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...

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

Images of a city, superimposed.

"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 accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

A brief excerpt from Huge Pupils that has been shown on its own. Portrait of filmmaker Ernie Gehr shown at FIAF's Symposium on the Importance of...

A stereoscopic view of a suburban backyard.

Sounds and images were recorded at the Polish flea-market, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, autumn 1989, a few days before the Berlin Wall came down. An...

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

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

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

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

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

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...

Drifting clouds. They are not nice little clouds that invite us to interpret them symbolically; rather they are poisonous and unhealthy clusters, a...

Picture Taking is focused on "verticality" and urban sightseeing as well as on some of the pictorial possibilities of the HD digital format.

Animation created from early paper films.

2023. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 16 min.

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...

The film is a half-hour series of brief close-ups of people on the street, shot from a high, but still intimate, angle. In a constant interplay of...