Ernie Gehr

Ernie Gehr has spoken of film as less representational image but “a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.” One of the central figures of American avant-garde cinema, Gehr has been less interested in abstraction than in opening the senses of the viewers to the interplays of color and light and shadow that exist within quotidian objects. Thus the fixed camera shots of a hallway that make up Serene Velocity; the view of Lexington Avenue in Still; the kitchen interior of Table; and the shots of Gehr’s son that comprise For Daniel. Rigorous yet free, Gehr’s films, making use of the medium’s most elemental aspects, nonetheless seem to be both recreating the cinema and the world as we watch.