by Joshua Peinado
Barry Gerson, an old master of experimental and structural cinema, has been working prolifically in his late period, in a way not dissimilar to his New York contemporaries Ernie Gehr and Larry Gottheim. Like Gehr, Gerson has spent the 21st century honing his digital craft, since his return in 2002 following a twenty-year filmmaking hiatus. From 2012 through 2022, Gerson made 15 films of varying lengths and aesthetic concerns, though all evince a lifetime of work towards understanding the frame as a window into other understandings of reality. A documentary about Gerson’s life, Don Barry, is soon to be released, and this year sees Gerson publishing a book—Elixir of Light: Intuition, LED Lights and Healing Oneself Through the Super Brain, described as “a memoir of the artist’s explorations with color LED therapy lights to heal the various maladies that accompany aging, combined with a reiteration of his theories regarding the energy powers of light and intuition.” In conjunction with the book release, Paul Smart (director of Don Barry) and Anthology Film Archives are conducting a retrospective of the director’s entire career, from 1964 to the present year.
Water (1969) demonstrates the true mastery of form that Gerson had even at an early point in his career and models the distinct, rhyming editing that seems to permeate his films. The film opens half submerged in water, and moves to clouds above breaking ocean waves, both seeming to mimic the other. Gerson then takes the audience for a brief but thrilling roller-coaster ride through the clouds, before returning to the first shot, which is now more apparent—a pool overlooked by a grassy knoll. It’s hard to find words for the film beyond “thrilling,” a paradigm of movement that connects the air to the sea, and cycles back to its origins. The obvious parallel—that clouds are merely water vapor, would seem to indicate Gerson’s more spiritual obsessions in the cyclical nature of Water, both physical and metaphysical. A more literal filmmaker might’ve titled it “Water/Clouds,” but Gerson’s concerns don’t map onto such straightforward interpretations: “Since all matter in the Universe pulsates rhythmically, it is therefore, in constant motion. My films/videos become an activated metaphor to elucidate this phenomenon.”
Gerson returns to water in Translucent Appearances (1976), which is composed of 35 shots of Niagara Falls. Gerson only really changes his vantage seven or eight times, but from shot to shot new concealing agents are introduced via horizontal blocks that hide parts of the image. At times stark white and others deep blue, these strips attached to the lens refocus the viewers’ attention to parts of the image not obscured. Teeming water explodes from the top of the frame downward, only to be cloaked by a white contour taking up no less than half the frame, leaving only an exiguous view of the bottom of these falls. It’s an interesting and prescient experiment in the types of framing Gerson would become known for, but at this stage instead of replacing the blank space left by the mask Gerson saw fit to let the void direct the audience’s eyes to what they could see. These windows act almost as magnifying glasses (an image that will literally appear six years later in Episodes from the Secret Life) that elucidate the vibrant blues and mist-textured geometries that make up the falls.
The last film Gerson made before his break from filmmaking was Episodes from the Secret Life (1982), which is as much about the dimensions of space it cohabitates as it is the illusory nature of chronology. Gerson describes a “poetic structure” that brings together two distinct realities of a moment, differing in motion and cadence. Practically, this effect is achieved through masking part of the camera, creating windows within windows that shift in rhythm and shape according to the episode. More often than not, there is a surrounding frame and an interior frame: A slanted rectangle jutting through reality; a triangle encroaching from the bottom of the screen but not quite rising to the top; a diagonal split between two images and a third superimposed image cutting through them both. Gerson’s images in the film are just as fantastic as his engineering of shots—whether it’s his knack for the kind, luminent terrain of spotted microbeams on a picnic table or the playful domain of small objects he uses a magnifying glass to inspect. Ones’ eye easily guides itself through the piece in all its converse movements—one half jerks while the other whips, but Gerson’s understanding of the geography of his movements allow a kinetic balance of the given elements.
The episodes themselves present competing angles of an event, playing out simultaneously yet depicting different moments in time. The shape of the film naturally brings about ideas of Deleuze’s crystal-image, which proposes a continuity made up of both the past and the present. In one corner, papers sit on a table, and in the surrounding frame papers have been scattered by the wind. Over the course of the scene, the wind does begin to act on the papers in the interior, revealing the exterior frame as the present moment and the inside frame the nucleus—the moment from which everything around it stemmed. Not every scene is so easily understood in this dynamic, with some featuring jumps in time from both the internal and external worlds. Deleuze, in Cinema 2, proposes an explanation for the phenomenon this way: “The crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and which is the other.” Unlike most of the films Deleuze was concerned with when writing (Deleuze was not a fan of experimental cinema, per say) Gerson’s film does not propose a running narrative through-line. Though there are ‘characters’—a man who walks up a fire escape, a man walks on a bridge, a different man is suggested by the movement of the camera—it’s hard to argue that they have more bearing on the film than the structure.
One rarely goes to a Barry Gerson film for its human figures, an audience goes to see his textures, his poetry, his playful manner of warping light. In his later films, and in the case of Episodes, one goes to see his frames. Gerson’s late period has featured a run of films that make use of the split frame technique he used in Episodes: Crystal Canyons (2016) features a series of clouds operating in this mode; Passage Through Infinity (2012), again using split frames, feels almost Dorskyeqsue in its obfuscation of its subject, a pipe, through shadow; The Snows of Reduction (2012), in its jutting frames-within-frames, recaptures the feeling of Episodes that in some way one frame is a mirror into one version of reality, merely being placed in front of another. Gerson has also moved to doubling down on textural pieces—such is the case in his latest, Mexico (2023).
Mexico features both image and sound, a unique feature in Gerson’s largely silent filmography. The first 2/3 of the three minute “imagistic sculpture” is scored by a static soundscape, replete with street noise and an anonymous song playing quietly behind. The last minute is dominated by a bellowing chant exploding over the previously-established sonic base. Mexico’s first image is of a bright pink domicile, quickly succeeded by its immediate surroundings, and then a doorknob—allowing the audience inside the house. From this point, it’s a play of strange geometries and textures. Vividly colored blocks stack on top of and around one another to create vacant spaces that occupy the center of Gerson’s compositions, while the attentive eye gravitates towards the focus pulling around shining silver granules on the surface of the nearest shape. Brilliant gold ‘curtains’ petrified in a warped state surround more turquoise objects, and then Gerson returns to the silver lining, now mirrored in black glass. It’s a dense film in that each successive shot establishes new textural layers that build upon each other until they all come together in one space.
Often the camera appears as though peeking around a corner it shouldn’t be allowed to, as if the filmmakers is viewing the chasm separating life from death—actualized in the void reflecting silver-painted stars. In the final scene, the gold plasticine veil now huddles around a mass of crinkled rose paper, which contracts and expands in a manner that immediately identifies it as something similar to a heart or a lung. This imagery in combination with Gerson’s throat singing causes the affair to feel like a ritual taken before death. Though Gerson’s imagery in Mexico is decidedly simpler, the staging of these shrouded architectural elements in combination with the camera’s slight movements seem to point towards some great drama playing out just beyond the audience’s purview.
Joshua Peinado is a filmmaker and critic based out of the Pacific Northwest, whose writing can be found most routinely in In Review Online and Screen Slate [Twitter]
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