Guest
“One day several weeks ago my office mail included a photo of Brigitte Bardot in CONTEMPT, which appears in Warren Sonbert’s WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?. I’m very interested in this matter because both Jonas Mekas and James Stoller in the Village Voice proclaim Sonbert as a genius. Mekas speaks of Sonbert creating a new narrative form which, he said, surpasses Godard. New York critics have nothing but praise for this young filmmaker (20 years old), who seems to be dealing with some new form of nostalgia or sentiment exclusively 60’s oriented. Writing of WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, Mekas emphasized its multidimensional moods. ‘The film is made up of a complex web of spontaneously, intuitively shot and edited (mostly during the shooting) scenes. It’s a post -Godardian cinema. I am not sure in exactly what way, but I have a feeling that Godard has been assimilated and transcended here, by the use of freer techniques that permit putting on film more feeling than intellect. The Brakhage aesthetics are winning out.’ “If WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? includes a reference to CONTEMPT, it’s a film I definitely want to see: I’ve long felt that CONTEMPT is perhaps a pioneer work of New Nostalgia. For me at least CONTEMPT and L’ECLISSE [1962, Michelangelo Antonioni] are ultimate statements on early 1960s nostalgia and sentiment, a kind of post-existentialist romanticism. From what I hear, Warren Sonbert could be the artist to take up where Godard and Antonioni have left off, moving away from a cinema of emotions toward a cinema of ideas.” As Sonbert’s career evolved, he continued to pay homage within his own films to those filmmakers that he admired (see references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film VERTIGO in Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE). In WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, the scene of a bathroom attendant brushing the jacket of a young man directly references F.W. Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH (1924).
