Short Fuse (Warren Sonbert, 1992) (Patreon)

Obviously there's a great deal to be said about Warren Sonbert's films on a formal level. His montage style was utterly unique in that it created small time-events while also avoiding linear narrative. Any two shots in Short Fuse could be analyzed according to Eisensteinian principles. Long shots tend to follow close-ups; unmoving shots follow movement or tracking shots; verticals are opposed to horizontals, etc. But unlike, say, Nathaniel Dorsky (who has cited Sonbert as a major influence), this is a filmmaker for whom the human contents of the shot were of paramount importance. Each edit presupposed a micro-drama of association, punning, mood, and commentary.

And these two aspects of Sonbert's work cannot be separated. The precise graphic matches or colliding juxtapositions give Short Fuse a sturdy correctness, which is what allows the viewer to make concrete connections between the people, places, and events Sonbert has fused together. And while none of Sonbert's films could meaningfully be called documentary, his focus on highlights of ordinary events offers a kind of intellectual hinge between Dziga Vertov and Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson.

But if we just look at Short Fuse as a whole, we see that all of these disparate images form a kind of environment or worldview. Coming back to Short Fuse after seeing it over twenty years ago, I was struck by just how accessible the film is, not in spite of but because of Sonbert's formalism. His may be the happiest filmography in the entire avant-garde. His films have diary elements (he took his Bolex everywhere), but for the most part they are material memories, structured according to Sonbert's fascination with human activity.

It's as though Sonbert filmed everything in the world and then edited out the sad or hopeless parts. Short Fuse is a human highlight reel, an alternate reality where the only conflicts are purely graphical. So many of the shots are of people having fun (surfing, playing basketball, going on parade, rollerskating in San Francisco) that they condition the harder stuff through atmosphere. Several shots in Short Fuse depict an ACT-UP protest, and even as Sonbert is watching his friends get beaten by the SFPD, the film insists that these are also golden moments. It's not the violence that counts, but the rage and camaraderie.

Like a much more condensed version of Cameraperson, Short Fuse organizes the visual world subjectively, taking discrete events and threading them through the entire film. This musical approach (Sonbert was a huge opera fan) could be said to depict the workings of memory. But there is also something so concrete about the filmmaker's approach, that relegating it to the temporal skittering of the mind, or a film grammar proposing some attenuated present tense, seems reductive. Even as a set of personal impressions, Short Fuse is so obviously constructed that film and memory form one complete process. After all, our memories are seldom so well composed.

Of course, some of Sonbert's films were silent, but others like Short Fuse make extensive use of music. While this isn't a filmmaker who edited on the beat, the relationship between images and sounds is highly articulate, bringing out the latent melancholy or otherwise mundane or cheery visuals, or elevating disparate shots into a rhapsodic pitch that vanquishes fear or misery. Beginning with Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, moving through The Platters, Bernard Hermann, and ending with unbridled disco ecstasy, Short Fuse takes the conventional idea of "the soundtrack of our lives" to an extreme but logical conclusion, where music is the driver of visual thinking, setting a tone that always fits even if contrapuntally.

Apropos of nothing, I do want to say something about a theme that runs throughout Sonbert's filmography, and is especially pronounced in Short Fuse. There are very few filmmakers, and even fewer men, who gaze so lovingly at women. As a gay man, Sonbert filmed women with no desire or acquisitiveness. He instead focused on the beauty and dignity of ordinary women, the films directing his infrequent visual lust at men. Sonbert stated at various points that two of his biggest influences were Warhol and Hitchcock. But unlike Warhol, Sonbert does not treat women as objects of scorn or pity, and unlike Hitchcock, he doesn't fixate on women's peril or deceit.

Instead, everyone in Short Fuse is observed in the most positive possible light: laughing, playing, displaying themselves, or just existing. I think it was David Ehrenstein, a friend of the filmmaker, who averred that he wished life were more like Sonbert's films: joyful, curious, sometimes wryly bemused, but always sunny and warm. Short Fuse exemplifies these aspects, and since this is the last film Sonbert completed before his death in 1995. (His final film Whiplash was completed after his death, according to detailed notes.) This film is like one last spin around the park before moving on.

Do check out these pieces on Sonbert from Max Goldberg and Thomas Beard.