by Alex Fields
Ernie Gehr’s restless experimentation is driven equally by a fascination with the technological processes of recording sound and image and with the visible scope of urban life. On both fronts, Gehr’s work has challenged and expanded the scope of human and cinematic vision. In an interview with Scott MacDonald, Gehr describes his early fascination with cinema:
“The things that moved me and haunted me, even during childhood, were things other than the ongoing stories depicted on-screen. For example, the beam of light in those old movie palaces: people used to be able to smoke cigarettes in the balcony, and when a movie got boring, I would look up and watch the beam of light and the smoke filtering through it.”
It’s exactly this sort of observation that drives his films, which always begin with a particular visual idea or process which generates the rest of the material. The end result is often as surprising to the artist as to the audience, and this way of working is perhaps what has allowed Gehr to repeatedly arrive in places so distant from cinematic precedent that they seem impossible to conceive a priori. Films like Shift (1974) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1992) fundamentally reorient the geometry of the frame, upending gravity and the very ideas of up and down, forward and backward. Gehr’s best known work, Serene Velocity (1970), similarly upsets our understanding of space and depth; its mostly mechanical application of a pattern (four frames at a time, alternating focal lengths which grow further and further apart) producing an film as endlessly complex as it is dynamic.
By removing the psychological and narrative conventions of film, Gehr frees its formal elements to take center stage, and at times creates the avant-garde equivalent of a blockbuster action movie. The films are viscerally exciting to watch, not because of what’s happening to the people on screen, but because of their pure energy and the feeling that we’re seeing the world in an entirely new way. As formalist as these works are, however, they’re also deeply interested in humanity, and not only in the sense that they teach us something about the structures and limitations of our own vision. The city films capture something of the dizzying pace and shape of the urban environment, in particular the multicultural mesh of New York City and San Francisco, the places Gehr has mostly lived and worked.
Gehr’s transition from film to digital video was primarily driven by economic concerns, but the shift seems to have encouraged a greater focus on this realm of urban activity, both because of the flexible mobility allowed by a small digital camera, and because the difference in technology heads off the particular sorts of experimentation with 8mm and 16mm cameras that defined so many of his earlier films. Nevertheless, the newer video works are largely contiguous with his previous body of work. In several cases, they even specifically echo earlier works. Construction Sight (2018) uses reflections on windows to layer scenes from the street across those inside stores and coffee shops; Still (1971) did something comparable using double exposed film.
One of the most distinctive digital works, Glider (2001), uses a giant camera obscura near the Cliff House in San Francisco to create a swirling distortion of an ocean view, which recalls Side/Walk/Shuttle’s anti-gravitational visuals but also Gehr’s first exhibited film, Morning (1967), which made a camera obscura out of the window in the room of his New York City loft. This fascination with early and pre-cinematic technologies is apparent in a number of works. Eureka (1974) refilmed a reel of footage of San Francisco’s Market Street from 1906, slowing it down frame by frame and causing it to seemingly come to life. Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides II (2019) points a digital camera at even earlier examples of moving images, including magic lantern shows and manually operated kaleidoscope toys. It speaks to the history of cinematic perceptive capacities through the contrast between the technologies on screen and those used to record them.
One partial change in Gehr’s late period is that his process seems to rely more on editing and less on advance planning. Most of the film works were edited primarily in camera, sometimes experimenting with frame by frame exposure or the split frames allowed by an 8mm camera. Several of the video works, by contrast, begin with relatively straightforward filming of an uncontrolled environment and find their distinctive approach through possibilities of digital editing. Sunday In Paris (2016) splits its source material into thirds horizontally. At first the three layers match spatially but are staggered temporally, creating bizarre effects like a person’s head departing from their stationary torso and crossing the street by itself. Later the displacement becomes spatial as well, showing the movement of feet across all three layers. The contrast of movement and stillness, the separation and isolation of particular elements of the broader canvas, locate new relationships and patterns in an otherwise ordinary scene.
Several recent works lean even more heavily into their digital nature, manipulating their images to the point of unrecognizable abstraction and then reintroducing legible meaning through sound. For the Birds (2016) features a mostly white screen with simple geometric shapes fluttering about. We “know” that these shapes are birds because the audio track features the loud squawking of birds in what sounds like a busy city park. We wouldn’t know from the image alone whether we’re looking at a basic computer animation or live footage that’s been manipulated, but we understand its meaning regardless. Similarly, Auto-Collider XX (2014) shows blurred bands of horizontal color, presumably created through pixel stretching an image of unknowable source. Due to recognizable sounds, however, we interpret this as the sight of (or from) a rapidly moving train. The purity of lines suggests motion faster than a real train could ever move, and this sound-image relationship gives the film a dynamic energy that establishes a tension between modernist abstraction and representational simplicity.
Displacement of sound and representational image are also core to Back in the Park (2021), which explores its subject by filming shadows on the ground. In one sense pure shapes formed in light, the shadows are also easily recognizable as people walking and eating. The visual element alone is a simplified echo of people it depicts, showing only their outline, but in combination with the live sound recording, it becomes more complex. Conversations are mostly audible, but it’s impossible to tell which voices belong to which figures. We therefore see and hear the same scene simultaneously but separately, and have to learn to perceive in a new way.
This process of learning to see anew is the essence of Gehr’s work. He uses technology to move beyond the constraints of embodied human perception, and rebels against the conventional limitations of the camera and microphone as a vehicle for simply reproducing those perceptions. An expanded repertory of camera and editing tools offers an expanded realm of experience, and at their best the films deliver a profound glimpse of what can feel like another plane of reality. Chambers of Time (2010) begins as a warmly diaristic record of a teenager building a snowman before cutting to the falling snow in the gray sky. As it alternates between these views, the camera begins to shake violently, dissolving the scene into an abstract blur. The personal and ephemeral is contrasted with the infinite, a precious moment disappearing into the tunnels of time.
Carroll Gardens (2023) takes the shaking camera approach to its radical extreme, consisting of twenty minutes of images from the eponymous New York City neighborhood shot entirely in rapid blur. There’s never a question of what we’re seeing or how the images were made, and yet it feels revelatory, like seeing a modernist painting for the first time, trees and cars and storefronts elevated to a Cubist geometry of pure shape and color. In digital as well as film, Gehr’s work continues to prove that that beam of light in the movie palace can be just as invigorating and transformative as any story that appears on the screen.
Alex Fields is a film writer and postal worker in Knoxville, TN. They write regularly on formalist, experimental, and genre film for Tone Glow and their blog, Not Reconciled.
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