mother makes a crack
about “Blonde” equating it with evil-[ironically] a color that is almost never absent
from any frame of this film. And indeed this subtle yet debilitating contagion that
pervades the film’s moral climate reaches its apex with the entrance and actions of
Lil – Marnie’s doppleganger — . Marnie is framed standing against the staircase
(quest ahead) Jessie is framed sitting against a lower area of the same staircase
(her trials — since she’s younger — will be perhaps more arduous — who’s to say
that the spoiled Jessie won’t have similar or more excruciating torments/fuck ups
from her upbringing) while behind Mrs. Edgar teacups & fragile Dresden china
loom (linking up with Mr. Rutland’s teacups) The overbearing mother & the
underachieving father. [Although of different social strata] Both houses (only
two in the film) share these symbols, of [contain] family[ies] fragilely built over
thin ice (could break away at any moment) in the emphasis on china, of staircases
(trials to overcome) and guilty secrets hidden away contained within the sphere
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of everyday normalcy (Lil’s later snoopings & pryings). Mrs. Edgar’s leg is already
broken [lame] — she hasn’t a leg to stand on in her false assumption of false guilt
(like the heroine of “Suspicion” assuming bad faith martyrdom). This infirmity
of mind & body smacks the face of her begrudged-birth bastard daughter as
nutcrackers, needles & nuts spew all over the space place in a frenzy of sexually
hostile[ity] symbols as the yellow refrigerator looks on. Onto the first shadow of
the dream — window tapping sequence — window is an escape but there’s also a
brick wall directly opposite. Mother at the top of stairs is also in shadows and an
ominous walkdown (Herrmann’s almost gooey score finally lets up and the silence
is at last really threatening) slow FO down the stairs (that walk is more tapping)
(the cane a transference for the later murderous phallic poker). FI on train R to
L (psychological regression that R to L in the heroine’s odyssey) which cuts in
further emphasis to a yellow cab at curb going R to L to deposit a newspaper
clutching Marnie (The headline reads: “Crash kills 118” and even though she’s
smiling this is not an auspicious sign — did you know that Mrs. Edgar’s address
on that dream street in Baltimore — prominently displayed but in the background
of the final cathartic sequence is [#] 118? Not a casual offhand # [mind you] like
7 or 3, huh? & More on 8 later). In the Rutland offices — distinguished by brick,
converging columns, a bridge in background of its exteriors — Susan, the affable
Rutland secretary — bright & cheery, but already hence “tamed” and therefore
of absolutely no interest to the huntsman Mark (he doesn’t ride to the hounds,
makes fun of such but is [really] after more challenging prey) is set in sharp
contradistinction to Marnie’s mysterious aloofness (much like Scottie Ferguson’s
fascination with Madeliene [rather than the more accessible Midge] in “Vertigo”.).
Similarly Marnie piques Mark’s interest. Mark’s green safe/vault[,] the green walls
and brown furniture combine with Mark’s flirtaious appraisals and Marnie’s
neurotic coy avoidance glances to exude a palpable sexual tension. Marnie later
eyes the safe, Mark in background eyes Marnie — Mark observes before he trains
his animals. Keyes are for insertion — Marnie taking back with her aggression the
sexuality circumstances have denied her: Money & Power and aggressive control
are the makeup of a man’s world (a theme of “Vertigo” too) and Marnie’s thefts
are also her rapes of male power. [And revenge — albeit unconscious — for the
double losses of innocence — hers + her mother’s.] Lil closes door on Marnie’s
observations — like Strut — Lil is both a halt to Marnie’s actions and a spur to
her catharsis. Predatory behavior & clinical observance before action: Mark &
Marnie. Man flirts & more red suffusions (red on white) another trip to bathroom
— another washing away of sins — here with soap. White-color of death. [in
Japan: the removal of color.]
More washing away of past sins with the storm outside the Rutland offices
— now single car in zigzag lined parking lot. A lamp prominent in foreground
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dividing but balancing Mark & Marnie. A healthy attitude — Mark’s [+ God the
father’s] destroying of his 1st wife’s Pre-Columbian art collection: (connected
to Marnie’s animalistic primitivism — shedding her shoes before jumping on
Forio later on). But then there is a mystery there, about Mark’s 1st wife, about her
“death” — “So young” — someone (Susan?) says. Unanswered, but perhaps of
equal devastating import to Mark’s current condition as [is] the film’s conveniently
put together puzzle of Marnie’s destructive incident of [in] her youth. This
opens up an endless can[s] of worms. What lurks behind everyone’s behaviorial
patterns. Did Mrs. Edgar become a prostitute because of economic factors or
was her personality drawn to it or a combination of both. And surely Strut’s
homelife — judging by the arch, removed presence of his middle-aged wife —
can’t solely explain his brutality and venality. What is it about Lil that causes her
both to be a champion of her sister’s memory & place in Mark’s affections (a la
Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca”) but in love herself with Mark and cuastically out to
get Marnie anyway she can? And why is Mr. Rutland so removed from society
and so complacent about it? Will each of the children playing in the street on
both trips to Baltimore themselves be twisted, half-formed, neuroticized in the
process of attaining adulthood. One of the film’s mysteries is somewhat solved
but not in any instance are all the others. Mark at least makes the showy gesture
of discounting his past — moving on without the human’s usual tenacious hold
on memory & guilt. The office’s red carpet links with the Rutland home’s red
carpet with further links with Mrs. Edgar’s red carpet that [on which] later
on the blood-splattered poker will find its ultimate rest. A tilted CU for Mark
comforting Marnie, a CU for their 1st kiss — now set right, and a 3rd tilted CU
in opp. dir. of the first to balance the kiss and its apposite effect. Mark & Marnie
take their 1st of many car rides: all of which accumulate to information being
given or confessions — some true some partly true — being rendered. These are
modern-day odysseys of the soul in the American suburban landscape. Invariably
streaks of brown-yellow-green (the onset of fall) will be the backgrounds for Mark
& Marnie — complemented by the colors of their clothes. At the race track it
just isn’t the man’s pressure of the past that this time causes the red suffisions: his
entrance coincides with a glimpse of Table #8 card placed on Marnie’s lower R.
#8 is also the number of the race horse that Marnie refuses to bet on. #8 her home
address in Baltimore (plus 1 & 1 — Marnie & Mom) [Marnie + Mark? Marnie
+ Lil] It all adds up. A salt & pepper duality [also on the table]. And the horse’s
name is appropriatelt annointed “Telepathy” — certainly part of Mark’s hold on
Marnie. He’s the only male who has so far been able to outfox this vixen. Again
red on white is the jockey’s attire. Mark’s recessive father is seen descending the
staircase at our 1st glimpse of [inside] the Rutland home (balancing our previous
sight of Marnie’s mother descending — both from her [Marnie’s] POV — but
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in opposing directions). Mark’s home is full of pictures of horses, and silver and
bronze suclptures of horses, in fact [they’re] the only art work that seems to be
present. If Marnie is looking for father figures (Forio even gets delivered eventu-
ally) she can certainly find [them] it here. And her reactions upon entering are not
of forboding or mistrust or dread (at least not until after the honeymoon) but of
welcoming interest. And Mr. Rutland is even wearing Marnie’s colors — yellow
vest & green tie — school colors, team colors, colors the signal that I’m on your
side (in contrast Lil wears turquoise, ruby red, — the mischievous & the chal-
lenging). Marnie will find sympathy & aid in Mr. Rutland & Mark, antipathy &
hostility from Lil & Strut — but the latter’s actions and presences will also serve
as kicks in the butt for reassessment and reevaluation [while Mr Rutland is merely
ineffectual]. Lil calls Mark “sneaky” — just like Marnie, but also soon enough
like Lil with her snoopings & pryings. Again the prominent tea cups plus [tea]
ceremony link up with Mrs. Edgar’s home backgrounds. 1) LS from above, the
walk by the couple to the stables. (Vertigo’s stables are invoked). 2) In the stables
horses on side foreground, [Camera eye level] couple in background. 3) CU kiss
disquieting because of the abrupt focal length change from the previous images.
The robbery: Another hiding scene in the secret recesses of the bathroom — in
fact the film’s longest take. - Marnie’s waiting. Unclean bodily functions -later on
Mark will refer to Marnie’s lies as “Mt. Everest[s] of manure” thus linking up the
visual themes of horses & bathrooms/toilets [Fathers + the unclean/sex]. And
now again the bag & key and the thrust forward assuming aggressive masculine
stance for the robbery. Now a lengthily held symmetrically balanced LS camera
below eye level but looking across rather than up — a position not assumed by
any other shot in the film — 2 women engaged in separate but similar actions. The
washerwoman at her work and Marnie robbing the safe. Yes but both are “cleaning
up”. Hitchcock’s visual puns provide some relief from the predominantely minor
key tonality of the work. Marnie removes her brown shoes for flight (linking up
with her similar gesture later on [when mounting] with Forio). And indeed the
first cut away from the robbery already has her on her horse. Theft & riding are
coequal releases for her. Mark greets her soon afterwards with “I should beat the
hell out of you” — good animal training tactics. [-] If not the most edifying in
regards to humans. In this initial revelation of Marnie’s mendacities Hitchcock
keeps the couple in strictly separate frames though the bedroom at the inn is
certainly small enough to contain them within the same cinematic space but it’s
at this point in their relationship that they are spiritually farthest apart.
Mark calls Marnie “a habitual liar” in their next car ride — though Mark
eventually himself lies to Lil, Strut, Cousin Bob, his father and on and on. At the
Howard Johnson’s Marnie would once more like to “freshen up” at the rest room.
Escape comes for her in bathrooms & horses — on board ship a big fuss is made
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about her hiding retreating in there. Mark asks “Are you cold Margaret?” “Marnie”.
The confusion of names finally reveals the truth: her real name and the fact that
she is cold — frigid. Outside the house before leaving on her honeymoon MR.
Rutland suggests going back for “another piece of cake”. In the previous image of
Mr. Rutland that we saw — before Mark & Marnie’s kiss at the stables — with
Lil in the foreground, Mr. Rutland reaches for another piece of cake too. There’s
a tie-in here between two self-indulgences. Mr Rutland’s unselfreflective selfish-
ness & complacency & almost as if in balanced overcompensation Mrs. Edgar’s
self-sacrificial burdens of guilt. Mark’s father again blithely unaware & withdrawn,
Marnie’s mother oppressive and all too aware. On the steps Mark suggests bringing
Lil back a “Noble savage” — an attempt to balance some of Lil’s overly sophisti-
cated outlook (degenerate, overrefined — lolling about on couches, going out to
lunches, endless shopping) with some of Marnie’s animalistic primitivism (but
here again overbalanced — Marnie is nothing if not an overachiever — happy to
work late, after hours, boundless energy that can only find an outlet, an escape
from self in keeping busy — even down to non-stop robberies, “absconding with
the family silver” as Mark gamely puts it. Cousin Bob’s info to Lil sets her up as
another thief — going through drawers and ferreting out secrets — in Hitch’s
Jesuit-trained mentality such behavior isn’t too far from the taints of Marnie’s
pilferings — more so as Marnie is more actively psychotic. The cruise becomes
another flight. The yellow walls & green chairs so compliment the films other
interiors that Mark & Marnie might seem to have designed their suite to feel
more than at home. Marnie emerges in a muted green nightgown/robe by Edith
Head that resembles a formidable coat of armor as Mark makes a crack about
bathrooms being the real “battleground” of a marriage. [The irony of Marnie’s
full frigid confession. Intercut with Mark beside an enless profusion of flowers]
Mark’s attempts at affection result in Marnie’s caged, animalistic clutchings of the
green couch like a trapped prey — just as later on her endless cat burglar outfit &
[endless] pacing[s] after Struts’ intrusion reinforce the nonhuman aspect. This
next vain stab at flight, escape (the cruise) displays in profusion yellow flowers, a
yellow headband, even yellow drinks (screwdrivers- sex & [a] safe-breaking tools).
Before the love? sex? rape? scene there are 2 shots from above & below the couple
right after the tearing of the nightgown. This is balanced by a porthole directly
behind Marnie’s head eye level. Her lowering down with Marnie’s vacant eyes
staring and the FO FI on the grey porthole sets in motion some more questions
about the scene. Sex or no? Rape or no? Climax or no? But the visual emphasis on
a grey porthole both before & afterwards surely posits an unsatisfied vagina. The
lack of emphasis on anyone else onboard during Mark’s frantic search through
the ship’s corridors links up with the other transportation scene of the opening
train station and that these are solitary quests by the hero & heroine. Again
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the profusion of water — pool & ocean, and the vainly attempted drowning
reinforce the continual motif of washing away those sins. When Marnie says
goodbye to Mark back at the homestead there’s both a rolling expanse of hills
in the background as well as a fence — one more visual emphasis on closure &
flight (this links up with the Balt-more household’s window & brickwall, or ship
and street, and so on. Mark brings home Forio: a slanted shot of two women (Lil
& Marnie) at the windows of their rooms both parting the curtains at the same
time. This recalls a similar moment of similar import in “Rear Window” with Lisa
(Grace Kelly), the heroine[,] and as well Miss Lonelyhearts (when the former
proudly holds up Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring — unaware of the approaching
murderer and right before Miss Lonelyhearts contemplates drinking a potion of
sleeping pills). These juxtapositions of two previously thought of very different
kinds of women now suggest the opposite: in “Rear Window”s case Lisa could
very well wind up a lonely, unwanted unattached woman just as the spinster (as
she eventually does) has the potential to enter into a mutual satisfying relationship
with another being. Here in “Marnie” I think Hitchcock has already demonstrated
the doppleganger links between Lil & Marnie. Lil certainly has the potential to
becom[e]ing an active thief & liar (she even swears this kind of alliegiance to
Mark) while Marnie, if her anxieties are solved and her soul saved, could learn
attachment and trust for a fellow sympathetic creature (“Getting a jaguarandi to
trust you is a great deal” remarks[ed] Mark earlier). After Marnie’s leap & shoe
removal to mount the horse, Lil & Mark in the same frame have a dialogue. There
is only a cut away to mark solely filling his own cinematic space after Lil’s remark
about a “Mother in Baltimore”. Mark’s moment of revelation and intellectual
isolation deserves the cut, the change of spatial venue. A reason to cut, to make
a change. This is a moment of “truth” one is not cinematically slighted. Another
revelation follows — but as it turns out a false one — Mark on the phone in his
upstairs study questioning a detective about Marnie’s past and getting the info
about Mrs. Edgar’s police record. Again the camera shifts overhead for the news
item that literally throws a new slant on the proceedings. The scene even ends with
a closed door in his study from Mark’s POV emphasizing that these secrets may
not yet be truly answered unbeknowst to Mark. The “Aloha” pillow dream follows
with a pan back to reality of Marnie’s Rutland mansion bedroom with its yellow
flowers. The man’s hand at the window “I can’t bear to be touched”.
The “I’m sick? Take a look at yourself, daddy dear” scene follows. Mark’s
admits, somewhat smugly[,] his lack of perfection. This ends with Marnie’s
screams of “Someone help me” which is followed by the slow crane down of the
entering party guests which only cuts when Strut’s arrival fills the frame. Strut
is the help, albeit indirectly, that will lead to the final catharsis. Not only that:
Lil greets him conspiciously dressed in red — what a double whammy. Marnie
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in white as rebuttal. After her cat burgular getup pacings -like the trapped prey
various clutchings of the couch, her sympathy and identification with the trapped
vixen during the hunt pushes her literally (and the camera as well) over the
brink. The rocking horse escapes, her toy world no longer satisfy. Neither does
the subsequent robbery — not a stranger’s safe but her husband’s the MALE.
During the hunt Lil pursues her in her active doppleganger role, and after the
accident three women struggle with a gun, torso shot with Marnie & Lil balanced
on L & R while a mother surrogate figure & provider of the gun is in the middle.
The two halves of the ego must destroy the id (and again this woman — the
first & last we see her –recall not only Mrs. Edgar, Marnie’s mother, but as well
that perfect ideal of Marnie in the future[,] glimpsed earlier in the film as the
mistress of the inn of Forio’s stables. Doppleganger halves struggling with gun
with mother between them. But all that gets shot and from Marnie’s POV like
the safe vault in the next thing [scene] — two escapes that must be destroyed,
relinquished — is Forio. Strut’s line of “Wait till you’ve been victimized” is visu-
ally answered by the distraught mindless entrance of Marnie in her riding togs
listlessly coming into the Rutland hallway — the only victim now seems4 to be
herself. The god’s eye view of her, the god our father, finds a paternalistic crushing
weight that is old testamount all destroying. Strutt — the mean dark side of
Mark’s weak father. In Mark’s office with Strutt horses, statures & paintings of
all types & sizes accumulate with oppressive, magnifying strength. The spiral coil
at the staircase’s bottom compliments Marnie’s often spiral coil hairstyle - esp.
emphasized with her talk on the phone to her mother. And her descent down the
staircase to visually encounter it seems like some kind of Job-like accumulative
mass of pain in mockery. The zooming in & out of the money in the safe is an
obvious enough metaphor of sexual thrust as the green & browns seem to relate
to the[is] female’s aggressive rape of male power & control. There are 3 shots of
Mark’s crotch approaching Marnie with his outstretched hand. Does vault relate
too to her vaulting with the horse. His fly to her fly through the air? Surely their
intertwined boots & shoes given a prominent shot in CU is like another rape but
this time hers over his money. These tensions are not resolved quite. Back to Bal-
timore — the ship being there still suggests [a] stasis of the situation. Rain again
but now the final washing away of the sins. The red bricks of the buildings recall
Forio’s final collision with the wall. Marnie immediately plunges upon entering
onto that staircase that provided the background for both her & Jessie earlier in
the film (and links up too with the Rutland staircase seen a scene before) — final
mounting up for answers [children ascending, fathers and mothers descending].
Like “Psycho” only the mother knows the whole story. In the recounting, the
sailor (linking up with [the] outside ship — a constant reminder, of [a] millstone
of guilt around mother’s neck) provides little Marnie with the same gestures of
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Appendices
comfort that Mark provides [issues] for the nightmare awakening adult Marnie.5
White is death in Japan. The removal of color. The opening of the flashback is a
similta-eous zoom in and pan back (like the Vertigo technique). A queasy repul-
sion / attraction like the thrusts to the safe. The sailor’s emergence is a fragmented
pan (the only instance of this technique in the film) giving the character special
prominence. The potency of the phallic poker recalls the nutcrackers & needles
of the smack seen (as well as the physical blows) of Mrs. Edgar’s outrage towards
Marnie towards of [for] any kind of sexuality. “There now” comfort statement
[is the] same as Marnie’s towards Forio — the ironic exorcism [of destroying
the father]. The mother takes on her daughter’s guilt which causes the future
abberations in the really guilty party — shades of “Under Capricorn” territory
here — which in turn makes everybody cummulatively miserable because of the
underlying mendacity — as opposed to having it out. This transfer of guilt motif
taints all. The teacups in background during Mrs. Edgar’s confession mutely
underline family fragility once more. The final images of mother & daughter
contain a phallic tilted fountain pen in background. A slash, a separation but
also what joins them in guilt — either sexuality or the denial of that [it]. Outside
a blond girl in yellow is the foreground figure in a pack of surprisingly startled
onlookers at the couple’s emergence — almost as if they too are disturbed by
the ugly possibility of copulation in the form of relationships rearing its head
in any repressive upbringing situation (after all children are usually denied any
healthy exposure to such — just like unclean bathroom functions & equated
with that — and again perhaps resulting in their future adulthoods with similar
sexual & behavioral abberrations along Marnie’s lines or any other’s. FO from
above as the car (once more) containing Mark & Marnie starts to turn a corner
but does not quite complete its action before the end. A gesture towards healing
and unity but not strongly enough affirmed to insure a happy ending (again a la
Sirk), that all the problems have been worked out or that there’s any such thing
as an easily resolvable resolution.
NOTES
These endnotes transcribe the handwritten marginalia of “Warren Sonbert on Marnie.” The
numbers are placed in the transcription to correspond as much as possible to their placement in the
text. This is a draft of a lecture on Hitchcock’s Marnie that Sonbert gave at BAM/PFA on July 8,
1986. Marnie and Sonbert’s A Woman’s Touch were screened together at that talk.
1. Anyone with wishes to (unclear) the (unclear) takes might leave now as the seats will be locked
and bolted I guess this is my critique. Well I can either read my lecture or else just answer
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Appendices
questions about why I made this film. Apologize for not making this as detailed as it could be
– Swamped with finals + critiques
2. We the audience already want a hero. Though in true Hitchcockian fashion we pay for such
desires by being given one to inspire mixed reactions
3. Marnie nothing if not a virgin albeit a somewhat perverted (unclear)
4. eyes blank like before her rape so she decides to rape
5. tho in opp. reaction
263
Figure 16. Friendly Witness (Warren Sonbert, US, 1989)

Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings

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Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings

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FRAMEWORK

Drake Stutesman POETRY

“Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema”

Acknowledgments and Accreditations 7

Filmography: Warren Sonbert 239

and “Warren Sonbert Filmography”: reprinted by kind permission of Film

A Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert’s

Figure 3. Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

Sonbert’s Career Evolution10

Furthering Sonbert’s Legacy24

Warren Sonbert was conversant about the varied manifestations of creative

In my introduction to this collected volume of Sonbert’s writings, I articulated

Sonbert’s relationship to music is a subject worthy of more in-depth analysis and

Sonbert’s creative relationship with poets is another subject worthy of further

tuxedo theatre is Sonbert’s newest and best work. He has abandoned

Alfred Hitchcock that was published in Film Culture magazine. Altogether, we

else, Sonbert’s world view—the tension between balance and disequilibrium—

Amphetamine (with Wendy Appel, US, 1966), B/W, sound, 10 min.

Noblesse Oblige (US, 1981), color, silent, 25 min.

“Aggressive Genius,” Bay Area Reporter, date unknown.

Literal Transcription of Original Handwritten

p. 55 – Love, scene in rain

Literal Transcription of Original Handwritten

Literal Transcription of Original Handwritten

Literal Transcription of Original Handwritten

Literal Transcription of Original Typed Notes

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