“Warren Sonbert: Friendly Witness and Other Films” in Atlanta Celebrates Photography Film Series

ACP FILM SERIESEYEDRUM

Warren Sonbert: Friendly Witness and Other Films

Atlanta Celebrates Photography and Film Love         present three nights of films by this crucial figure             of the American avant-garde.  

A "friendly witness," Warren Sonbert (1947-1995) holds a unique place in American independent film. On one hand he shows the distinct influence of Hitchcock and the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and on the other he was a rigorous avant-gardist. Sonbert's films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum and other institutions, but remain available only in 16mm prints and are too rarely screened.

Film Screening: Tue, Oct 26, 7pm - 9pm                                                                     

PROGRAM ONE - Juxtaposing early and late works, tonight's program (one of three) explores the maturation of Sonbert's style as well as his masterful use of music. His early trilogy of short films, set to exuberant rock and roll and documenting the seedy glamour of the 60s New York art world, established Sonbert's notoriety while he was still a teenage film student at NYU. Twenty years later, Sonbert returned to the music soundtrack in his masterpiece Friendly Witness - an intricate and deeply moving mosaic of people and places around the globe.

Film Screening: Thu, Oct 28, 7pm - 9pm                                                               

PROGRAM TWO - Sonbert's later filmmaking combines his precise but unconventional eye for color, composition, and shot content with his intricate and highly personal editing technique. 

Tonight's program presents Sonbert's magnum opus in this style (and his longest film), Carriage Trade.

Film Screening:  Fri, Nov 19, 7pm - 9pm                                                               

PROGRAM THREE - Program three explores Sonbert's career-long fascination with coupling - the dynamics of communication, romance, and desire. Honor and Obey, made at the peak of Sonbert's late period, and The Bad and the Beautiful, a restored 1960s film set to an effective popular music soundtrack. Also screened are films by two of Sonbert's influences, Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken.

Presented by ACP, Film Love and Eyedrum. Curated and hosted by Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals.  Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the critics of Creative Loafing in 2006.

Free Admission

EYEDRUM290 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr,  Suite 8                                                                         Atlanta, GA 30312  [map: Google Maps]                                                                                                             p: (404) 522-0655                                                                                                                                               web: http://www.eyedrum.org

J’ACCUSE and SLOW SUMMER Featured in MoMA’s Eighth International Festival of Film Preservation

To Save and Project: The Eighth MoMAInternational Festival of Film Preservation                                                  

October 15–November 14, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art11 West 53 Street  New York, NY 10019                                                                                                                                   

J’ACCUSE

1919. France. Directed by Abel Gance. With Romuald Joubé, Marise Dauvray, Séverin-Mars. Stunningly restored to its full 1919 length with its original color tinting by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in collaboration with Lobster Films, and accompanied live on piano by Robert Israel, one of the world’s finest silent-film composers, J’Accuse is a milestone of silent cinema. It also endures as one of the most damning antiwar films ever made, said to have influenced Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and later championed by Susan Sontag and the film historian Kevin Brownlow. Made in the last, brutal year of the Great War, Gance’s technically groundbreaking film chronicles the decimation of a Provençal village as the sons of France go off to fight, either dying on the front or returning as shell-shocked, hollow men. Gance (La Roué, Napoleon) and his brilliant cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel filmed several sequences alongside the United States Army during the battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918. Gance would later recall the unforgettable “return of the dead” sequence that ends the film: "The conditions in which we filmed were profoundly moving….These men had come straight from the Front—from Verdun—and they were due back eight days later. They played the dead knowing that in all probability they'd be dead themselves before long. Within a few weeks of their return, eighty per cent had been killed." Silent. Approx. 161 min.

Friday, October 22, 2010, 7:00 p.m. , Theater 2, T2

Sunday, October 24, 2010, 1:15 p.m. , Theater 2, T2

LANGSAMMER SOMMER (SLOW SUMMER)

1976. Austria. Directed by John Cook, in collaboration with Susanne Schett. Screenplay by Cook, Michael Pilz. With Cook, Pilz, Helmut Bozelmann, Eva Grimm. A successful Canadian-born fashion photographer who became “Viennese by choice,” Cook is often cited as one of the most important Austrian filmmakers of the past fifty years—a true auteur who created a deeply personal and vital vision of his adopted city. This screening of Slow Summer, with its sardonic and at times disturbing blurring of fantasy and autobiography, serves as a prelude to a retrospective that will begin this December at Anthology Film Archives of new prints restored by the Austrian Film Museum. Cook takes the uncanny Viennese landscape and his demimonde of artist friends and collaborators as the subject of this fascinating experimental film, which he shot on Super-8 color stock and then printed on black-and-white 35mm. “[Slow Summer] is a strange film,” the critic Olaf Möller observes, “a bit unsettling in its relentlessness, even if one doesn’t know the people in it. The characters bear the same names as the actors, and the line between truth and dare is so thin it’s often just not there; one can never be certain whether the self-loathing and disgust expressed by these people is real, or part of the fiction.” Preserved in 2006 by the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, and the film’s producer, Michael Pilz. In German; English subtitles. 83 min.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 8:00 p.m. , Theater 1, T1

Friday, November 5, 2010, 4:30 p.m. , Theater 1, T1

J’ACCUSE Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.

SLOW SUMMER Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.

All Six GEORGES MÉLIÈS Discs Including ENCORE Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

 All 6 Discs

 GEORGESMÉLIÈS – FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA

(1896-1913)

173 Films on 5 Discs

 and

 GEORGES MÉLIÈS - ENCORE

(1896-1911)

26 New Discoveries

 Format: DVD NTSC / Region 0, No Regional Code.   

 Institutional Sale Price: $400.00 plus shipping & handling.

These DVDs are available on an exclusive basis for sale to educational organizations in North America (universities, libraries, & other cultural institutions), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.

For more information on the these titles visit here.

For information on ordering by fax, email or post visit here.

To order by phone please call: 212.280.8654