VOL 56.1
spring 2015
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
Acknowledgments and Accreditations
Ascension Serrano
Preface
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
ART
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
Warren Sonbert
“Point of View”
“Does the Avant-Garde Film Still Exist?” “Jerome Robbins”
TRAVEL
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
Warren Sonbert
“Vita”
Postcard to Jeff & Suzanne Scher, Germany, 1987
MUSIC
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
Warren Sonbert
“Malefic Overtures”
“Sonbert Introduction to ‘Some Notes on Capriccio’”
“Some Notes on Capriccio”
“Capriccio Script”
“Record Review”
POETRY
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
Warren Sonbert
“Warren Sonbert Interview”
“Film Syntax”
FILM
Jon Gartenberg
Introduction
Warren Sonbert
“Warren Sonbert Lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979”
“Rude Awakening Shot List”
Letter [excerpt 1] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
“Program Notes: Carriage Trade”
“Program Notes for Screening of Carriage Trade and Rude Awakening” “Lecture Topics”
“Warren Sonbert Filmography”
“Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”
“Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Morality”
Letter [excerpt 2] to Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
“Warren Sonbert on Marnie”
“Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama”
Postcard to Jeff Scher [and] Suzanne Fedak, US, c. 1980
“Factory Work”
“Program Notes for PFA on Nathaniel Dorsky”
“Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in Person”
“Aggressive Genius”
“Cruising: Some Afterthoughts / Views from an Outsider”
“Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema”
Filmography: Warren Sonbert
EDITORIAL
"You have to be ready to carry all that you need on your person."
- Warren Sonbert
Jon Gartenberg is the guest editor of Framework 56.1, a special issue of writing by avant-garde filmmaker, Warren Sonbert. Sonbert, as Jon’s introduction, and this issue’s content, makes clear, was a man of eclectic interests, ranging from opera to experimental poetry. He applied compelling ideas about filmmaking to many other arts and took many ideas from other arts. Most of Sonbert’s writings are out of print, unpublished, or hard to find, so this has been a great opportunity and an unprecedented one: this issue is the first collection of Sonbert’s writings. Sonbert film clips and other materials to accompany this issue can be found on the Framework website, www.frameworknow.com.
Materials have been scanned, rather than transcribed, so they appear in the original form. (Some are accompanied by transcriptions of pages with handwrit- ten annotations and are in the Appendix.) Some are typed manuscripts, with or without annotations, and some are handwritten letters; others are prints from books, newspapers, or magazines. These visible pages, by appearing as they did in the time they were written or published, can give today’s reader a sense of the real feeling in these works and of Sonbert’s life and times.
Jon’s choices of what to include also reveal some sense of Sonbert’s lived life and show him as a man of great curiosity, strong opinions, and brilliant talent, who wrote skillfully and with polyvalent imagination on many subjects. He was a man of his times but, fascinatingly, he was more radical, and in multiple ways more modern, in his opinions than many are today. Ascension Serrano, Sonbert’s partner, has contributed a loving preface. Jon, Ascension, and I hope this is just the beginning of deeper discussions about Sonbert’s work and of more publications to come.
- Drake Stutesman
56-1 links
fall 2015
VOL 56.2
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
Susan Potter
Valentino's Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920's Hollywood Cinema
Benjamin Halligan and Laura Wilson
"Use/Abuse/Everyone/Everything": A Dialogue on LA Plays Itself
DOSSIER
Geopolitics of Film and Media
Masha Salazkina, Guest Editor
Introduction: Film Theory in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization
Weihong Bao
The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and Geopolitics of Medium Specificity
Naoki Yamamoto
Eye of the Machine: Itagaki Takao and Debates on New Realism in 1920s Japan
Peter Limbrick
Vernacular Modernism, Film Culture, and Moroccan Short Film and Documentary
Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
A Writing Haunted by Cinema: The Film Theories of Three Latin American Fictions
Kay Dickson
At What Cost "Theory"? An Economics and Poetics of Uptake
Bhaskar Sarkar
Plasticity and the Global
Karen Beckman
Film Theory's Animated Map
EDITORIAL
In volume 56.2 of Framework, Susan Potter’s lushly articulate “Valentino’s Lesbianism” opens new ways of perceiving the “lesbian fantasmagoric” embedded in the erotic nuances of Rudolf Valentino’s appeal. In “‘Use/Abuse/Everyone/ Everything’: A Dialogue on LA Plays Itself,” Benjamin Halligan and Laura Wilson, in a back-and-forth conversation as an analytical devise, speculate on what they see as the queer normative breakthrough of Fred Halsted’s “mysterious and yet mythical” 1972 hardcore gay porno film, LA Plays Itself. e dossier, “Geopolitics of Film and Media Theory,” guest edited and introduced by Masha Salazkina, examines geopolitics and theories across a range of national perspectives and genres, through the writing of Weihong Bao on early to mid-century China; Naoki Yamamoto on 1920s Japan; Peter Limbrick on Moroccan short film and documentary; Felipe Pruneda Sentíes on Latin American fiction film; Kay Dickinson on Arab cinema and Rancière; Bhaskar Sarkar on ideas of plasticity, architecture and Indian cinema; and Karen Beckman on animation.
– Drake Stutesman