Carriage trade

Duration: 60

Year Published: 1973

Creator: W. Sonbert

Format: 16mm

Color: Color & B&W

Sound: silent

Description: A six year compilation of travels, home movies, documents. Not strictly involved with plot or morality but rather the Language of film as regards time, composition, cutting, light, distance, tension of backgrounds to foregrounds, what you see and what you don't, a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects. Contrapuntal textures in using 8 or so different stocks of film - color and b&w, negative and dyed shots. Film as music without music and each shot a cluster of Note s striking a reaction in the viewer. Although there is a both a flow and a contrast between shots, an image may not directly refer to the shot that has preceded it but rather perhaps to several shots before. Film takes in the changing relations of movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images. All to pull the carpet out from under you.--W.S. Sonbert journeys from Broadway to Afghanistan, Turkey, India, Egypt, and other locales. Arab camel riders in the desert follow pastoral views of flowers. Radio City's Rockettes pass by quickly as does an English wedding scene, bathers in the Ganges and gondolas on the Grand Canal in Venice.