"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...
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.
“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...
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...
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
"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...
"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...
"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...
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,...
"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...
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)
"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....
"A poetic visual rendition of morning, and an evocation of my awakening to working with some basic elements of filmmaking – film emulsion responsiveness to light, as well as an initial approach to the relationship between a frame and a shot. My first 16mm work. The beginning of a new day."...
In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.
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.
