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
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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