Ernie Gehr Movies

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...

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

16mm film (black and white, silent)

Nothing extraordinary. Just a ride on the S-Bahn (elevated train) through a small section of what used to be East Berlin. An anxious journey fraught...

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

"Untitled begins with a flat, out-of-focus, reddish-pink screen on which blurry white patterns quickly appear and disappear. After awhile a space...

"[A] view from a Brooklyn apartment sublimates Hitchcock's voyeurism into a frenzied engagement with the visible. The film varies exposure or racks...

"Serene Velocity (1970) created a stunning percussive head-on motion by systemically shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens as it stared...

"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...

"Completed shortly after Morning, Wait is a vivid depiction of the cinematic process of recording images on film. From frame to...

"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...

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...

Silence dominates the work, as does the screen rectangle, which cuts off the “image” from a life time-space continuum and imposes upon...

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

“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...

"One of two new digital works in the all-Gehr program, Morse Code is not only clever; it's unexpectedly funny. Having now spent several years...

"The radio waves could be the breeze stirring the trees. The pedestrians swim and bob among these visceral transmissions; the total image seems...

“The eyes may be attracted to look left and right – and please let them – but the center is also intriguing and not separable from...

“Frolicking on the beach in early June, before the start of the summer season.” - Ernie Gehr

"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...