Director
“A cinematic audio-visual fugue plays out in-time a choreography of interior and exterior spaces, activities, sounds and perhaps longings.” - Ernie Gehr
Director
This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working, thinking, and faring during the quarantine. Most of the other works have a diaristic bent, but Ernie's piece -- his first new release in several years, I believe -- is an exceedingly simple depiction of separation from the outside.
Director
“The eyes may be attracted to look left and right – and please let them – but the center is also intriguing and not separable from the rest. Among other things, a side view is transformed into a frontal view, but of course, that is not all.” - Ernie Gehr
Director
“This is a work that evolved out of play and a sudden impulse. I had been recording footage for a work in Midtown Manhattan. On one particular occasion it was not a productive day for me. As a result I felt a bit stressed out, and began to just drift through the streets. It was a cool and pleasant afternoon. There were a lot of people relaxing at Bryant Park, so I stepped into the park myself. Within less than a minute, and without a conscious motive in mind, I grabbed the camera out of my pocket and began to exercise my own form of pleasure and relaxation: moving the camera through space, caressing or playing with shapes, and forms as well as shadows. Later on, in spirit of that afternoon and out of the recorded footage, I composed Back in the Park.” - Ernie Gehr
Director
Ernie working his magic.
Director
"The concluding work is Circling Essex Crossing. In this piece, what arises out of a series of images documenting the construction of Essex Crossing is, for me, a metaphor for the evolving transformation of the Lower East Side." - EG
Director
"The second piece on this program, Aproposessexstreetmarket, is what I consider to be the heart of the trilogy. It offers glimpses to the kind of activities I often encountered inside the old Essex Street Market, and I dedicate this screening to all the people who appear in the work—shoppers as well as vendors" - EG
Director
“It’s a mysterious field, this screen rectangle populated by haunting phantasmagoric phenomena, be it representational or just patterns of color, light and darkness. Realism has no place here, but lifelike re-presentations of consciousness and the imagination do. Even in the most fleeting of spaces…. hmm, spaces on a 2-dimensional plane? Never mind! Look at the above still image. Intrigued? Then perhaps the work from where it came might interest you.” - Ernie Gehr
Director
The ever changing Lower East Side.
Director
Animation created from early paper films.
Director
"Throughout his long career, Ernie Gehr has explored cinema's unique potential to reveal the limits and possibilities of visual perception and the illusionary, subjective experience of time. In these recent digital video works Gehr offers profoundly cinematic experiences of place, radically dividing and slowing down the images of city streets and sites to unfold within a single instant the dazzling array of movements and passages too marvelous and manifold for the human eye alone to perceive."
Director
Humor without a banana peel.
Director
Digital. Screened as a part of MOMA's 'Mechanical Principles' series
Director
Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.
Director
Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.
Director
Ernie Gehr’s large-scale, multiscreen video installation CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS is simultaneously a reflection on early animation and genre cinema, a playful exercise in moving-image graphics, and an extension of the artists' interest in the abstraction, texture, and rhythms of visual material. Its source is an early-20th-century shadowgraph toy, which used “paper print films" in the form of sequential silhouette drawings that were brought to life as they passed before a stroboscopic screen. Gehr’s silent, digital video adaptation transforms five original paper subjects, all issued in France c. 1900–05: At the Circus, Carnival in Nice, John Sellery’s Tour of the World, Street Scenes, and Gulliver’s Travels.
Director
The missing chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railroad Journey. A museum piece. Recorded in Berlin, Feb. 2015.
Director
A Commuter’s Life (What a Life!) gives sculptural dimension and kaleidoscopic novelty to footage shot by Gehr during his commutes from his native New York to Harvard, where he was teaching a seminar on the history of phantasmagoria, of cinema before cinema.
Director
Inconvenient miracles escape prediction but require attention. Roadblocks are building blocks for daily adventures in seeing. Snowscreens. —M. M.
Director
A translation of volumes in space into a vibratory painted desert and living lines. A new register in an optical Richter scale.
Director
In New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr’s cinema, haunted now by ghosts, from long-ago travels and struggles, that are gifted with an uncanny voice and presence.
Director
From a train trip home, legendary experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr creates a triptych cum structural trajectory in which composition and perception convene into a “phantom ride. Departure sharpens the senses as it penetrates a recognizable yet reframed landscape.
Director
“Frolicking on the beach in early June, before the start of the summer season.” - Ernie Gehr
Director
An ode to digital interlace, which is to video what intervals between frames are to film…
Director
Picture Taking is focused on "verticality" and urban sightseeing as well as on some of the pictorial possibilities of the HD digital format.
Director
A four-channel video work taking inspiration from a lush park environment and the proliferating presence of security cameras in public life.
Writer
Images of a city, superimposed.
Director
Images of a city, superimposed.
Writer
Abstract short featuring mirrored images.
Director
Abstract short featuring mirrored images.
Director
Silence dominates the work, as does the screen rectangle, which cuts off the “image” from a life time-space continuum and imposes upon the image its particular character. Within it, there is a play between tonalities, textures, large and small shapes.
Director
American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of extended sublime that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film’s structure and soundtrack work as a reminder of the constant intersections between life’s impulsiveness and beauty. - Peter Knegt
Director
“Fun” to make and to watch, as well as satisfying to respond to, ABRACADABRA’s realization is a miracle of sorts. Contemporary and very digital, it also celebrates some of the thrills and spirit of early cinema…
Director
In New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr’s cinema, haunted now by ghosts, from long-ago travels and struggles, that are gifted with an uncanny voice and presence.
Director
A meditation on silence, vanishings, and phantoms of light.
Director
Two related videotapes in which Gehr articulates formal connections between organic and geometrical forms, CF1 and 2 adopt the thaumatope structure characteristic of certain other Gehr's videotapes (Before the Olympics, The Morse Code Operator), rapidly flipping between two separate images. Here, several series of trees (some bare, others with sparse foliage) alternate with the entryways of buildings, arches and shafts lining up with flickering, imperfect registration.
Thanks
"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one."
--Nina Menkes
Director
“Before the Olympics is composed out of sounds and images recorded in Torino in November 2005, while the city was undergoing renovations for the then-upcoming Winter Olympics. Fun to compose. Hope you enjoy it.” (E. Gehr)
Director
"One of two new digital works in the all-Gehr program, Morse Code is not only clever; it's unexpectedly funny. Having now spent several years exploring the possibilities of DV, one senses that Gehr has attained a new level of comfort and flexibility with the new medium. The Morse Code Operator is a glitch-turntablist remix of a segment of Griffith's 1911 short The Lonedale Operator, or more accurately, of the National Film Preservation Foundation's DVD of that film. There's something tentative about the piece, but in an exploratory way, as if Gehr were encountering "home video" as something deeply strange, in the manner one might step outside and find an asteroid in the front yard."
Director
Mechanical glass slides were manipulated to simulate various kinds of change in the image, and multiple projectors allowed for superimposed and dissolving views. Brightly colored, handcrafted slides, depicting human activity, fantasy figures, and landscapes, were typically presented with live narration, music, and sound effects, in what became popular by the 1870s as Magic Lantern shows. Experimental media artist Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image (2005) is a synchronized five-channel video installation that uses eighty-seven original slides and views selected from Gehr’s personal collection and that of renowned pre-cinema collector David Francis. Projected side by side, the slides create a mesmerizing wide-screen spectacle. A selection of vintage paper Zoetrope strips and Phenakistiscope discs—complementary artifacts of nineteenth-century moving-image technology—are also on display.
Director
"Replete with visual and audiovisual humor, these works not only celebrate the pleasures of perception, as well as physical spaces and spaces of the mind, but also remain ethereal and multi-faceted in their formal and perceptual attributes. Rigorous in their construction, these films float between representation and abstraction, all the while opening up new cinematic worlds."
Director
"What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Dust. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. A scattering. The present. The passage of time. Sleep." - E.G.
Director
"a five-minute film of the view west across the Soho street to a brick building. Gehr sat there from one day from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and shot it with his Bolex camera, one frame at a time. It conveys the settled relief of being home, as against the pace of the monochromatic working day seen in the three prior films. It is closer to his earlier films in its abstraction of forms and play with time-lapse and film speed. In the beginning, the forms are screamingly reddish-orange and incomprehensible, but as the afternoon progresses shadows slip across the surfaces and windows, fire escapes, and bricks become visible: a world is revealed with the clarity of Vermeer’s famed Little Street (1657-8)." - Jason Rosenfeld
Director
16mm film (black and white, silent)
Director
16mm film (black and white, silent)
Director
A 16mm black and white, silent film by Ernie Gehr.
Director
A stereoscopic view of a suburban backyard.
Director
Drifting clouds. They are not nice little clouds that invite us to interpret them symbolically; rather they are poisonous and unhealthy clusters, a skin rash of the sky, an impenetrable gray curtain of smog. This is a trailer of impressive tranquility and simplicity. A second look, however, opens up new dimensions: Are there not – as so often the case in Gehr’s work – unsuspected, amorphous forms that manifest themselves? Has an event scurried quickly past us while we were still busy discovering the mysterious in the seemingly obvious? In fact, these are two trailers in one: a palimpsest of the cinematographic pleasure of mystification.
Director
Nothing extraordinary. Just a ride on the S-Bahn (elevated train) through a small section of what used to be East Berlin. An anxious journey fraught with projections. A ride very much in the present, but due to history and family history, also a journey into and out of time.- Ernie "The GOAT" Gehr
Director
Gehr uses a mini-digital recorder to look back on the Machine Age in the form of San Francisco's soon-to-be-shuttered Musee Mecanique. For slightly more than an hour, Cotton Candy documents this venerable collection of coin-operated mechanical toys—including an entire circus—mainly in close-up, isolating particular details as he alternates between ambient and post-dubbed (or no) sound. By treating the Musee's cast of synchronized figures as puppets, the artist is making a show—but is it his or theirs? Gehr's selective take on the arcade renders it all the more spooky. There's a sense in which Cotton Candy is a gloss on the moment in The Rules of the Game when the music-box-collecting viscount unveils his latest and most elaborate acquisition. (It also brings to mind the climax of A.I.: The DV of the future tenderly regards the more human machine of the past.) (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
Director
"The other Gehr installation, Modern Navigation, is a two-screen piece that shows people looking at fish in an aquarium. It is dark and mysterious, and seemed to me to be a witty and even slightly ironic comment on museum-going and art viewing in museums, which interpretation Gehr confirms was part of his intent. It's a good idea to see it from different positions, including from different upper-level locations at the top of the ramp." - Fred Camper
Director
City is grounded in the familiar everyday world of the street. Yet, the ground often gives way plastically, opening up a dense and paradoxical field for visual musings and delights as colours, solids and transparencies as well as spaces within spaces weave a tapestry of a somewhat familiar ‘city’.
Director
An experimental film made from distorted and refracted images of seascapes.
Director
"Before my son was born, friends would ask me "Will you make a baby movie, now?". "Of course not!", I would answer. Yet, right after Daniel was born I found myself filming him, not with the intention of making a film, but with a need to retain, hold on to some moving images of his early and miraculous stage of his life." - Ernie Gehr
Director
In Side/Walk/Shuttle, he takes to the glass elevator attached to San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel and rides its 24 stories up and down, constantly shifting the orientation of his camera to offer images of the city as a site of flux, freed from gravity to rearrange itself in perpetuum. While the sensual and emotional experience of all these new views is enough to make one's life richer (the phrase "city symphony" has never seemed quite so apt), Gehr's film is also a deeply visceral reminder that the world contains so much more than we can ever know. -- Slant Magazine
Director
"[A] view from a Brooklyn apartment sublimates Hitchcock's voyeurism into a frenzied engagement with the visible. The film varies exposure or racks focus so that the flickering, spatially ambiguous patterns that press the limits of the frame momentarily dissolve themselves as tree branches or a fire escape or a shadow caught on the screen of someone's laundry rippling in the breeze. 'I cupped one of my hands in front of the camera lens and attempted to make tactile to myself light, color and image,' Gehr explains in his notes, linking the film to his father's death and calling it a 'hopeless attempt' to render the ephemeral tangible." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Director
Sounds and images were recorded at the Polish flea-market, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, autumn 1989, a few days before the Berlin Wall came down. An uneasy, almost sort of carnival atmosphere pervaded the place and like some magical crystal ball, reflected both the past and the future.
Director
The past is never delineated through Gehr‘s film, an unorthodox “city symphony” composed of largely static compositions of West Berlin streets. His refusal to dissertate an active through-line in the sights and sounds opens up a world in which we can identify, through metrical editing and angular snapshots of a city space, universal signifiers coursing through every frame. Combined with an embedded knowledge of the area’s loaded past and Gehr’s recorded, crackling radio broadcasts laid over the images, Signal - Germany on the Air (1985) is a challenging personal work.
Director
The film is a half-hour series of brief close-ups of people on the street, shot from a high, but still intimate, angle. In a constant interplay of figure and ground, the film shows fragments of feet, heads, hands and elbows against the backdrop of an ancient sidewalk .... The film is fast on the eye, with many staccato camera moves. But, partially because the people are bundled up in winter clothes, one experiences it as a succession of cushioned jolts - the collision of soft, bulky forces that enter the frame from all directions. There is, however, too much raw human interest in the footage for the film to ever become completely abstract.
Director
Gehr replaces the camera lens with a half-spherical piece of plastic and filmed around his apartment, producing bands of color and light.
Editor
As Untitled (1977) opens we see whitish blue streaks close to the camera continually appear and disappear. The background is indistinct, but gradually similar streaks seemingly at a greater distance come into focus, while the foreground streaks grow fuzzier. Soon we guess that we're looking at falling snow, and it seems we're viewing it from a window as he gradually changes the focus from close-up to infinity. Well before the focus change ends, a tannish red mass starts to materialize in the background; as it comes into focus we realize it's a brick wall.
Camera Operator
As Untitled (1977) opens we see whitish blue streaks close to the camera continually appear and disappear. The background is indistinct, but gradually similar streaks seemingly at a greater distance come into focus, while the foreground streaks grow fuzzier. Soon we guess that we're looking at falling snow, and it seems we're viewing it from a window as he gradually changes the focus from close-up to infinity. Well before the focus change ends, a tannish red mass starts to materialize in the background; as it comes into focus we realize it's a brick wall.
Director
As Untitled (1977) opens we see whitish blue streaks close to the camera continually appear and disappear. The background is indistinct, but gradually similar streaks seemingly at a greater distance come into focus, while the foreground streaks grow fuzzier. Soon we guess that we're looking at falling snow, and it seems we're viewing it from a window as he gradually changes the focus from close-up to infinity. Well before the focus change ends, a tannish red mass starts to materialize in the background; as it comes into focus we realize it's a brick wall.
Director
Short experimental film featuring a kitchen table shot from various angles through colour filters.
Director
A short film by Ernie Gehr.
Director
“For Gehr, SHIFT broke new ground, hence perhaps a pun in its title. The film is his first to employ extensive montage. The actors are all mechanical – a series of cars and trucks filmed from a height of several stories as they perform on a three-lane city street. Gehr isolates one or two vehicles at a time, inverting some shots, so that a car hangs from the asphalt like a bat from a rafter, using angles so severe the traffic often seems to be sliding off the earth, and employing a reverse motion so abrupt that the players frequently exit the scene as though yanked from a stage by the proverbial hook. A sparse score of traffic noises accompanies the spastic ballet mecanique...” – J. Hoberman
Director
Eureka (1974), which lyrically re-photographs a travelogue shot from a San Francisco streetcar, offers the purest expression of Gehr’s deep love of early cinema as a source of a joyous formal inventiveness-- changing its length from 5 to about 38 minutes.
Director
Ernie Gehr's short, silent film [...] shows two young girls, almost children still, on a New York street. Both wear blue, one washed out blue jeans, the other a short, somewhat poor jersey dress. Both are lanky, weary, a little prudish in front of the camera. Only their luscious, wavy preraffaelit hair is meticulously combed and stands in a strange contrast to their overall appearance and the bleak surrounding, in which they linger.
Director
Serene Velocity stares down the center of an empty institutional hallway while shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens, transforming the basement corridor into a nexus of visual and conceptual energy.
Director
Experimental film made without a lens.
Writer
Abstract short film.
Director
Abstract short film.
Director
An “action” movie in which the processes of recording and projecting moving images are the protagonists and the field of action is the screen rectangle within which cinematic ripplings and combustions are offered for immediate sensual pleasure and enlightenment.
Director
Reveberation detaches a few static shots of a posed portrait to expand them for twenty-three minutes.
Director
For about sixty minutes, STILL peers through a New York City street level window, watching the storefronts and windows across the way. People come and go, cars pass by, and the space/time are further articulated by the street sounds which are or are not exactly matched to the activity outside. A single tree grows in the sidewalk across the street, rich in foliage - and somehow, the taxi cabs, autos and people who cross the street are sometimes solid, sometimes transparent. ... this very subtle and perplexing interweave of transparency and opaqueness - sends the audience on its way with the feeling they have seen a magician at work. But for me, there are even greater mysteries and secrets in this beautiful film. The basic, root mystery of the evocative object, the evocative mood - which I have been waiting for years to see film come to terms with, and which in my opinion STILL does come to terms with in a significant and important manner.
Director
A couple waiting in a room.
Director
Lyrical debut film of avant-garde/structuralist filmmaker Ernie Gehr. Morning light streams through a window in Gehr's apartment. As Gehr changes the aperture from open to closed and back again, the light pulsates, in turns overwhelmingly bright and almost vanishing in darkness. A beautiful mediation on the essence of cinema and perception.
