Ernie Gehr Movies

A meditation on silence, vanishings, and phantoms of light.

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

An “action” movie in which the processes of recording and projecting moving images are the protagonists and the field of action is the...

Experimental film made without a lens.

“Frolicking on the beach in early June, before the start of the summer season.” - Ernie Gehr

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

“The eyes may be attracted to look left and right – and please let them – but the center is also intriguing and not separable from...

2020. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 8 min.

"It was recorded over Summer of 2020, we were isolating ourselves. We live in the ground floor in an apartment building, we have the full backyard...

“A cinematic audio-visual fugue plays out in-time a choreography of interior and exterior spaces, activities, sounds and perhaps...

A translation of volumes in space into a vibratory painted desert and living lines. A new register in an optical Richter scale.

A Commuter’s Life (What a Life!) gives sculptural dimension and kaleidoscopic novelty to footage shot by Gehr during his commutes from his...

“This is a work that evolved out of play and a sudden impulse. I had been recording footage for a work in Midtown Manhattan. On one particular...

Inside/out at whisper speed, symmetries in locomotion churn soft and feathery floating like a dream. A nocture before nightfall. -M.M.

“It’s a mysterious field, this screen rectangle populated by haunting phantasmagoric phenomena, be it representational or just patterns...

This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working,...

2020. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 24 min.

Avant-garde work by Ernie Gehr.

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...

"The concluding work is Circling Essex Crossing. In this piece, what arises out of a series of images documenting the construction of Essex Crossing...