The Ever-Expanding Cinema of Ernie Gehr - Program Two

This two-program showcase of Ernie Gehr’s filmmaking over the past ten years begins with a pair of dazzling films, both works from longer series, which underscore the dialogue, active across his oeuvre, between Modernist Art and cinema. Sensations of Light 7 uses flicker effect to create an intensely animated return to a variation of sorts of Albers’ famous Homage to a Square, now using variable speeds and rhythms to generate a rich series of effects and aftereffects that ignite the screen. Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman and Bridget Riley, among others, are recalled in the mesmerizing linear abstractions of Auto-Collider XX, part of a long series made using footage shot while driving through the streets of San Francisco.
The other films in the program together give special emphasis to the urban focus of Gehr’s recent work. While Construction Sight uses slow motion and a low-fi soundtrack recalling his earlier Reverberation to observe uncanny patterns of movement and mirroring, Back in the Park observes the parallel world of shadows on a sun-drenched Manhattan day. It was on a certain Sunday in Paris that Gehr, meanwhile, filmed one of his most delightfully adventurous films using careful “cuts” to render the image into a fascinating turnstile of displaced perspective. Among the most beautiful and poignant of Gehr’s city films are three—Delirium, The Weather Report and Flying Over Brooklyn—that were made within steps from his Caroll Gardens home since the coming of COVID. Quiet works of resilience, the films affirm Gehr’s incredible resourcefulness as well as his understanding of vision itself as a creative and transformative art.