Mar
13
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Ernie
Gehr in person!
Since the late 1960s Ernie Gehr has been one of the most impressive avant-garde
filmmakers in America. His work may be characterized as an intense, often
minimalist, examination of the rhythms of urban life as they counterpoint
the fundamental techniques and strategies of cinematic representation.
Recently this sublime purist of the filmic image has begun to work in
digital video as well. The economic advantage of this expansion has allowed
him to produce more films in the past five years than ever before in his
long career. -- P. Adams Sitney
Screening tonight:
Reverberation (1969) 16mm. 25 minutes. B&W. Sound
"Reverberation is one of the most rigorous examples I know of that
growing body of film that sets out to examine materials in such a way
that the 'phenomenon' under consideration finally glows with the grace
of a lucid quality of observation which lifts us into the realm of quite
genuine 'illumination' at the same time that it asserts ever more forcefully
the pre-eminence of the simple 'being-thereness' of the materials under
the camera-eye" -- Richard Foreman
Crystal Palace (2002) Digital Video. 28 minutes. Color. Sound.
"A heavy snowstorm provides the blanket and the spark, but its really
'between the frames' (to use film language) that sets the crystals on
fire and unmasks this winter landscape populated by felt, yet otherwise
unseen forces and creatures -- both, real and imagined." -- Ernie
Gehr
The Astronomer's Dream (2004) Digital Video. 15 minutes. B&W.
Sound.
"Particles of dust -- insolent creatures -- filling the air with
dreams and enchanted sounds of night, tantalizing the real with their
dance of veils. Be quick! Be quick! They are awakening... Curtains!"
-- Ernie Gehr
Precarious Garden (2004) 16mm. 13 1/2 minutes. Color. Silent.
"It's easy to lose your footing when you try to keep in time with
the dance of Eidolons. Where is everything...exactly? Nearby. Doubled
over in laughter silently playing hide and seek with our fingertips. All
is relative. Color - spectral. Translucent solidities, wavering balance.
Our foundations change pitch, shift and sink, then seconds later run firmly
to meet us. Peril impels us towards delight. This film, Precarious Garden,
remembers the delicacies of perceptual indecisions and binds them into
bouquets of backyard florescence and prismatic spray. "It is as if
the soft diaphanous membranes of petals and leaves were the substance
of a surrogate mental retina" (Catherine de Zegher). As with Gehr's
film Mirage, the terraces and bends of available light traveling through
store-bought optics creates a spectacle of uncertainty and splendor. A
lesson in survival. A day in the sun." -- Mark McElhatten
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