Bon Voyage

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

"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 color Gehr captures come from the world, shot through a simple clear tube that strips away form and lets only chromatic patterns and motion come through. Even in his most abstract films, Gehr is relating to a world outside his consciousness and trying to stake out a relation to it, testing its order and chaos, its beauty and its threats." – Tom Gunning

"Reverberation began as an attempt at a portrayal, a representing of a life situation by way of film, and turned in the making of it into a presentation of the physical movement of film itself, stranding the photo-memory of persons/objects/their relationships in a cinematic force-field wherein images are offered up and simultaneously swept away by conflicting energies. Sound as it comes from a speaker has its own quality. No matter how close it comes in reproducing sound of living beings or objects, this quality is always the sound of the projector, the wires, the tubes and the speakers. This is its actuality. And it can be heard and experienced as sound, a form of energy." -Ernie Gehr

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)

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.

"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. We do not simply see Market Street circa 1902, but a film of Market Street, and it is as fascinating as the site itself. Film may in some sense exist indifferent to emotions, objects, beings, or ideas. But early in his work Gehr realized that film, even conceived as a thing in itself, can never exist outside of history. The very dance of grain on the screen acquires a history of its production, its screenings, its viewings. History is the place no place can avoid.” - Tom Gunning

"Completed shortly after Morning, Wait is a vivid depiction of the cinematic process of recording images on film. From frame to frame……. this work offers a sense of film emulsion coming to life, and responding to the forces of light. In addition shifting camera positions, panning, tilting, using the zoom, framing and focusing are all part of the work. A sculpturing of a space from frame to frame on a surface where there is no space. The title, Wait .... is asking the viewer to forgo our conditioned focus on the photographic image as a representation of a life situation, and instead, focus on the visual kinetic here and now. Physical therapy for the eyes, and delight for the senses." – Ernie Gehr

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

In New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr’s cinema, haunted now by ghosts, from long-ago travels and struggles, that are gifted with an uncanny voice and presence.

“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

A stereoscopic view of a suburban backyard.

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.

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

"Serene Velocity" remade at USF Tampa in Cooper Hall

Animation created from early paper films.

“The eyes may be attracted to look left and right – and please let them – but the center is also intriguing and not separable from the rest. Among other things, a side view is transformed into a frontal view, but of course, that is not all.” - Ernie Gehr