Ernie Gehr Movies

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

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...

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

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

2022. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 15 min.

"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...

Digital. Screened as a part of MOMA's 'Mechanical Principles' series

In this fascinating exploration of the rich, elusive qualities of the video surface, Gehr layers transparent and translucent repetitions of a complex...

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

“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...

“It’s a mysterious field, this screen rectangle populated by haunting phantasmagoric phenomena, be it representational or just patterns...

A slice of life. An advanced exploration of motor- coordination. Taking to the streets for a new formulation of optical mechanics in a darker key and...

Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.

"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...

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

"The concluding work is Circling Essex Crossing. In this piece, what arises out of a series of images documenting the construction of Essex Crossing...

“Before the Olympics is composed out of sounds and images recorded in Torino in November 2005, while the city was undergoing renovations for...

In this infamous structural film, Ernie Gehr takes to the glass elevator attached to San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel and rides its 24 stories up and...

"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,...

Film by Ernie Gehr