Carriage Trade

Carriage Trade was filmed over the course of six years as Sonbert brought a Bolex 16 mm camera with him on international trips.^[1][2] According to his program notes, the filming locations were Afghanistan, Egypt, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Morocco, Nepal, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.^[3]

Early titles for the film were The Tuxedo Theatre, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Tonight and Every Night.^[4]

The film marked a major shift in Sonbert's filmmaking. Unlike his earlier short films, which are loosely narrative works that used longer takes, Carriage Trade is a montage work built out of shorter shots.^[5]

A 20-minute early cut of the footage from Carriage Trade, then known as The Tuxedo Theatre, was shown at the Jewish Museum in New York on February 11, 1969.^[5] Sonbert screened a longer 80-minute cut in London and New York.^[4] He edited that down to a final 61-minute version which has become the most widely distributed version.^[6] It premiered in 1971 as part of the Museum of Modern Art's Cineprobe series.^[7] The Whitney Museum screened it in 1973 as part of its New American Filmmakers series.^[1]

Carriage Trade is now part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection.^[8]

For The New York Times, critic A. H. Weiler wrote that it "makes for a slightly dizzying but colorful and far-ranging trip, [but] it also illustrates the talents of an acutely perceptive and artistic film maker."^[1]