Ernie Gehr Movies

Ernie Gehr’s large-scale, multiscreen video installation CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS is simultaneously a reflection on early animation and genre...

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

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

Animation created from early paper films.

The missing chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railroad Journey. A museum piece. Recorded in Berlin, Feb. 2015.

2023. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Silent. Digital. 22 min.

"What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Dust. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. A scattering. The present. The passage of time. Sleep."...

"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...

"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...

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...

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

Ernie working his magic.

Cool, delirious, and mysterious. Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extraterrestrial optical...

"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...

2022. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 15 min.

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

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...

By Rail, To Boston (2024) 17 min. Color. Sound.

A 2013 English language avant-garde film directed by Ernie Gehr. The film screened at The New York Film Festival in 2013.

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...