Divided Loyalties1978

"Warren Sonbert described DIVIDED LOYALTIES as a film 'about art vs industry and their various crossovers.' According to film critic Amy Taubin, 'there is a clear analogy between the filmmaker and the dancers, acrobats and skilled workers who make up so much of his subject matter.' (The soho weekly news, Nov 2, 1978)
"In a lecture on 'film syntax' at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, Sonbert elaborated upon his role as the film's omnipotent and omnipresent voice. ' The job of editing ... is to balance a series of ambiguities in a tension-filled framework.' Interpreting a multiple-shot sequence from DIVIDED LOYALTIES (in which a close up of a Cezanne paiting 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. ... the artist is cool and detached, but the reason is to shake up and dirturb. ... art is being revealed, in the causal link of images... nothing has a valid reality outside of the whole chain of iamges... ' (Warren Sonbert lecture, published in Film Culture, no. 70-71, 1983)" -Jon Gartenberg