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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Film Form as Film History: An Introduction to Ernie Gehr
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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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2009-03-01
2022-12-16
2009-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Dario Marchiori
2009/03/01
Université Paris III
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Film Form as Film History: An Introduction to Ernie Gehr
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19414/17272
9
FILM FORM AS FILM HISTORY: AN INTRODUCTION TO ERNIE GEHR
Dario Marchiori, Université Paris III




                                                           The art work should be a field for noticing
                                                                     Which means: It should INVITE
                                                                   The viewer to SEE what’s THERE.
                                                                                                  […]
                                                         Art should ground us in what-is-to-be-living.
                                                                   Not develop our lust for solutions.
                                                                                   Richard Foreman




                                Fig. 1 – Table (Ernie Gehr, 1976).

   Writing on Ernie Gehr means dealing with one of the most sensitive, intelligent and simply
beautiful cinematic investigations of the last forty years. As an introduction, this essay intends to
strongly echo the formal process of Gehr’s film Still (1969-1971), in which different layers of
light are superimposed onto each other. Here, these layers will be the different formal memories
we can observe conflating in the present instant of watching one of his films. In Still, Gehr filmed
Lexington Avenue, New York, from inside the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, where he was working
at that time. The layers of light, filmed in the morning and afternoon of the same day, give the

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DARIO MARCHIORI

images a wide range of opacity and transparency, so that the film makes visible the history of his
own process, which transcends it, often blurring the layers of time and space and freeing the
spectator’s perception from within the monocular perspective vision of the camera. More than a
simple mimesis of mental processes, this «layering of imagery»1 really intends to «embody the
life of the mind»2. In a more hidden way, the layering concerns Gehr’s personal perception of the
urban space in his everyday work at the Cooperative, since it seems to embody the Proustian-
Bergsonian durée of modern perception3 as an attempt to reconfigure the chaotic stimuli of big
cities as seen by Simmel. We shall see how Gehr’s practice of film and video deals with different
traditions, from modern art to his own personal history, revealing their morphology and
transcending them in the present tense of the form we experience.


Film as film
   What is film? What can it be? A central question at stake in Ernie Gehr’s films is the
exploration of film as a medium, going as far as to explore its physical properties («the intrinsic
aspects of film itself»). In this aspect, Gehr’s first films seem to share a “modernist” intention in
Clement Greenberg’s sense: each of them explores just one fundamental, elementary aspect of the
cinematic apparatus, such as the variation of the exposure timing (Wait, 1967), the projection
conditions (Reverberation, 1969), the variation of the camera speed (Transparency, 1969), the
grain of the film (History, 1970) the movements of the camera (Field, 1970), and so on4. Isolating
these variable elements is a way to explore them and to become aware of their possibilities, but
it is also a way to allow the film itself to think5 within its formal means and through its own
devices. That is what in modern aesthetics we call “reflexivity”, something we can understand
better if we consider the avant-garde film – or at least the cinematic practice involved, which is
closer to artistic tradition – as modern art.
   However, this is a delicate point. Many spectators or critics have seen pictorial references in
Gehr’s abstractions, mainly to abstract painters like Frank Stella, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian
and so on. According to Gehr, this is only «a surface resemblance»6, that is, a resemblance
between formal shapes devoid of their material heterogeneity but with a profound difference in
the creation process itself. While admiring the other arts (especially music and painting), his
modernism lies precisely in his concern for the specificity of his own medium, not in transposing
particular formal patterns. Certainly, Gehr’s films examine the questions par excellence7 of
“modernist painting”: the frame and the flatness of the picture. But he does so by resolving them
in cinematic terms: his reflection on the filmic frame concerns, among other aspects, the dialectics
between internal frames and the format of the picture8. It also concerns in-camera editing (since
film deploys in time, and the intervals between frames are visible gaps that put the unreeling of
the film into question: consider the vibrating frame in Reverberation, or the “trespassing” lights
at the edges in Serene Velocity, 1970). And the flatness is to be seen in its relationship with the
screen and the architecture of the movie theatre, since film is a “nothing-over” medium (as
opposed to Greenberg’s “all-over” definition of Pollock’s paintings). He sometimes seems to be
considering a particular painting tradition, such as Cubism (Table, 1976, Fig. 1), or Jackson
Pollock’s abstractions (History); but the result is radically different, as in Table where the discrete
images of Muybridge, Cubist composition and an editing approach using a sort of 3-D red-white-
blue (the three filters he used in filming it) converge in a still life changing in time, evoking
Impressionist tradition as well. In this way, art history conflates with filmic means.

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                                                                          FILM FORM AS FILM HISTORY

  Enclosing his films within self-referentiality (especially in the first decade of his production),
Gehr frees them from the reduced perspectives of narration and representation, while attaining
these perspectives in new ways. Contrasting the idea of “seeing through” the frame in favour of
a consideration of the 2-dimensional surface, Gehr’s aim is not only the basic avant-garde
necessity of negation (of representation, naturalism and so on) but, more precisely, to reach «the
2-D/3-D reciprocal tension of a two-dimensional image»9. When the film attains abstraction, it
does so through a process that starts from reality, not by following a dogma. One example is
Field, which shows complete abstract moving images since it is made up exclusively of very fast
pans10, but which has been shot in a real field, near a small lake. As a result, shooting a field
becomes an investigation of the cinematic field itself, as it questions both 3-D representation and
the reference to concrete shapes. Abstraction is not a state to attain and maintain, but something
that is always vibrating in its relation to the real. The direction of the pans is itself blurred at some
points, recognizable at others, as Gehr is always on the edge between knowing the world and
seeing it differently, combining consciousness with ecstasy.


Archaeology of the present
   The autoreflexive11 path led Gehr to rediscover early cinema (Eureka, 1974) as well as the
scientific devices and toys of the 19th century (Cotton Candy, 2001), which are not simple
anticipations of cinema, as the “pre-cinema” label tends to imply, but the defeated promise of
different possibilities in film history. Since the 1970s, there has been great interest in returning to
this period, not only to Lumière and Méliès but also to Muybridge, Marey and to the various
visual toys12. In a way, the achievement of modernism lies in this tension with the origins, in order
to find and preserve the forgotten memories of the past – a project close to Benjamin’s aims – and
Gehr’s found footage film, Eureka, can also be read in this perspective13. In the phantom ride
tradition (a movement filmed from the front of a car, a streetcar or a train), Eureka shows a long
tracking shot, slowed down four to eight times by re-photographing each frame. Passing through
the city of San Francisco and rediscovering the amazement of the people seeing themselves
filmed, maybe for the first time, the tracking shot ends in front of the inscription “Erected 1896”:
the date, more or less, of the birth of cinema, which we are led back to see. In returning to these
origins, Gehr finds new cinematic forms: as Adorno would have put it, «the new is the nostalgia
for the new»14. Similarly, the “vertical panorama” of Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) takes on a modern
vision device (Muybridge’s panoramas), going beyond the discipline of the eye whose role it
assumes, and appropriating the function of the place itself (a glass elevator in a San Francisco
hotel). Moreover, Cotton Candy embodies the tension and the extreme distance between the
present instant – the quintessence of time in modernist practice – and memory, even if it does so
in a very different way. What is quite astonishing is Gehr’s capacity to explore different
techniques and processes, and very different formal patterns: an aspect that has often been
neglected, but fundamental to understand a filmmaker whose work demonstrates at the same time
such coherence and such liberty.
   Since his very first films, Gehr’s archaeological project involves an investigation of the
«conditions of possibility», as Foucault would have said, of a modern device like film15. His
archaeology of modernity is also a look into modern perception through a modern technology
such as cinematography. The frame-by-frame technique allows Gehr to give the spectator the
sense of continuity/discontinuity and stillness/motion that shape the fundamental paradox of

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DARIO MARCHIORI

cinema. If modernity is the age of «the emergence of cinematic time»16, Gehr’s cinematic practice
is a personal investigation on modern devices and modern perception17. For Gehr, reflecting upon
film means questioning the very matter of film, taken as «a real thing»18 which «is reacting
internally»19 just like a living being would. He seems to transcend the primary philosophical
opposition between conceptualism and empiricism: exploring the layers of the mind, seemingly
effacing his subjectivity, while always exploring the present reasons of his existence as a
filmmaker, he’s able to articulate in a humble but decisive way lucidity and emotion, or «passion»
and «serenity» as Sitney has underlined (quoting Benedetto Croce).


The personal eye
  When he first started making films, Gehr told Mekas he was moved by «a desire less to express
myself and more of making something out of the film material itself relevant to film for spiritual
purposes». Brakhage, speaking in a more obscure and formalist way, said that he intended to
«magically transform […] every vibration of unspeakable private origins into Form». Sharing an
immanent-transcendent conception of form20, Gehr and Brakhage seem to be at opposite ends of
the spectrum regarding the place of the subject-object question in their films: Brakhage as the
subjective genius and Gehr as the “cold”, “structural” one. But if the former made among others
the wonderful hyper-phenomenological Pittsburgh Trilogy (1971), the latter is able to deeply
conceal a very personal dimension in his own work. Sitney asserted as much when he said about
Gehr: «I find the man and the films more intimately related than he would acknowledge».
Personal, subjective involvement remains a factor in Gehr’s work, as Still (Fig. 2) suggests. We
touch here on one of the most delicate questions in discussing an artist’s works: the obscure links
between human life and the products of human labour. This should not take the form of a mystery,
but should rather be the place for a necessary silence to be maintained by the spectators, most
notably critics.




                        Fig. 2 – Still (Ernie Gehr, 1969-1971).

  Gehr’s films can be considered in a way similar to what plays are for his friend Richard
Foreman, in the tradition of Gertrude Stein: «A combination of the THING and of my PERCEPTION
(of the fact I perceive it)»21. Concealing subjectivity allows Gehr to explore the relationship of
formal patterns to the filmmaker’s mind, and to give the spectator the gift of a more intense and
sensitive consciousness. To inscribe subjectivity, not to show it: that is the task of the filmmakers

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                                                                        FILM FORM AS FILM HISTORY

and the critics who watch Gehr’s films. The personal is political: subjective perception is social
and collective, and the attempt to transcend historical determinations within such perception is
still alive. Likewise, the questioning of modernity is paralleled by the exploration of the personal
historical background of the filmmaker, as in the 1980s, when Gehr’s interest in urban spaces
became more concerned with political history, notably in his works Untitled: Part One, 1981
(1981), Signal – Germany on the Air (1982-1985), This Side of Paradise (1991), and Passage,
which focus on Germany, the country his parents had to leave after Hitler’s election, and Berlin
in particular. Travelling through Europe and the USA, Gehr is able to create unique connections
between all continents, as in Side/Walk/Shuttle, which shows the two major tensions of Gehr’s
cinema through the back-and-forth movement between the search for transcendence and the
search for a place in which to live on this earth. “Walking” up and down a hotel by elevator,
Side/Walk/Shuttle seems to exorcise the painful urban spaces of the 20th century. After that re-
grounding cosmic experience, he made a home movie, filming his son (For Daniel, 1996): he did
not at first intend to show the result to public audiences. After five years of shooting, he
eventually decided to show it, again and always more deeply relating his public work to his own
existence and his feeling of the present moments of his son’s growing-up. This strong link to
infancy will return in Cotton Candy, a sort of fiction film in which he uses some classical editing
devices and in which there is a place-holder for a subject, for instance the empty place in the
cradle moved by a woman sitting on a bench (which may also bring to mind Griffith’s
Intolerance, 1916). Is this the place of the author, recalling his infancy, cotton candy, toys and
merry-go-rounds? Between hiding and inscribing subjectivity, Gehr leaves the spectator free to
inscribe his own experience. In a way quite similar to Jackson Pollock’s practice, art is a process
that involves the subjectivity of the artist in a way which seems to efface him. As Gehr shows us,
since the first half of the 19th century the model of vision has become subjective, and its truth is
«grounded in the density and materiality of the body»22.


Layers for ecstasy
   These different “histories” that Gehr is able to unite in his work (filmic and aesthetic, political
and personal, and more generally the conditions of modern perception) could mark a line of
evolution, from a dominant “objectivist” reflexivity to a prominent inscription of the subject as a
historical being, in the films about Germany and US, which articulate personal memory and the
history of the 20th century. In the materiality of their form, Gehr’s films are able to bring together
the spatial memory of modernity as it has been crystallised in urban spaces, the tradition of art,
the history of humanity and its relations to personal history and feelings. But Gehr invites us to
carry out a morphologic reading that goes beyond an evolutionary model. His own activity in
organising screenings of his own films, an activity which is both an exploration of
correspondences and a creative invention on links between them, may underline some major
themes of his work. Following a recent program, for instance (at the Tate Modern in London),
one may note some of these themes, such as self-referentiality, interest in urban spaces, and the
return to the 19th century.
   In this short introduction to Gehr’s work, I hope I have been able to show at least a part of the
richness of the articulations that link this variegated work together, work that is unified by the
experience of Gehr’s life. This is a “personal cinema” as Brakhage’s is, only the person is very
different. The formal coincidences between the two are not what is most important: their

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approaches to film share similarities because they are rooted so deeply in human condition and
history. All the cinematic questions that Gehr poses, all the “emoted ideas” to which he gives
shape, resume the main issues of modernity and articulate some constitutive poles:
abstraction/reference, 2-/3-dimensional space, continuity/discontinuity, slowness/fastness and so
on. Between these poles, Gehr is searching for his own place; the articulation between all these
apparent dualisms seems to be the paradoxical negative dialectics conceived by Adorno, the place
where a late modernist can shape a constellation that is not a synthesis between opposite elements,
while attempting to constitute a fragment of serenity.




                        Fig. 3 – Glider (Ernie Gehr, 2001).

   In conclusion, a last point must be considered. As I said at the very beginning, all these layers
of history are condensed in the present of the frame projected on the screen, since the present is
the modernist timeframe par excellence, the Jetztzeit (“now-time”) in which it becomes clear that
«origin is the aim»23. In the same way as the buildings in Side/Walk/Shuttle, Gehr’s time is a
present laden with history. But all the magic of the film is in the present moment, and so the film
on the screen creates an interaction of realities, from reality to audience and back to a new vision
of reality. Within Ernie Gehr’s transcendent-materialistic vision, there are some mystical
moments, like the dawn at the end of Serene Velocity (which gives even more necessity to the
entire film), the quivering of the cinematic substance onto the buildings in Eureka, the shape of
an eye that emerges from the cosmic vision near the end of Glider (2001, Fig. 3), the beauty of a
flickering tree which concludes Cinematic Fertilizer 2 (2007). Just as in Eureka or in my dreamed
vision of History, the cinematic frame is teeming with flecks of light, like a drip painting by
Pollock. The ultimate aim of Ernie Gehr’s cinema, it seems to me, is to free the spectator’s
perception in the instant of vision. Halfway between the phenomenological eye and the
geometrical abstraction, between haptic and optic, Gehr brings forms, structures and processes to
their very limits; through precision and discipline, he is able to reach the very site where
something begins to vibrate, to “happen” thanks to and beyond its premises. His modernism lies
in this attempt to both assume and go beyond these limitations, liberating at their furthest reaches
something that is not extreme, but rather an energetic serenity that we may inhabit.




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1    P. Adams Sitney, Ernie Gehr, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1980.
2    See Ernie Gehr, “Program Notes for a Film Showing at the Museum of Modern Art, February 2, 1971
     at 5:30 P.M.”, in Film Culture, no. 53-55, Spring 1972, p. 36.
3    Richard Foreman called Still «the first truly Proustian film». See Richard Foreman, “On Ernie Gehr’s
     Film ‘Still’”, in Film Culture, no. 63-64, 1977, p. 28.
4    For a discussion of Gehr’s relationship to (mostly architectural) modernism, see Gilberto Perez, Gehr’s
     Still, in Ted Perry (ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, Indiana University, Bloomington 2006.
5    See Jacques Aumont, A quoi pensent les films?, Séguier, Paris 1997.
6    Ibidem, p. 27.
7    According to Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting (1960), in Id., Art and Culture, Dutton, Boston 1961.
8    I will just mention the internal frames in Serene Velocity, the table in Table, and most of all the walls
     and other framing elements within the urban spaces, which many Gehr’s films investigate and reflect
     (Germany – Signal on the air, Passage, Before the Olympics and so on).
9    “Ernie Gehr interviewed by Jonas Mekas, March 24, 1971”, in Film Culture, no. 53-55, Spring 1972,
     pp. 25-36 (p. 29). According to Stephen Bann, that is exactly the main question at stake in modern art.
     See Stephen Bann, Ways around Modernism, Routledge, New York 2007.
10   In describing this film, we could reuse Michael Snow’s definition of his own La Région centrale as «the
     only moving picture». History and Mirage, which like Field are shot without a lens, reach complete
     abstraction starting from something “real” before the camera, while for instance a film like Untitled
     takes the reverse path, from out-of-focus abstract forms to concrete ones.
11   I define it “autoreflexive” instead of “reflexive” because it questions the apparatus itself, not only the
     process of enunciation.
12   See notably the works of Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault; cfr. also Bart Testa, Back and Forth:
     Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 1992.
13   Jeffrey Skoller has linked Eureka to Benjamin conceptions of allegory and of history as wreckage, and
     to the Deleuzian time-image. See Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards, University of Minnesota,
     Minneapolis 2005.
14   Theodor Wiesegrund Adorno, Ästetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 45.
15   In this sense, Gehr says he works «with the articulation of the chemical mental/optical and mechanical
     factors that make the film image, the movement in time and space possible».
16   Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Harvard
     University, Cambridge 2002.
17   Annette Michelson was probably the first who remarked a possible link to phenomenological tradition
     (and it’s here the major link and the major difference between Gehr and Brakhage).
18   “Ernie Gehr interviewed by Jonas Mekas, March 24, 1971”, cit., p. 30.
19   Ibidem.
20   Gehr was fascinated by Brakhage, and his first attempts were some 8mm films which seem to have been
     strongly influenced by Brakhage.
21   Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, New York University, New York 1976, p. 16.
22   See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, MIT,
     Cambridge 1999.
23   See Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940), in Id., Selected Writings: 1938-1940,
     Harvard University, Cambridge, 2003.




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