From: Ed Halter (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Dec 14 2010 - 10:02:39 PST
Hey NYC-based Frameworkians
Tomorrow, please join Light Industry for our last event of 2010, at
ISSUE Project Room! Details below.
xx
Ed
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Light Industry <email suppressed>
Couchsurfing
Light Industry's crashing with friends in November and December,
organizing a series of events at like-minded venues across the city
while we relocate to our new home.
________________________________
Light Industry at ISSUE Project Room:
Two Films by Warren Sonbert
With readings by Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman
Wednesday, December 15 at 7pm
ISSUE Project Room
The Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street
Brooklyn, New York
The Cup and the Lip, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1986, 20 mins
Friendly Witness, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1989, 32 mins
Though Warren Sonbert has frequently been described as a maker of
diary films, the label fails to capture the emotional and formal
intricacies at play in his work. In less than twenty films made from
1966 to the mid-90s—his career caught short by his death from AIDS at
age 47—Sonbert’s primary method was indeed the creation of dense
montages from 16mm shot in the course of daily life. The same images
and ideas were often reused in different permutations for new films
and, through this process, footage of his friends and colleagues
attains an iconic status that transcends its documentary valence,
becoming vibrant evocations of Sirkian melodrama. "I think the films I
make are, hopefully, a series of arguments,” Sonbert said of his own
work, “with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in
turn." The rich use of color and delicately punctuated editing also
point to the influence of his mentor, Gregory Markopoulos, and
Sonbert’s love of Hitchcock, Kenneth Anger, and opera.
The Cup and the Lip and Friendly Witness both date from the late
1980s, when Sonbert was refining and deepening his use of montage. Amy
Taubin noted that The Cup and the Lip “is so dense it's impossible to
apprehend it at a single viewing,” calling it “Sonbert's darkest
work." Precisely composed of 645 individual shots over 22 minutes, set
to girl-group songs and the overture to Christoph Willibald von
Gluck’s 18th-century opera Iphigeneia in Aulis, Friendly Witness was
Sonbert’s return to sound after two decades of purely silent films.
Tonight’s event pairs Sonbert with readings by three poets—Charles
Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman—a testament to the
fact that, though long-admired as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, he always
worked in conversation with other forms, literary and otherwise.
Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected
Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three
American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of
Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999).
>From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
magazine. In the 1990s, he co-founded and directed the Poetics Program
at the State University of New York Buffalo. He teaches at the
University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound.
Corrine Fitzpatrick is a Brooklyn-based poet, and former Program
Coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is the
author of two chapbooks – On Melody Dispatch and Zamboangueña, and her
poetry appears in numerous print and online journals. She recently
completed the MFA program at Bard College.
Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Recent books
include Adorno's Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna,
2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001), an
experimental novel dedicated to the memory of Warren Sonbert.
Forthcoming books include The Wide Road, an erotic picaresque written
in collaboration with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna). She is co-contributor
to The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of
Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay
area between 1975-1980. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves on
the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan
University.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
email suppressed
http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks