Movies: Ernie Gehr

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....

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—i...

"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 i...

"[A] view from a Brooklyn apartment sublimates Hitchcock's voyeurism into a frenzied engagement with the visible. The film varies exposure or racks focus so that the flickering, spatially ambiguous patterns that press the limits of the frame momentar...

"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 shif...

16mm film (black and white, silent)...

"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 floati...

"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.' Bu...

“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 ...

"Film in its primordial state in which patterns of light and darkness are still undivided. Like the natural order of the universe, an unbroken flow in which movement and distribution of tension is infinitely subtle, and a finite orientation seems im...

“We are confronted with everyday images in a romantic way. If you are patient, you eventually see a deli sign that says ‘Carroll Gardens,’ a bike, a stroller. These images are initially obscured, but through repetition become recognizable, until Erni...

A meditation on silence, vanishings, and phantoms of light....

South Station (2024) 19 min. Color. Sound....

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...

"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 ever changing Lower East Side....

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

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

The missing chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railroad Journey. A museum piece. Recorded in Berlin, Feb. 2015....

"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 th...