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The Best Ernie Gehr Directed Movies

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poster

52

20

5.4

/474/

41

/21/

45

/18/

3.5

/1227/

"Serene Velocity (1970) created a stunning percussive head-on motion by systemically shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens as it stared down the center of an empty institutional hallway – thus playing off the contradiction generated by the frames’ heightened flatness and the compositions’ severely overdetermined perspective. Without ever moving the camera, Gehr turned the fluorescent geometry of this literal Shock Corridor (in the then – new State University of N.Y at Binghamton) into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films it would be this." – J. Hoberman

poster

?

6.8

/9/

35

/2/

"The footage for Transparency was recorded at variable camera speeds (from approx. 5 fps to around 40 fps). In this process, when later projected at a constant speed of 24 fps, the image on screen changes in time from a representation of cars passing in front of the camera to an image in flux and a collision of transparent colors and dynamic motion. One might also think of it as a rendering and transformation of one industrial phenomena (the automobile), by another industrial phenomena (the motion picture camera). What arises – as an experience – when 'visual phenomena' starts, thrives, and ends within the 4 borders of the rectangle and we do not project extensions to them? How startling when occasionally, and just for a moment, a bird enters the frame, and creates 'space' against a light blue 'sky'." – Ernie Gehr

poster

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20

/1/

"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

poster

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80

/1/

"This mysterious, delightful film opens with a sound collage of jazzy music and voices played against a black background. After a few minutes, there is an extended shot of a young woman sitting at a table by a window with a slight look of embarrassment as she tries to keep a straight face under the camera’s gaze. Made just after Shift, it continues Gehr’s early experiments with sound editing. It is startling in the context of his other work as his first film with a straight on close shot of a person." – David Schwartz

poster

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6.2

/10/

10

/1/

"Reverberation began as an attempt at a portrayal, a representing of a life situation by way of film, and turned in the making of it into a presentation of the physical movement of film itself, stranding the photo-memory of persons/objects/their relationships in a cinematic force-field wherein images are offered up and simultaneously swept away by conflicting energies. Sound as it comes from a speaker has its own quality. No matter how close it comes in reproducing sound of living beings or objects, this quality is always the sound of the projector, the wires, the tubes and the speakers. This is its actuality. And it can be heard and experienced as sound, a form of energy." -Ernie Gehr

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10

/1/

"Abstraction in Gehr behaves like an X-ray, revealing unexpected patterns of order under the skin of things. A film like Mirage, one of those most sensuous of Gehr’s abstract films may resemble superficially a strip painting by Kenneth Noland. But it is essential to realize that the bands of color Gehr captures come from the world, shot through a simple clear tube that strips away form and lets only chromatic patterns and motion come through. Even in his most abstract films, Gehr is relating to a world outside his consciousness and trying to stake out a relation to it, testing its order and chaos, its beauty and its threats." – Tom Gunning

poster

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60

/1/

"It was recorded over Summer of 2020, we were isolating ourselves. We live in the ground floor in an apartment building, we have the full backyard which ended up being my interaction with nature – that’s where 'Flying Over Brooklyn' was recorded. Just looking around, what on earth can I do here? I was looking at this reflection of leaves from trees from our neighbour to one of our fences and became interested and began to look at these reflections, some transformed themselves almost day by day, sometimes it was difficult to really catch some of these – it’s creature-like faces I tended to see there. The shadows were exotic for me, they had quality of the tropics, at the same time it’s flat and there are vertical lines which for me denoted prison in a way – you have these bars there, so it’s a contained jungle and that mean different implications for me. The sound we hear, though somewhat amplified, were recorded with the same camera, not necessarily at that moment." – Ernie Gehr

poster

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70

/3/

Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.

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50

/1/

The missing chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railroad Journey. A museum piece. Recorded in Berlin, Feb. 2015.

poster

?

7.3

/29/

10

/1/

"[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

poster

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10

/1/

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.

poster

?

7.0

/7/

10

/1/

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.

poster

55

?

6.5

/41/

30

/2/

3.5

/225/

“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

?

7.5

/23/

10

/1/

"The radio waves could be the breeze stirring the trees. The pedestrians swim and bob among these visceral transmissions; the total image seems suddenly so ethereal that the film's title, taken from a 1940s pulp magazine, becomes fact. Is the sound emanating from the phone booths or contained inside people's heads? As usual Gehr uses the simplest possible means to effect a subtle derangement in perception. Signal—Germany on the Air is a substantial addition to an oeuvre which is already among the most impressive in American film." - J. Hoberman

poster

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6.4

/13/

20

/1/

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)

poster

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35

/2/

"Untitled begins with a flat, out-of-focus, reddish-pink screen on which blurry white patterns quickly appear and disappear. After awhile a space seems to emerge behind the screen. The swiftly changing patterns generate an experience of soft floating motion, through a field of snowflakes that whirl about in the wind. There is simultaneous serenity and agitation in the portrayed motions. The background appears soft, almost quivering at first, as if alive, and the reddish color suggests warmth and contrast with the snow. As the film progresses the snowflakes get smaller and better focused, yielding a kind of distance perspective and the background acquires more and more substantiality. At some point and often quite suddenly, the trans-like floating experience is broken by the discovery of what lies ahead: a red brick wall! The entire meaning of the earlier experience undergoes a sudden shift as this prototype of the impenetrable obstacle becomes apparent."– Robert Becklen

poster

?

5.6

/9/

10

/1/

"The title is a reference to the force-field within the rectangle. To accentuate its character I filmed with B&W filmstock." – Ernie Gehr

poster

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7.3

/14/

30

/2/

35

/2/

"This collapse of separate times into one image creates another push/pull with the experience of depth. The superimpositions seem to lie on top of the image, yet they move into depth, creating what Gehr describes as a 'teasing play with planes.' But the play with space and position here involves more than tension between layers. The variations on light and shadow on the two levels cause the double-exposures to pop in and out of depth. A shadow on the first level can give the superimposition a sudden burst of solidity. Gehr calls our attention to the multiplicity of depth cues that operate in a film in addition to perspective recession. The cue of overlap creates much of the amusement of the film, as the vehicles on one level plow through the phantoms on the other. Gehr was particularly fascinated by the way depth cues provided by color (with warm colors coming forward) interact with the logic of space..." – Tom Gunning

poster

?

6.4

/10/

40

/2/

70

/1/

"Film in its primordial state in which patterns of light and darkness are still undivided. Like the natural order of the universe, an unbroken flow in which movement and distribution of tension is infinitely subtle, and a finite orientation seems impossible." –Ernie Gehr

poster

66

?

6.0

/86/

70

/2/

62

/5/

3.6

/252/

"Table, shot in 1976 is the celluloid equivalent of a cubist Still Life. The subject is an ordinary kitchen table, a homely clutter of crockery and utensils. For 15 minutes, Gehr alternates two slightly different fixed points of view, accentuating individual shots through the use of blue and red filters (and sometimes no filter at all). This simple if painstaking procedure transforms the image into a stuttering hypnotic shuffle. Difficult to take in on a single viewing, Table improved with familiarity. As one learns how to look at it, one’s eyes wander around the frame to savor specific details. Some objects appear simultaneously in 2 positions, others flex their shimmering forms or collide with their neighbors, while a few barely seem to 'move' at all." - J. Hoberman

poster

50

?

5.2

/140/

49

/10/

49

/9/

"Completed shortly after Morning, Wait is a vivid depiction of the cinematic process of recording images on film. From frame to frame……. this work offers a sense of film emulsion coming to life, and responding to the forces of light. In addition shifting camera positions, panning, tilting, using the zoom, framing and focusing are all part of the work. A sculpturing of a space from frame to frame on a surface where there is no space. The title, Wait .... is asking the viewer to forgo our conditioned focus on the photographic image as a representation of a life situation, and instead, focus on the visual kinetic here and now. Physical therapy for the eyes, and delight for the senses." – Ernie Gehr

poster

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40

/1/

The ever changing Lower East Side.

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6.3

/92/

45

/4/

57

/7/

"This is a film that not only documents a place in time, but a modern spatial vision, a look and technology that makes this street the sort of place it is. And here in this preserved piece of history, one also sees the chemical dance of film grain that makes up the material of Gehr’s own History. We do not simply see Market Street circa 1902, but a film of Market Street, and it is as fascinating as the site itself. Film may in some sense exist indifferent to emotions, objects, beings, or ideas. But early in his work Gehr realized that film, even conceived as a thing in itself, can never exist outside of history. The very dance of grain on the screen acquires a history of its production, its screenings, its viewings. History is the place no place can avoid.” - Tom Gunning

?

35

/2/

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’.

poster

?

6.6

/8/

58

/5/

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.

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35

/1/

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.

poster

?

8.0

/7/

55

/2/

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.

poster

?

100

/1/

An ode to digital interlace, which is to video what intervals between frames are to film…

poster

?

10

/1/

A four-channel video work taking inspiration from a lush park environment and the proliferating presence of security cameras in public life.

poster

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20

/1/

Cool, delirious, and mysterious. Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extraterrestrial optical and gravitational laws. (Ernie Gehr)

poster

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10

/1/

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.

poster

65

?

6.5

/204/

55

/10/

65

/11/

3.8

/683/

In this infamous structural film, Ernie Gehr 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 zone of constant flux, freed from gravity and in perpetual rearrangement.

poster

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Better than ever. 'They’re dancing better than ever,' commented Ernie Gehr's wife Myrel Glick on seeing how he brought these girls' dance into contemporary light. Yes indeed. That's the mystery. That the past dances now better than ever, even while we feel the world getting dimmer and dimmer.

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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.

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South Station (2024) 19 min. Color. Sound.

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By Rail, To Boston (2024) 17 min. Color. Sound.

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Inside/out at whisper speed, symmetries in locomotion churn soft and feathery floating like a dream. A nocture before nightfall. -M.M.

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A 2013 English language avant-garde film directed by Ernie Gehr. The film screened at The New York Film Festival in 2013.

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In this fascinating exploration of the rich, elusive qualities of the video surface, Gehr layers transparent and translucent repetitions of a complex urban street scene to form a mesmerizing tableau. – Haden Guest

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Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.

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“We are confronted with everyday images in a romantic way. If you are patient, you eventually see a deli sign that says ‘Carroll Gardens,’ a bike, a stroller. These images are initially obscured, but through repetition become recognizable, until Ernie intuitively knows when to cut once you understand what you are looking at. You are rewarded after every cut.” -Larry Gottheim

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2023. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 16 min.

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2022. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 8 min.

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2023. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 6 min.

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2020. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 8 min.

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2010. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 8 min.

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This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

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2022. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 15 min.

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