Ernie Gehr

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

A brief excerpt from Huge Pupils that has been shown on its own. Portrait of filmmaker Ernie Gehr shown at FIAF's Symposium on the Importance of Non-Industrial Cinema Within Our Cultural Heritage in 1984.

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.

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

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

Ernie working his magic.

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.

An experimental short film which shows a time-lapse in the basement hallway of a Binghamton University building.

Abstract short featuring mirrored images.

Abstract short featuring mirrored images.

"a five-minute film of the view west across the Soho street to a brick building. Gehr sat there from one day from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and shot it with his Bolex camera, one frame at a time. It conveys the settled relief of being home, as against the pace of the monochromatic working day seen in the three prior films. It is closer to his earlier films in its abstraction of forms and play with time-lapse and film speed. In the beginning, the forms are screamingly reddish-orange and incomprehensible, but as the afternoon progresses shadows slip across the surfaces and windows, fire escapes, and bricks become visible: a world is revealed with the clarity of Vermeer’s famed Little Street (1657-8)." - Jason Rosenfeld

"The other Gehr installation, Modern Navigation, is a two-screen piece that shows people looking at fish in an aquarium. It is dark and mysterious, and seemed to me to be a witty and even slightly ironic comment on museum-going and art viewing in museums, which interpretation Gehr confirms was part of his intent. It's a good idea to see it from different positions, including from different upper-level locations at the top of the ramp." - Fred Camper

Animation created from early paper films.

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)

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

"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." –Ernie Gehr

“It’s a mysterious field, this screen rectangle populated by haunting phantasmagoric phenomena, be it representational or just patterns of color, light and darkness. Realism has no place here, but lifelike re-presentations of consciousness and the imagination do. Even in the most fleeting of spaces…. hmm, spaces on a 2-dimensional plane? Never mind! Look at the above still image. Intrigued? Then perhaps the work from where it came might interest you.” - Ernie Gehr

"What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Dust. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. A scattering. The present. The passage of time. Sleep." - E.G.

A stereoscopic view of a suburban backyard.

The ever changing Lower East Side.

American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of extended sublime that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film’s structure and soundtrack work as a reminder of the constant intersections between life’s impulsiveness and beauty. - Peter Knegt

"The second piece on this program, Aproposessexstreetmarket, is what I consider to be the heart of the trilogy. It offers glimpses to the kind of activities I often encountered inside the old Essex Street Market, and I dedicate this screening to all the people who appear in the work—shoppers as well as vendors" - EG

“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

A translation of volumes in space into a vibratory painted desert and living lines. A new register in an optical Richter scale.

Inconvenient miracles escape prediction but require attention. Roadblocks are building blocks for daily adventures in seeing. Snowscreens. —M. M.

Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.

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’.