Warren Sonbert Part II    by Phillip Lopate                              To give a much-discussed example: In Divided Loyalties, he shows shirtless guys embracing in a Gay Pride parade, followed by a shot of a graveyard. This would, on the face of it, appear to be a sardonic commentary on the gay lifestyle; and Warren was certainly not averse to taking an ironic distance from any group propaganda, including gays. But we also know that Warren was increasingly gay-identified from the time he moved to San Francisco; so we wonder what to make of the juxtaposition. He told an interviewer: "Well, in one sense it may be obvious. You know, 'All is vanity.' These beautiful bodies will eventually be dust. But what follows after that--you just can't take it from A to B without including C as well. It changes with all the things that are surrounding them. There is a shot of sheep getting clipped and another of sitting ducks on ice. It's people being exploited and not really knowing it. It's both embracing everything and being unbelievably critical of it at the same time."      Looking at this explanation purely on the technical, cinematic level, I would say that it sounds like wishful thinking--having one's cake and eating it too. Sonbert disliked Eisenstein for his didactic "dialectical" equations (shot of plutocrat, followed by shot of crowing rooster, means the rich guy is a silly braggart). But Sonbert was a montage filmmaker, like Eisenstein: so how do you keep the audience from drawing its own simplistic moral conclusions based on the collision of X+Y images? To say that later images, further on in the filmic stream, will complicate the equation, still cannot keep the viewer from glib causal reactions induced by two shots. One way Sonbert tried to evade these links was to separate two potentially narrative-making images with what he called "palate-cleansing shots," usually of something in nature, and filmed so close-up as to verge on the abstract. This device seems to me both mechanical and overly optimistic, in that it doesn't really defuse the satiric editorializing of individual shots.      Just as Warren was a non-narrative film artist who loved classic Hollywood movies (Ford, Hitchcock, Sirk), so his challenge was that he was an avant-garde filmmaker2 dedicated to "difficulty" and ambiguity, who also happened to have strong political and moral sentiments. He qualified his own content by saying: "Usually works are mirrors of what is contained already in the viewer, and it is the role of the creator to 'place' or qualify these reactions. Lead the viewer down one road only to diverge onto another, upset inbred expectations at the same time as exploiting these very cliches." I wonder if I am entitled to ask at this point: To what extent is this desire to keep things morally ambiguous and multivalent as long as possible, this subversive urge to "upset inbred expectations"--connected to being gay? Is it part of a gay aesthetic? Of course this subject has been worried by many better theoretical minds, in queer studies and elsewhere, and I realize I sound naïve by raising it this baldly. But I am trying to convey how, from a heterosexual (i.e., hopelessly naïve) vantage-point, one tries to puzzle out one's gay friends' inner lives, particularly if they are artists.      The paradox of Warren's films, it seems to me, is that they are both sensual and punitive, with ravishing images which add up to a sense of futility. And this paradox is not only aesthetic, but goes to the very heart of Warren's personality. He had killer charm and a core of anger. Perhaps he was angry at straight society for having stigmatized him as a gay male; perhaps he was angry that his mother had died early, and his father had also passed away, leaving Warren orphaned before he had reached middle age. He was alone in the world--except for a million friends. Somewhere this bitterness and urge to lash back, in contrast to his seductive, all-embracing public persona, had to emerge, and it came out, albeit still masked, in his art.      He seemed quite aware of the malice latent in his film method. "Some people are disturbed by the brevity of some of the images--particularly those that one might label 'beautiful' or 'ecstatic.' They are over before one has a chance to barely luxuriate in them, they are taken away before one can nestle and coo and cuddle in the velveteen sheen of it all, so that feelings of deprivation, expectations dissolved, even sadomasochism arise. Very often a cut occurs before an action is complete. This becomes both metaphor of frustration, hopes dashed, and yet of serenity if you like--that perhaps all of this activity has been going on, is going on, will be going on, and even all at the same time. That we are privileged viewers of many sectors of humanity…"      Warren loved to have it both ways. On the one hand, admitting to a certain sadomasochistic impulse to undercut expectations; on the other hand, expressing a healing wisdom, by offering us the solace of the ever-ongoing material stream. It was in the tension between these impulses that he operated, creating a body of work which assured him a solid place in the history of American experimental film.      When I was visiting San Francisco, I would sometimes stay with Warren, who lived just off Castro Street, in the heart of the gay district. Warren shared a beautiful Victorian with bay windows and wooden steps leading from the sidewalk to the first floor. I slept on a couch in the outer parlor, which had a large piano and a theatrical arrangement of tall orange irises in a vase, and a kitschy statue of two men embracing.      Warren, solicitous of my comfort as a guest in the Castro district, took me around the first night and pointed out which coffee shops and bars catered to straight men as well as gays--adding with a laugh that I would have no trouble picking up women. He had a mocking irreverence toward many aspects of gay style, the conformity of "Castro Street clones" and the fussy décor of his own house, which he blamed on his roommate, a Gone With the Wind fanatic. (The parlor bookcase was filled with foreign editions of Margaret Mitchell's novel and every possible publication related to the film.) At the same time Warren seemed proud to show off the Castro as an international gay magnet.      He was dating, he said, four, five, six or seven people at the moment. One of his regulars arrived while I was reading a book in the back porch: I heard him go into Warren's bedroom and leave some twenty minutes later, about the length of one chapter. I kept planning to put down my book and mosey up front to introduce myself; but the man was gone before I even had a chance to see him.      The next day, Warren showed me what he called "the playroom," a little secret addition, just above the basement. The house, located on a steep San Francisco hill, was actually built on stilts, and the playroom had been tucked down underneath the back porch steps. Warren informed me that it was the fashion for many of these Victorians to have their own playroom. This one was small and dark: black walls, black curtains, one naked green light bulb, and a harness floating in the center, suspended from the ceiling. It was some sort of torture device, which he assured me was "actually quite comfortable, I understand," accompanying this statement with nervous laugh trapped in the throat, rapid hand movements dishing out dissociation, and underneath, the complicitous pleasure of offering a tasty tidbit for my file of social manners. Whiplash (1997) Photo: Ascension Serrano, The Estate of Warren Sonbert      I examined the other paraphernalia: a black executioner's hood, chains on the floor, and a row of shiny balls on a string. "What are these for?"      "Oh, those come from Japan. Japanese prostitutes would put them in the anus of the man and pull them out one by one, to induce a bigger orgasm. As I say, I never use this place myself, though we do put up guests here!" he added wickedly.      My eyes kept returning to the Super-8 projector on the night-table, cocked at an upward angle to throw an image onto the wall screen just beyond the bed. The mattress was bare except for one creased black sheet. The projector was already threaded and had been stopped at mid-reel (under what circumstances I could imagine). I had my old cinephile's temptation to watch the film--any film.      The playroom felt essentially comic, like a spook house; but what did threaten me was the extent of Warren's sexual activity. Not because of AIDS--this was before we'd even heard the deadly acronym. No, it was that I envied his hedonism, while mistrusting the way it mocked my sense of the consequential difficulty of life. If I encountered in his films an emptiness, underneath the pleasure-seeking spectacle, this was only partly because he had intended it there.3   The other part was that I wanted to find "sterility"--that harsh judgment which heterosexuals, even one like myself who had no children at the time, are eager to level at gays--as the price to be paid for Warren's sexual freedom.      But I do not want to belabor the point: after all, I never saw Warren engaged in sex, except in my imagination, but I saw him plenty of times preoccupied with his art. When Warren was filming, usually with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex, he did it in a relaxed, unobtrusive manner, his camera a natural, dance-like extension of his height and coiled bearing. Once, he came to the public school where I was working and shot the kids and me, getting down on the gym mat with us: the shot turned up in Divided Loyalties. When he edited, there was that same blend of casualness and concentration: a bagel and cream cheese might lie dangerously close to the splicer, on which two celluloid strips were about to be joined. Warren defied the usual precautions by cutting the original, instead of making a work-print first. I think he relished the whole primitive, artisan setup of physically cutting film with a safety blade, scraping off the emulsion, applying glue, and watching the results through a flickering monitor, guiding them by turning the take-up reel's hand-crank.      He knew there was little financial reward for his kind of filmmaking--as little as there usually is for writing poetry, which may explain why he felt so close to poets. I used to wonder how he supported himself. The answer was, partly from a trust fund, and partly from fees earned showing his films, or selling prints to archives, or getting grants, or teaching. Within the limited remunerative constraints of his genre, he was successful, hustling, networking, cultivating friendships with festival organizers and film curators all over the world. He also began writing lively, acerbic movie reviews under the pen-name "Scottie Ferguson" (his Jimmy Stewart, Vertigo alter ego) for the Bay Area Guardian. A Woman's Touch (1983) Photo: Ascension Serrano, The Estate of Warren Sonbert      Though still gallant, the omni-appreciative persona of the younger Sonbert had given way to a more jaundiced tone, a dislike of stupidity, as he approached middle age. Warren said it this way: "There's so much junk around, there's so much crap. Webern talked about this--about how there's so much junk, why not produce less, something really scaled down and perfected. A small contained body, that really says it all."      Recently, Paul Arthur in Film Comment made a strong case for Sonbert's artistic variety, pointing out not only the different thematic emphases of each film, but shifts in technique from movie to movie. Arthur warns of the mistake many viewers make when they "conclude that Sonbert's films are more or less the same in tone and ideas." And yet I must admit that sometimes it seemed to me he was making the same film over and over. He had perfected a form which suited him, and which yielded quality results, even though it did not quite express the full brio and range of the man.      I once chided him publicly about this. Contributing in Film Culture to a special Warren Sonbert section (1983), I wrote a piece which both praised and found fault with his movies. (I told myself that he was so surrounded by admiring friends, and that avant-garde film in general is so resistant to self-criticism, that it was up to me to prod him towards taking up new challenges. We won't talk about my own unconscious hostility in doing this, or the ethics of criticizing a friend in print.) Among other things, I questioned his repetition of certain motifs, such as parades, elevated trains, car trips, be-ins, airplane wings, which made one film begin to look like the out-takes of the other.      Warren replied in the same issue. Though he bristled at the term "diary-films,"4 he still relied on the materials of his daily life: "There are certain things that interest me, and that's what I film. People think that when they see new work of mine that I'm using out-takes from past films, things from seven, eight years ago. But I'll always go to the circus during a given period of film-making, or a parade, things that are out there on public display. But at the same time, the opposite of that--private, intimate things with friends, what they'll do at home, leisure, etc."      In truth, he did have larger ambitions. He wrote a screenplay for a feature film set in Nazi Germany, built around the premiere of Richard Strauss's Capriccio; but it was a complicated schema with a dozen characters, and would have cost millions. In the absence of such backing, he continued working on his self-contained, jewel-like "cantos."      A stabilizing force had come into Warren's love-life: an older man, Ray. Immensely cultivated and kind, securely employed, silver-mustached and rail-thin, Ray became the protector, nurturer, devoted partner and champion whom Warren had long sought. They moved in to another Victorian near Castro Street, which soon became a gathering-place for their circle. Ray and Warren loved to entertain and give lavishly prepared dinner parties. Over the years, they developed into as secure a couple as can be imagined, gay or straight. Living with Ray, Warren became much more domestic. They also traveled together, Ray shepherding Warren to his screenings in foreign cities, Warren indulging Ray's scholarly passion for Renaissance painting. They had over ten happy years. In the best of all possible worlds, they would have grown old together. But Ray came down with AIDS, and died.      Warren was bereft. Ray had been his lover, older brother, nurse, manager and guardian angel. As he said to one friend, honestly if a bit self-centeredly: "Who's going to take care of me now?" In the year after Ray's death, Warren's friends, comparing impressions, began to notice that he was becoming rather imperious and irritable, his temper flaring more readily than normal. I started to hear reports of his storming into projection booths and complaining about some technical flaw in the screening of his film. He was starting to act more like a prima donna. We had our own little falling-out: it involved my being on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival when Warren submitted his latest film. In past years when I was on the committee, the NYFF had been very kind to Warren: we had almost automatically included him in our Avant-Garde program. But this time, the committee, myself included, felt that the new film was a little too much like his earlier ones; it did not seem to mark an advance. So we passed on it. Warren was stung, outraged, the more so because he regarded everyone on the committee as his personal friend. He was too proud to chew us out directly, but I heard of his displeasure in the usual roundabout way.      The next year, I rotated off the committee, and, sure enough, Warren re-submitted the film. The second time around, it was accepted. Either Warren had guilt-tripped the committee members, or they had come to their senses and realized what a gem they had insufficiently appreciated the year before.      Their decision may have affected by the news that Warren was suffering from a mysterious illness. He insisted it was not AIDS, but some sort of baffling brain disease which eluded the diagnoses of his physicians. He described to me episodes of passing out and being taken to the hospital, going through grueling tests, and finally being released. Knowing how Ray had perished, I suspected from the start that Warren was HIV-positive. A mutual friend, who lived on the West Coast and was very close to Warren, confirmed my suspicions: she had noticed certain medications on his bureau, and asked her father, who was a doctor, about them. He told her they were treatments for AIDS. She confronted Warren with this information; Warren, still denying his condition, added angrily, "Well, given the fact I'm gay and the life I've led, it wouldn't be surprising if I were suffering from AIDS!" This was classic Warren, wanting to have it both ways, to tell and not tell. Perhaps it was too much for his pride that he should have been afflicted with the common scourge, rather than some exotic ailment. Or perhaps he resisted appearing before friends in a pitiable light. Regardless, I can't help wishing he had trusted me enough to tell me; but then, he stonewalled everyone, till near the end.      The last few times I saw Warren, we got along well. He seemed to have forgiven me my treachery on the New York Film Festival committee, or at least controlled the urge to allude to it. He had hooked up with a young Hispanic man named Ascension, who was looking after Warren and whom Warren, in turn, was educating in the finer things in life. They were running from appointment to appointment, seeing everyone and everything there was to see in New York.      One day in early October, I got together with Warren for what turned out to be the last time. His speech sounded slurred from the drugs he was taking. It was hard for him to stay on a subject; his attention wandered. I remember he was looking forward most to the opera that night. He was wearing lederhosen with the ends rolled up, and he bragged about how he'd still been going to the gym and how great his body looked, all things considered; how he was unafraid to walk around in shorts in October, when most New Yorkers had already started bundling up. I thought to myself, "All is vanity, indeed! he's a step away from death, and it's still so important for him to show off his muscle tone?" In retrospect, I have no doubt a gay man would have more properly appreciated the bravado, or seen it more intuitively as a species of courage.      There were some screenings of Warren's films at the Museum of Modern Art, which he had to introduce, so he excused himself at five p.m. After that, there would be the opera to go to. "Ciao," he said amicably, walking up 53rd Street to meet up with one of MOMA's film curators, who was waiting for him in the museum lobby.      It will always seem too short, Warren's last goodbye, like a clumsy essay which ends abruptly and you turn the page, thinking there must be another page missing. He who taught me the value of a gentle leave-taking was forced to make his own exit from life an overly hasty one. We can stare at photographs of him, marveling at his jaunty presence, vital as a superstar, yet detached, contraposto, his torso turned away from the head, away from us, and try to grapple with the paradox that someone can still be so alive to us and yet--gone. It is like one of those cruel oxymorons he alluded to with his titles, Rude Awakening, Friendly Witness, Divided Loyalties, Honor and Obey, something he was trying to tell us all along. Now that we are rudely awakened to our loss of him, we must turn to his art for vestiges of his insouciant plenitude.5 Notes 2 Actually, he disliked the terms "avant-garde" or "underground," preferring to call himself an "independent filmmaker," but that term now refers to Sundance wannabes who are looking to score a Hollywood studio. 3 He described Rude Awakening as "things not working out, things not materializing, people having certain expectations, plans, input, and those dissolving." 4 He thought the term too suggestive of an accidental, anything-goes mode of composition. 5 There is, this year, a traveling retrospective of Warren Sonbert's work, originating at the Guggenheim Museum under the curatorship of Jon Gartenberg, with newly-struck prints of everything, including rediscovered films thought to be lost, such as The Tenth Legion and Ted and Jessica. Return to Part I Phillip Lopate is the author of ten books, including "Being With Children", "Bachelorhood", "The Rug Merchant", "Portrait of My Body" and his latest, "Totally Tenderly Tragically", a collection of film criticism. He teaches at Hofstra University. "Warren Sonbert" excerpt reprinted by permission of the publisher. From, White, Edmund, ed. "Loss Within Loss". Forthcoming for Spring 2001 from The University of Wisconsin Press.