And the films themselves were sexy. I don't mean to say that the actors took their clothes off, they didn't, but what was sexy was the extremely fluid way the movies were put to-gether. The sound track of soul songs had something to do with it, but even more so the long hand-held tracking shots that followed in "real time" someone walking down corridor after corridor, or the merry-go-round shot that metaphorically described an attitude toward the cosmos as much as did Godard's swirling coffee cup. The shots took us over like a wet dream. It was as if Hitchcock's 360-degree turn around the lovers, Stewart and Novak, in Vertigo, that saturation of love and impossible yearning and doubt and fulfillment, had started to infiltrate all of Sobert's images. It was a lover's cinema. The filmmaker was in love with the world, or was amused and saddened by it, so obviously that he had only to point his camera anywhere, it seemed, and it would fill up with feeling.

The original title of Divided Loyalties was Industrial Keys. The young Orpheus is awakened rudely to a world in which industry holds all the keys, and even personal life has a manufactured, industrial quality, as Adorno would say. Warren Sonbert's films have always had a trace of sociological inquiry, and in Divided Loyalties one can almost make out the beginnings of a critique of modern society: from the furs and tuxedo set at the opening of San Francisco's opera season, to the mangy train tracks of the Chicago Loop, to factories and impersonal glassed-in elevators. Collective action is also treated sardonically, in the gay lib parade sequences, as one more illusion or pretense to be punctured (we see a cemetery after a gay be-in). However, the mosaic technique as Sonbert (unlike Vertov) uses it does not take responsibility for direct political or social statements that can reasonably be attributed to the filmmaker. Indeed, we can assume nothing but a pileup of ironies which imply, in the worst circumstances, a shrug of indifference.

A frightening emptiness dogs these films. Perhaps their real program is spiritual [...]