Extensive writings and/or chapters on my films can be found in the following recent publications: Eyes Upside Down, P. Adams Sitney, Oxford U. Press; Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, Ted Perry, U. of Indiana Press; Shadows, Ghosts, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Jeffrey Skoller, U. of Minnesota Press; Visionary Film, 3rd Edition, P. Adams Sitney, Oxford U. Press; The Garden in the Machine, Scott MacDonald, U. of California Press. There is also a long interview with me in A Critical Cinema 5, Scott MacDonald, U. of California Press.
The following two catalogues are no longer in print (films of Ernie Gehr - with writings by Tom Gunning, Daniel Eisenberg, Susan Thackrey, and Robert Becklen; and Ernie Gehr – with an introduction by Bill Berkson and an essay by J. Hoberman), but photocopies of both may be obtained by sending an 8 1/2” X 11” self-addressed envelope to : Ernie Gehr, 11 2nd Place, Brooklyn, NY 11231. For personal film lecture/presentations as well as print sales and other inquiries, please contact me at the above address. Thank you. Ernie Gehr1968, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m (18fps), $20
"I saw Ernie Gehr's two films, MORNING and WAIT, twice. The first time they seemed like light events. On second viewing Gehr's films began to appear to be two light narratives. ... Two people sitting in a room. Silent. Nothing seemingly happens. They slightly change positions from time to time. Window. Room. Furniture. Action between the frames. And the light, between them, around them, over them. The story is not told by way of usual situations, happenings, actions, emotion clashes, because the story is not the usual one. It's happening on some mental level. The light, no doubt, is the key to it, it punctuates the events, it tells the story, it sets the tone."
"If WAIT were a 19th century 'narrative,' these two people who are now sitting in Gehr's room, no doubt, would be talking, exchanging some lines, performing, going through some psychological bits. No matter how disjointed, surrealistic, or cubist, still they would be going through lines and actions and expressions aimed at revealing their psychology, emotions, ideas. In a later 20th century or early 21st century film, which is where Gehr's film is, the event is transposed to another level and we don't give a damn about these people's emotions or their characters. We are following completely something else, something that cannot be told in words but can be revealed only through certain rhythms of light - emphases, and events of light - something that is happening on a mental level which communicates directly to your thought waves (nerves) and you won't get anything out of it if you try to react emotionally, if you look for psychological keys, or any of that bag. Yes, maybe we should use Richard Foreman's term: Ontological cinema has arrived." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
1968, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18fps), $20
With Andrew Noren and Margaret Lamarre.
"REVERBERATION is a textured slowing, hollowing and placing. The sound-image relationship is one of the most intense I've experienced: the sound has a mass, it's continuous, rough edged. This thick black and white flecking is equaled by a rocky grainy image (of bas-relief not of planes or roundedness). An equation of tone and light is hinted at by constant transformations. Moments, movements are slowed, weighty, solemn yet the film has a beautiful 'However': one sees and hears the whirling atoms beneath the images of streets, buildings, people. These images constitute perhaps a story, a portrait, a looking at, a making of a film of a friend and his friend by their friend." - Michael Snow
"I remember seeing REVERBERATION for the second time at a showing at which it immediately followed a projection of Vigo's Zero de Conduite. I think it's generally agreed that Vigo is one of the masters of the world cinema, and I can only say that my immediate reaction was that Gehr's film was in many ways the stronger of the two. REVERBERATION is one of the most rigorous examples I know of that growing body of film that sets out to examine materials in such a way that the 'phenomenon' under consideration finally glows with the grace of a lucid quality of observation which lifts us into the realm of quite genuine 'illumination' at the same time that it asserts ever more forcefully the pre-eminence of the simple 'being-thereness' of the materials under the camera-eye." - Richard Foreman
1969, 16mm, b&w/sound on tape cassette, 23m (18fps), $70
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.
1969, 16mm, color/si, 11m (24fps), $33
This was the first version of FIELD. Two prints spliced together, end to end. In a sense, there is no repetition, as the second half is the first half projected end to beginning, and upside-down. An extended temporal paradoxical visual field for the pleasures of vision and reflection.
1970, 16mm, color, silent, 19 minutes (18 fps), $48 Rental
The frame encloses a rush of diagonal streaks in black and white without any distinguishable depth or recognizable imagery. The speed is so great and the optical highlights so homogenous that it is very difficult to determine whether the movement is downward from the upper left corner of the screen or upward from the opposite corner. I assume that this puzzle is integral to the experience of the film, and furthermore that Gehr deliberately transformed the natural landscape into the very perceptual paradox which Faraday noted in the movement of spinning wheels and which subsequently became the theoretical basis of the phenekistoscope and all subsequent machines for presenting the illusion of movement. ... Nature is so blotted out that we can only take his word for where and how it was shot. Curiously the natural sublime sneaks back into the film by association. The rush of lines and the spires of shadows suggest cascading waters, mountains and pine forests." - P. Adams Sitney, monograph on Ernie Gehr, 1980
1970, 16mm, b&w/si, 9.5m (18fps), $30
"SERENE VELOCITY established Gehr's reputation as a major filmmaker of the generation that began exhibiting works in the Sixties." - P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film
"SERENE VELOCITY is one of the few really unique films I have seen during the last few years. It is so emphatically single-minded and complete in its exploration of the various ironies and multiple levels of its imagery that it leaves one stunned. Just when you have settled into a one-groove visual interpretation of the given space you are viewing, Gehr transforms this space in such a way that your awareness of it becomes something entirely different." - Bob Cowan, Take One, 1974
"A literal 'Shock Corridor' wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway. Without ever having to move the camera, Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films, they would have been these." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1970, 16mm, color/si, 23m (18fps), $70
"I'd like to say more, but words fail me. This is historically reductive. That won't do. One makes choices. Choices are made. The opacity has been tapped. The black quivers, the matter is set in motion. There is light. Its primeval. pre - historic. At last, the first film! It trembles in the eye-mind. Unique." —Michael Snow
1970, 16mm, color, silent, 22 minutes (18fps), $55 Rental
"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.
"STILL is, for me, the first truly Proustian film in which I see mood and atmosphere seem to become slowly crystallized on particular objects - as if the whole framed scene and its mood slowly coagulates into - for instance - the mysterious recesses of the lush foliage of the tree across the street which the breeze slowly stirs .... Gehr has succeeded in making the first 'objectification' of atmosphere film, in which objects and relationships between them end up radiating the mood which heretofore I had only been able to think of as a 'container' rather than the contained. The moving and remarkable thing is that in this fifty-odd feet of New York City street front that we view for sixty minutes, nature and dreams of the forest and sky and wind and wilderness end up being more forcibly present than in any film about nature and forest and sky, etc. ...." - Richard Foreman, Film Culture #63-64
1969-1971, 16mm, color/so, 55m, $135
"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. Not only the action but Gehr's deliberate camera movements are synced to the music of honking horns, screeching brakes, and grinding gears. The eight-minute film is structured as a series of obliquely comic blackout sketches: trucks run over their shadows; cars unexpectedly reverse direction or start up and go nowhere." - J. Hoberman, American Film, 1982
1972-1974, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
This is a refilming of a remarkable movie depicting Market Street, San Francisco, around the turn of the century. The original film consisted of one long continuous take recorded from the front of a moving trolley from approximately Seventh Street all the way to the Embarcadero. I extended each frame six to eight times, full-frame, and increased the contrast and the light fluctuations.
To some degree, the original film has obviously been transformed, but I hope that this simple muted process allowed enough room for me to make the original work "available" without getting too much in the way. This was very important to me as I tend to see what I did, in part, as the work of an archeologist, resurrecting an old film as well as the shadows and forces of another era.
1974, 16mm, b&w/si, 30m, $90
1975, 16mm, color/so, 5 minutes, $20 Rental
"... TABLE is the celluloid equivalent of a cubist still life. The subject is an ordinary kitchen table, a homely clutter of crockery and utensils. For 16 minutes, Gehr alternates two slightly different fixed points of view, accentuating individual shots through the use of blue or 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 improves 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 two positions, others flex their shimmering forms or collide with their neighbors, while a few barely seem to move at all. Because the film was shot over the course of a single day, the light is constantly changing - shadows deepen, and different objects catch the sun. Throughout, Gehr varies the length of his shots. When he picks up the pace, the overall movement resembles an animated cartoon cycle of objects chasing each other around the table. And when he shifts into high gear, the screen starts to flash and ripple, barely able to contain the forces that have been released within it." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, 1982
1976, 16mm, color/si, 16m (18fps), $45
"... a delicious slow pulling of focus over four minutes in which snowflakes, streaming like intercepted chalk marks, fall in front of what seems to be a field, then a pond, and finally is recognized as a brick wall." - P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice
1977, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18fps), $20
"... surely the most disorienting negation of Renaissance perspective afforded by any since HISTORY." - J. Hoberman, American Film, June 1982
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8m (24fps), $25
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.
"The film is set on a shopping street in a neighborhood heavily populated by elderly Eastern European immigrants - a sort of asphalt shtetl. Gehr's subjects use their hands a lot, and these expressive, vulnerable, fleshy sensors take on a life of their own. In one sense, the film is a jagged symphony composed of the most transitory gestures. "In another, the film is an exercise in Hals-like portraiture in which an entire character is evoked through isolated details ...." - J. Hoberman, American Film
1981 (revised 1986), 16mm, color/si, 29m, $60
"... SIGNAL is a city dirge, a tensely ominous diary of a visit to Berlin, one of the grimmest loci of twentieth-century consciousness. ... Gehr's visit was not a casual tourist excursion. But for an 'accident' of history it would have been his childhood home. ... On the surface, Gehr's film looks like another exercise in choreographic human, vehicular, and architectural arrangements into formal patterns of conjunction and difference. His means are astonishingly simple: straight camera recording of a central and several ancillary sites, sharp cutting, and indigenous sound recording. But within these parameters Gehr unfolds an elaborate interplay of presence and absence that far exceeds his documentary approach." - Paul Arthur, Motion Picture
"[W]hile reintroducing social concerns, SIGNAL does not give us facts about the Nazi period or present-day Germany; Gehr's film is instead about a form of thinking. It addresses the mental processes that might govern looking at a Berlin street, rather than literally explicating present or past. ... Gehr's particular vision in SIGNAL is doubtless inflected by the deep emotions he must have felt in trying to view a city that at one point in its history would have denied his parents life and him birth." - Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
1982-1985, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $105
The initial inspiration for the film was an outdoor glass elevator and the visual, spatial and gravitational possibilities it presented me with. The work was also informed by an interest in panoramas, the urban landscape, as well as the topography of San Francisco. Finally, the shape and character of the work was tempered by reflections upon a lifetime of displacement, moving from place to place and haunted by recurring memories of other places I once passed through.
"... Gehr gives us an expansive view of the relationship between architecture, city streets and the movement on them, the medium of cinema, and patterns of thought." - Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, February 17, 1995
"We couldn't quite believe our eyes. The straight-forward pans and tilt shots of city street facades and rooftops, now rising and falling in a stately cadence, began to change. The change was not on the sunny panoramic surface of the screen - but in the materiality of the observed world. A nearby rooftop mushroomed up while the sidewalk remained static; streets and sidewalks sheared up to the sky like the cliffs of Yosemite; an upside-down penthouse soared over the San Francisco Bay serenely as a zeppelin ...." - Tony Reveaux, Artweek, July 23, 1992
"[T]he movie is pure sensation: it has the effect of a slow-motion roller coaster. The camera's stately swoops and stomach-dropping descents obliterate all sense of gravity. San Francisco is so viscerally and obsessively transformed that Gehr might honorably have titled his movie Vertigo." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, January 12, 1993
Exhibition: SF, NY, Berlin, Vienna and London Int'l film festivals.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 41m, $120
"[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
"The variety of these three films (SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, REAR WINDOW) reveal the way Gehr's filmmaking eludes classification or simple definition. Because each film occupies such a separate place they continue to shed new light on the scope of Gehr's work." - Tom Gunning, The Films of Ernie Gehr
1986/1991, 16mm, color/si (24fps), 10m, $30
"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." - Ernie Gehr
"To watch this film is to journey into the underground .... When Gehr inverts his camera, the world turns up-side-down. Heaven and Earth change places. The mud above, the sky below - which side of Paradise, indeed?" - J. Hoberman
"Gehr has used the reflecting surface of the dirty water puddles to undo the separation of what is valuable from what is not valuable. There is no dichotomy of chance and intention, but instead a lived perceptual encounter. ... Value and fact are equally real/equally illusory in this world out of the mud. The filmmaker's clarity of reception to what camera and recorder touch permits existence to whatever is found. ... Displacement becomes the ground for new place. We see a moving foot flare as the film ends ...." - Susan Thackrey
1991, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $45
"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 Gehr
2003, 16mm, 15 min, color/so, $50 rental
"It's easy to lose your footing when you try to keep in time with the dance of Eidolons. Where is everything... exactly? Nearby. Doubled over in laughter silently playing hide and seek with our fingertips. All is relative. Color - spectral. Translucent solidities, wavering balance. Our foundations change pitch, shift and sink, then seconds later run firmly to meet us. Peril impels us towards delight. This film, Precarious Garden, remembers the delicacies of perceptual indecisions and binds them into bouquets of backyard florescence and prismatic spray. "It is as if the soft diaphanous membranes of petals and leaves were the substance of a surrogate mental retina" (Catherine de Zegher). As with Gehr's film Mirage, the terraces and bends of available light traveling through store-bought optics creates a spectacle of uncertainty and splendor. A lesson in survival. A day in the sun." - Mark McElhatten
2004, 16mm 13.5 minutes, color/si 13½ min. $50 Rental