Films by Ernie Gehr
Given that position, it’s genuinely stupefying that only a tiny number of film professors have specialized in the vital, vibrant American avant-garde movement, which dates back six decades. Not only have these films opposed the values of mainstream culture almost by definition, one of the defining characteristics of the best works is that they make conscious references to the filmmaking and viewing processes. When Maya Deren shows herself peering out of a window in her landmark 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, she acknowledges that filmmaking mediates between viewer and external reality: the glass signals not only her consciousness, interposed between her eyes and the world, but the filmmaking process, with its lenses and rectangular frame, that expresses that consciousness. One cannot become mindlessly absorbed in the fictive world of this film because Deren acknowledges the process of its making–and, by implication, of its viewing.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
One reason the avant-garde may be underacknowledged is that key filmmakers are rarely given screenings. In the last decade there have been perhaps four one-person Ernie Gehr shows in Chicago–his best-known work, Serene Velocity (1970), is a rapidly edited study of a corridor. But I’ve been unable to verify that any of the three films on the March 8 program at the School of the Art Institute–the 55-minute Still and two shorter films, Untitled (1977), and Table (1976)–have ever been shown in Chicago. Interestingly, this screening was not scheduled by a curator, film programmer, or professor wishing to rectify an obvious oversight but came about because some filmmaking students wanted to see the films.
For New Yorkers of ordinary means Gehr’s brick wall represents the classic “picture window” view–indeed, it’s luxurious compared to views of narrow airshafts. And it seems that for Gehr the barrier that many city dwellers face daily is a metaphor for the limitations of the cinematic image. The falling snow recalls the grain of film, while the individual streaks heighten our awareness of the individual still frames, as does the slow projection speed; by contrast, conventional films aim for the illusion of movement and of the actors’ continuous presence. The rectilinear brick wall refers to the rectangular film frame, while the change in focus suggests a journey that merely replaces one visual barrier–the snow, or the film grain–with another, the brick wall.
Still remains one of Gehr’s least screened and least appreciated films. It’s slow for a Gehr work, in that its single view of a street–the camera never moves–is presented in real time. And the scene seems somewhat randomly selected: one looks across the street at a few buildings and storefronts, one with a small awning that says “Furniture” and another with a larger “Soda-Lunch” sign. The camera is at a very slight angle to the street, preventing one from equating the view with the film frame–as is encouraged by the head-on camera angle in Untitled (1977)–and indeed suggesting that the composition is nothing special. The film has eight sections determined by the length of 100- and 400-foot camera rolls: the first four are about 3 minutes each and silent, and the last four about 11 minutes each and include street sounds. These begin and end, demarcated by black leader, without regard to the movements of cars and pedestrians–though Gehr did stage a few small incidents.
