NEW YORK, NY.- Movies have been around for well over a century, and for roughly half that time, American filmmaker Ernie Gehr has — playfully, thoughtfully, beautifully — shown us just how far out, exciting and liberating they can be.
Gehr makes moving images that open your mind and pleasurably rearrange your thoughts. His movies tend to be short, have sound and, these days, were shot in digital. By conventional standards not a lot happens; they don’t tell stories per se, even if they say a great deal. What interests Gehr is light, energy, shape, color, rhythm, time, space and the medium’s plasticity. He chops the image up, twirls it around, makes it sing. You could call his work abstract, experimental or avant-garde, but a more fitting description is that it’s just, well, cinematic.
A contested, oft-abused word, cinematic can be fuzzy shorthand to describe images that look and move the way we think movies look and move (or should). Gehr challenges such thinking, which is exemplified by one of his most significant early works, “Serene Velocity” (1970), a silent color film that doesn’t have a single soul or any camera moves in it. Instead, partly by changing the focal lengths on a zoom lens, Gehr created an illusion of movement in which a precisely centered shot of a college basement hall becomes a trippy, propulsive, at times eyeball-popping inquiry into film form. He’s still challenging conventions just as trippily.
On Friday, the one-week series “Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic” opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Curated by Francisco Valente, this dynamic sampler includes both newer work and restored rarities that have been arranged into six programs. Gehr, who is 82 and lives in New York, is scheduled to appear at each show. MoMA is a fitting place to check out his movies, which in their formal rigor, aesthetic concerns and sheer visual pow make them ideal counterparts to the abstract and nonfigurative work hanging on the museum’s walls.
Gehr started making films in the 1960s after serving in the Army and landing in New York, where he chanced upon the work by avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a titan of the art. Although Gehr ended up going in a different artistic direction, he was excited both by Brakhage’s work and by the very idea that he, too, might make movies. In an era in which most of us have a video camera in our back pocket, it is impossible to overstate just how mind-blowing it once was for many aspiring filmmakers to realize that they didn’t need to be in Hollywood or have stars, crews and astronomical budgets.
Instead, if a would-be filmmaker like Gehr was lucky enough to be in New York in the 1960s — then an epicenter of off-Hollywood cine-adventurousness — he could even borrow a camera. That’s exactly what Gehr did after he visited the Millennium Film Workshop, which was then run by filmmaker Ken Jacobs and lent equipment for free. Gehr soon had a camera in hand that used 8-millimeter film (a precursor to Super-8), a cheaper alternative to 16-millimeter. Lightweight and easy to use, these cameras made making movies on your own entirely doable.
When Millennium temporarily closed (it’s still going), Gehr thought through what he liked and didn’t about movies. In an interview with writer Scott MacDonald published in 2006, Gehr explained that he realized that what interested him was often “peripheral” to what was on-screen. “The seamless illusion of reality wasn’t that important to me,” he said. When characters were in an alley that had a puddle of water, he wasn’t swept up by the action; Gehr was looking at the water’s reflections and patterns, and seeing other potentialities.
Gehr asks you to open your mind and your eyes. That may sound ridiculously obvious and maybe patronizing (apologies!), but mainstream movies create expectations that live in your head, settle into your body and, at times, narrow your vision. What those movies don’t prepare you for is work like Gehr’s “Creatures of the Night,” in which the image is divided in sections and filled with herky-jerky silhouettes that recall early animations. Or “Back in the Park,” an elegant meditation in which he points the camera downward (and sometimes turns it topsy-turvy) to capture striking shadows and fugitive glimpses of passersby.
I don’t find Gehr’s work difficult to watch, though thinking about it afterward can send me down rabbit holes. Even so, sometimes you need to just shake off those expectations. The brevity of the works in the MoMA series helps make that easy; the longest runs 36 minutes. One of the shortest, “Flying Over Brooklyn,” in the first program, is a witty one-shot five-minute charmer. It opens on a bright blue city sky filled with wispy clouds moving rightward, a drift that’s soon interrupted by a helicopter zipping left, a flash of birds and the sounds of an unseen plane.
Although there isn’t any story here, at least in the usual sense, the movie gives you something to look at while allowing your imagination to roam free, much as when you find images in clouds. While watching “Flying Over Brooklyn,” some low-slung buildings tucked in one corner of the frame made me think of all the times I would go on the roof when I lived in the East Village and how, because the buildings were all relatively short, I could see the dome of the sky with its clouds and planes. I also thought about how Gehr, with his genius eye and sensitivities, makes me re-see everyday life and, by extension, movies too.
That’s one of the expansive pleasures of Gehr’s work: it makes you see, deeply. Whether he’s focusing on a row of pants and shirts all but dancing on a clothesline (“High-Wire Act”) or dividing the image into sections that he shuffles around (“Sunday in Paris”) or training his gaze on shadows bobbing on a wall (“Delirium”), Gehr invariably invites you to look at the world with new eyes. He tests the very boundaries of what we call movies. He widens our horizons, delighting and at times baffling us with work that is at once heady and down to earth, and which is insistently personal — as we can see from the peekaboo glimpses of him holding a camera in the dazzling “Construction Sight.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
