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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (March 7, 2003)
nardi 7.2003 FILM Still life within four walls m Cinema collective presents the work of late gay filmmaker Warren Sonhert ■ by G ary M orris FIN E D IN IN G FR O M T H E SEA 3520 NE 4 2 N D A T F R E M O N T 503-249-848.6 W IN TFR R O R N DINNERS FROM 5 30 TO 9 30 WEDNESDAY - SATURDAY HT(, ~ Casual Dining ~ Lounge ~ Game Room Open 4:00 Daily ~ ~ ~ ~ 120 N W Third Avenue, Portland, OR 97209 • (503) 224-3285 Parking Validated Smart Park Davis & Front www. hobos. c i ty sea rc h. com Restaurant & Lounge Japanese Restaurant 1 _ Visit us at www.starkys.com » /> & 503 230.7980 * 2913 SE Stark •i. \ t /. , ri. 1 ^ /. r ■ r _* Pizza, Salad, Sandwiches, and Oregon Microbrews sold here V Unique Sushi Tempura & Delicious Japanese Cuisine Free Delivery (60th-Rivcr, Glisan-IA/oodstoek) M-Th n:3oam-iopm Fri-Sat n:3oam-io:30pm Sun i2-9!3opm 1337 NE Broadway 503.281.6804 www.pdxyuki.com 3701 SE Hawthorne 5 0 3 -2 3 1 0 9 0 1 V J s a fellow critic for some of San Francisco’s queer weeklies, I had the gixxl for tune to know War ren Sonhert slightly in the last few years of his life, before AIDS claimed him in 1995 at age 47. I was always delighted to meet him at screenings, eager to hear him sling the dish as only he could. His daggerlike digs, delivered sotto voce, were thrilling to hear, and he had no compunc tion about stonning out of screenings early, practically tripping over the puzzled publicist. 1 often wondered if those who saw him knew anything more than his exit suggested—another irritated, impatient, overcaffeinated critic. Sonhert was, in fact, well known in the world of avant-garde cinema as Kith theoreti cian and filmmaker. A master of the form whose name— the impressionistic “diary film”— he detested, he made 18 short films between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s that are rightly ranked with the best of their time and genre. An ongoing restoration project by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS has brought these movies hack into circulation, helped by retro spectives at the Guggenheim Museum and San Franciscos Museum of Modem Art. Sonhert's early works— like 1966 s Amptata- mine, made at age 19 in collaboration with Wendy Appel— were influenced hy the gningy dmg and sex subculture in New York at the time. It nins a mere 10 minutes hut captures in its grainy black and white the lure of a queer druggy demimonde in its images of handsome boys shtxning up and making out. Portending his later work, Sonhert pointedly added a pop music score— in this case, early Supremes songs— as ironic commentary on the seedy happenings. As his style evolved, his films became ever more intense chronicles of the vivid hut always ephemeral, fleeting pleasures of the world. For a curmudgeon, he prixJuced splendidly gener ous work, filled with color and drama and a sheer appreciation of life’s beauty. 1989’s Friendly Witness represents the apex of this style: a series of brief, heavenly images of celebration, ritual and the poetry of everyday life. It was filmed in San Francisco and various far away places, especially the Middle East, where Sonhert often traveled. Structured around a series of classic R &. B songs fol lowed hy a Glück symphonic piece, Witness lovingly sur veys couples embracing, gay men at play, fireworks, nxleos and other time less tableaux. T he sheer joy of being alive and the need to fix that joy on film— making it at least temporarily real— is a recurring motif. 1995’s Whiplash transforms Sonhert s travels into heady surveys of sheer experience. W ith brief, gorgeous, often whimsical images of everything from a dog on a high wire to a handsome Bedouin man cleaning a carpet in the desert, it typifies the filmmaker’s ability to evoke a world of dazzling beauty as he himself drifted far from it into illness and death. fff one of Sonhert s films are available on video and may never have been shown in Portland before. Four Wall Cinema is tak ing care of that, though, with A Still Life of Postcards: Films hy Warren Sonhert March 11 and 12. It’s a rare chance to see the aforemen tioned films and several others. The film collective, hidden in the industrial district of Southeast Third Avenue, is an ideal venue for this material, because in some sense it shares Sonhert s vision of reminding people to kxik hard at what’s around them and find new forms to appreciate— or new ways of appreciating the familiar. According to Alain LeToumeau and Pam Minty, Four Wall grew out of a small base ment-type venue, the Cinema Next Door, which they ran together. “The collective formed partly in response to the war in Afghanistan,” LeToumeau explains. Its first program was ambitious hy any standard: The Journey, Peter W atkins’ rarely screened 14 1/2- hour dtKumentary about the growth of the U.S. military-industrial complex. A Still iJfe of Postcards typifies the kind of important cinema that has been increasingly marginalized but offers singular pleasures. “Exhibiting these films can elicit such an
