After 20 years of making silent films, in 1989 with Friendly Witness, Sonbert returned to incorporating music tracks back into his filmmaking practice. In doing so, he selected specific recordings from his firsthand knowledge of a vast repertoire of classical, pop, and world music idioms. Musician, and experimental filmmaker Luke Fowler observed “Sonbert…lived for music as much as film and would go to great lengths to contrive tours for his films in order to catch whatever appealing new opera premiere he wished to see in Europe at that time.”
The Cup and the Lip. 1986. USA. Directed by Warren Sonbert. 20 min. 16mm.
Sonbert considered The Cup and the Lip as one of his best films – “complete, succinct and time proof.” Film critic David Sterritt wrote that “the film appears to be a regretful and perhaps sardonic essay on human frailty – and on the effort to stave off chaos by means of political and religious institutions, which carry their own dangers of social control and mental manipulation.”
Friendly Witness. 1989. USA. Directed by Warren Sonbert. 32 min. 16mm.
Friendly Witness prompts the viewer to contemplate, in analogous fashion, the tension between the music and the images. Critic Fred Camper has noted that the first section of Friendly Witness is “suggestive of loves gained and love lost” – to the tunes of four rock and roll songs. Sonbert accompanied the closing imagery with a music underscore from Gluck’s operatic overture to Iphégenie en Aulide.
Divided Loyalties [screened with original sound composition by Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster]. 1978. USA. Directed by Warren Sonbert. 22 min. 16mm.
Describing the film as "about art vs. industry and their various crossovers," Sonbert said “the job of editing is to balance a series of ambiguities in a tension-filled framework". Interpreting a multiple-shot sequence…in which a close-up of a Cézanne painting is being cleaned…, he elaborated that "the image of art naturally refers back to the artist-filmmaker, saying that art is both objective and merciless, the filmmaker being both callous and opportunistic...art is being revealed in the causal link of images... nothing has a valid reality outside of the whole chain of images...." For the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art, Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster composed and performed Warren Sonbert’s silent film Divided Loyalties with an original, live score.
“With Liberties and Latitude for All (for Warren Sonbert)” [Original music composition by The Fictive Five]. 2019. USA. 19 min. Sound-only composition.
In 2019, musician Larry Ochs composed, and his jazz group the Fictive Five recorded a 19-minute work entitled “With Liberties and Latitude for All (for Warren Sonbert).” Grounded in an intelligible narrative context, the tune grants enthralling counterpoint between sax and trumpet, an array of percussive configurations coordinated with a timbral hook, and even a jazzy passage composed of jittery brushwork, trumpet digresses, and an eccentric coexistence of grinding bowed bass and swinging pizzicato.
Program 93 mins.