Creatures of the Night (2024)
This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic. ...
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"Born in 1941, he began making eight-millimeter films in the mid-’60s. The precipitating event, he told the writer Scott MacDonald in a 2002-3 interview, was a program of Stan Brakhage films that Mr. Gehr caught in New York on a rainy night. The works excited him partly because in their abstraction and attention to color, texture and rhythm they were closer to his experience of 20th-century painting than of movies, and he continued to seek out more of the same. He eventually ended up at the Millennium Film Workshop and borrowing a light meter from the filmmaker Ken Jacobs (with whom Mr. Gehr shares an interest in early cinema). As he walked around New York reading light, as it were, Mr. Gehr discovered “the character of light” and learned about “cinema’s dependency on light.”
(from NYTimes profile by Manohla Dargis. Full piece here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/movies/ernie-gehrs-films-traffic-in-images-and-light.html?
"We are confronted with everyday images in a romantic way. If you are patient, you eventually see a deli sign that says 'Carroll Gardens,' a bike, a stroller. These images are initially obscured, but through repetition become recognizable, until Ernie intu ...
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"I have a number of doctors that I have to see – getting older and it's an issue all the time, and they are on the Upper East Side. I take the F train to 63rd St. Station and walk two and a half blocks to this building where my doctors share, it's on thi ...
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"This is a work that evolved out of play and a sudden impulse. I had been recording footage for a work in Midtown Manhattan. On one particular occasion it was not a productive day for me. As a result I felt a bit stressed out, and began to just drift throu ...
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"The eyes may be attracted to look left and right – and please let them – but the center is also intriguing and not separable from the rest. Among other things, a side view is transformed into a frontal view, but of course, that is not all. ...
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"It's a mysterious field, this screen rectangle populated by haunting phantasmagoric phenomena, be it representational or just patterns of color, light and darkness. Realism has no place here, but lifelike re-presentations of consciousness and the imaginat ...
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"A cinematic audio-visual fugue plays out in-time a choreography of interior and exterior spaces, activities, sounds and perhaps longings. ...
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This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working, thinking, and faring during the quarantine. Most of the other works have a diaristic bent, but Ernie's piece ...
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"It was recorded over Summer of 2020, we were isolating ourselves. We live in the ground floor in an apartment building, we have the full backyard which ended up being my interaction with nature – that's where 'Flying Over Brooklyn' was recorded. Just lo ...
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This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic. ...
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"The second piece on this program, Aproposessexstreetmarket, is what I consider to be the heart of the trilogy. ...
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"Throughout his long career, Ernie Gehr has explored cinema's unique potential to reveal the limits and possibilities of visual perception and the illusionary, subjective experience of time. In these recent digital video works Gehr offers profoundly cinema ...
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Better than ever. 'They're dancing better than ever,' commented Ernie Gehr's wife Myrel Glick on seeing how he brought these girls' dance into contemporary light. Yes indeed. That's the mystery. That the past dances now better than ever, even while we feel ...
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Ernie Gehr's large-scale, multiscreen video installation CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS is simultaneously a reflection on early animation and genre cinema, a playful exercise in moving-image graphics, and an extension of the artists' interest in the abstraction, text ...
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The missing chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railroad Journey. A museum piece. Recorded in Berlin, Feb. 2015. ...
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This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic. ...
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A Commuter's Life (What a Life!) gives sculptural dimension and kaleidoscopic novelty to footage shot by Gehr during his commutes from his native New York to Harvard, where he was teaching a seminar on the history of phantasmagoria, of cinema before cinema ...
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The 20th installment of the Auto-Collider series. "In 2005 we were still living in San Francisco, we were there for 18 and a half years, I really like the city very much but we also miss New York. When I retired and our son graduated from 8th grade we deci ...
Watch NowA 2013 English language avant-garde film directed by Ernie Gehr. The film screened at The New York Film Festival in 2013. ...
Watch NowInside/out at whisper speed, symmetries in locomotion churn soft and feathery floating like a dream. A nocture before nightfall. -M.M. ...
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A translation of volumes in space into a vibratory painted desert and living lines. A new register in an optical Richter scale. ...
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In New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr's cinema, haunted now by ghosts, from long-ago travels and struggles, that are gifted with an uncanny voice and presence. ...
Watch NowA 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 a slanting grade. ...
Watch NowIn this fascinating exploration of the rich, elusive qualities of the video surface, Gehr layers transparent and translucent repetitions of a complex urban street scene to form a mesmerizing tableau. ...
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Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these "little films" form a unique anth ...
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From a train trip home, legendary experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr creates a triptych cum structural trajectory in which composition and perception convene into a "phantom ride. Departure sharpens the senses as it penetrates a recognizable yet reframed la ...
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An ode to digital interlace, which is to video what intervals between frames are to film… ...
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"Frolicking on the beach in early June, before the start of the summer season. ...
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Picture Taking is focused on "verticality" and urban sightseeing as well as on some of the pictorial possibilities of the HD digital format. ...
Watch NowSilence dominates the work, as does the screen rectangle, which cuts off the "image" from a life time-space continuum and imposes upon the image its particular character. Within it, there is a play between tonalities, textures, large and small shapes. ...
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A four-channel video work taking inspiration from a lush park environment and the proliferating presence of security cameras in public life. ...
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American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr's stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of extended sublime that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film's structure and soundtrack wo ...
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"Fun" to make and to watch, as well as satisfying to respond to, ABRACADABRA's realization is a miracle of sorts. ...
Watch NowIn New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr's cinema, haunted now by ghosts, from long-ago travels and struggles, that are gifted with an uncanny voice and presence. ...
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Two related videotapes in which Gehr articulates formal connections between organic and geometrical forms, CF1 and 2 adopt the thaumatope structure characteristic of certain other Gehr's videotapes (Before the Olympics, The Morse Code Operator), rapidly fl ...
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"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 is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not ...
Watch Now"Before the Olympics is composed out of sounds and images recorded in Torino in November 2005, while the city was undergoing renovations for the then-upcoming Winter Olympics. Fun to compose. Hope you enjoy it." (E. ...
Watch Now"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 exploring the possibilities of DV, one senses that Gehr has attained a new level of comfort and flexibility with t ...
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"The visual was recorded through, not a lens, but an adjustable slit-like opening, which was attached in front of the image sensor. I was changing the length of the slit and rotating the angle to modify the visual, as my response to the activities taken pl ...
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Mechanical glass slides were manipulated to simulate various kinds of change in the image, and multiple projectors allowed for superimposed and dissolving views. Brightly colored, handcrafted slides, depicting human activity, fantasy figures, and landscape ...
Watch Now"Replete with visual and audiovisual humor, these works not only celebrate the pleasures of perception, as well as physical spaces and spaces of the mind, but also remain ethereal and multi-faceted in their formal and perceptual attributes. Rigorous in t ...
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"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 shot it with his Bolex camera, one frame at a time. It conveys the settled relief of being home, as agains ...
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Drifting clouds. They are not nice little clouds that invite us to interpret them symbolically; rather they are poisonous and unhealthy clusters, a skin rash of the sky, an impenetrable gray curtain of smog. This is a trailer of impressive tranquility and ...
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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 with projections. A ride very much in the present, but due to history and family history, also a journey in ...
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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 more than an hour, Cotton Candy documents this venerable collection of coin-operated mechanical toys—inclu ...
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"The other Gehr installation, Modern Navigation, is a two-screen piece that shows people looking at fish in an aquarium. It is dark and mysterious, and seemed to me to be a witty and even slightly ironic comment on museum-going and art viewing in museums, ...
Watch NowCity is grounded in the familiar everyday world of the street. Yet, the ground often gives way plastically, opening up a dense and paradoxical field for visual musings and delights as colours, solids and transparencies as well as spaces within spaces weave ...
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Cool, delirious, and mysterious. Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extraterrestrial optical and gravitational laws. ...
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"Before my son was born, friends would ask me "Will you make a baby movie, now?". "Of course not!", I would answer. Yet, right after Daniel was born I found myself filming him, not with the intention of making a film, but with a need to retain, hold on to ...
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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 down, constantly shifting the orientation of his camera to offer images of the city as a zone of constant fl ...
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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 uneasy, almost sort of carnival atmosphere pervaded the place and like some magical crystal ball, reflected bot ...
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"The radio waves could be the breeze stirring the trees. The pedestrians swim and bob among these visceral transmissions; the total image seems suddenly so ethereal that the film's title, taken from a 1940s pulp magazine, becomes fact. Is the sound emanati ...
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"Abstraction in Gehr behaves like an X-ray, revealing unexpected patterns of order under the skin of things. A film like Mirage, one of those most sensuous of Gehr's abstract films may resemble superficially a strip painting by Kenneth Noland. But it is ...
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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 figure and ground, the film shows fragments of feet, heads, hands and elbows against the backdrop of an ancie ...
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"Table, shot in 1976 is the celluloid equivalent of a cubist Still Life. The subject is an ordinary kitchen table, a homely clutter of crockery and utensils. For 15 minutes, Gehr alternates two slightly different fixed points of view, accentuating indivi ...
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"This mysterious, delightful film opens with a sound collage of jazzy music and voices played against a black background. After a few minutes, there is an extended shot of a young woman sitting at a table by a window with a slight look of embarrassment as ...
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"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 mechanical – a series of cars and trucks filmed from a height of several stories as they perform on a three-lane ci ...
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Eureka (1974), which lyrically re-photographs a travelogue shot from a San Francisco streetcar, offers the purest expression of Gehr's deep love of early cinema as a source of a joyous formal inventiveness-- changing its length from 5 to about 38 minutes. ...
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Ernie Gehr's short, silent film [...] shows two young girls, almost children still, on a New York street. Both wear blue, one washed out blue jeans, the other a short, somewhat poor jersey dress. Both are lanky, weary, a little prudish in front of the came ...
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"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 the image, yet they move into depth, creating what Gehr describes as a 'teasing play with planes.' But the ...
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"Serene Velocity (1970) created a stunning percussive head-on motion by systemically shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens as it stared down the center of an empty institutional hallway – thus playing off the contradiction generated by the ...
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"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 in which movement and distribution of tension is infinitely subtle, and a finite orientation seems impossib ...
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"The title is a reference to the force-field within the rectangle. To accentuate its character I filmed with B&W filmstock. ...
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"The footage for Transparency was recorded at variable camera speeds (from approx. 5 fps to around 40 fps). In this process, when later projected at a constant speed of 24 fps, the image on screen changes in time from a representation of cars passing in fr ...
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"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 presentation of the physical movement of film itself, stranding the photo-memory of persons/objects/their relationsh ...
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"Completed shortly after Morning, Wait is a vivid depiction of the cinematic process of recording images on film. From frame to frame……. this work offers a sense of film emulsion coming to life, and responding to the forces of light. In addition shifti ...
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"A poetic visual rendition of morning, and an evocation of my awakening to working with some basic elements of filmmaking – film emulsion responsiveness to light, as well as an initial approach to the relationship between a frame and a shot. My first 16 ...
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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 would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse. ...
Watch NowA 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 Non-Industrial Cinema Within Our Cultural Heritage in 1984. ...
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