Warren Sonbert's AMPHETAMINE to Screen at WIELS with New Score

STILL: AMPHETAMINE (1966) BY WARREN SONBERT. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

Since the success of our Warren Sonbert retrospective at MoMA earlier this year, there has been renewed international interest in the artist’s extraordinary life and body of work, as evidenced by the forthcoming exhibition Billy Bultheel & James Richards: Workers in Song at WIELS in Brussels. Gartenberg Media Enterprises has granted permission for Richards to include Sonbert’s 1966 masterpiece AMPHETAMINE in this program — with a brand new score — which plays on Saturday, September 9th, and Sunday, September 10th, 2023.

As described on WIELS’ website:

[This program is] the result of a collaboration between visual artist James Richards and composer Billy Bultheel… [it] brings together new music, archival film and text. The performance is haunted by histories of occult photography and spectral music, as well as more trivial pleasures such as internet hook ups, party drugs, fanship and Franz Schubert’s WINTERREISE… Taking apart the seamless and unified apparatus of the film programme or chamber concert, Workers in Song inhabits the whole of the second-floor gallery at WIELS, turning it into a cinematic Frankenstein. Songs and images come flickering and humming into life, performers shift in front and behind the audience, weaving an array of cover versions, interruptions, distortions, and homages. Workers in Song questions the boundaries between liveness and the pre-recorded, between presence and absence, between ghosts and the archive in a dynamic and intimate encounter between the audience, musicians, and the moving image.

Part of this complex interrogation of the “boundaries between liveness and the pre-recorded,” and the dynamic deconstruction of “songs and images… interruptions, distortions, and homages,” is AMPHETAMINE, an experimental masterwork with images of young men partying and shooting up amphetamines, as well as a breathtaking, 360-degree shot of two men kissing — which was directly inspired by the iconic 360-degree shot of James Stewart and Kim Novak kissing in Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958). Just as Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE dialogues with and re-imagines elements of VERTIGO, Bultheel and Richards dialogue with and re-imagine AMPHETAMINE thanks to the accompaniment of a brand new score, and their inclusion of the film in this heady and intriguing multimedia performance piece.

AMPHETAMINE is an important entry in Sonbert’s filmography for several reasons. Not only is it notable for its allusions to VERTIGO; it’s also groundbreaking for its portrayal of intimacy between gay men. This avant-garde gem, with its 360-degree shot of two men kissing each other, was made three years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising (or, in other words, the beginning of gay liberation). The film is also significant for its portrayal of drug use. Even in the transgressive world of underground cinema, it wasn’t common to see “preppy” young kids injecting amphetamines with deadpan looks on their faces. In other words, AMPHETAMINE broke new ground in terms of style and content.

Sonbert’s 1966 wonder continues to resonate with audiences today — especially queer audiences. In an experimental essay for Volume 4 of the zine Dirty Looks, Johnny Ray Huston writes: “The two young men are making out ecstatically, standing up… It’s so false, and yet so true that I wish that I could feel what they feel… I remember last seeing AMPHETAMINE projected at The Stud in San Francisco as part of Bradford’s Dirty Looks series. I took photos with my iPhone of images from the movie reflected on one wall.”

AMPHETAMINE is currently available through GME as a DSL download for worldwide institutional rental or purchase.