Program 28: Ernie Gehr – Living Next Door to Magic

Photographic Phantoms (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 26m)
Winter Morning (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 18m)
The Quiet Car (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 18m)
Auto-Collider XVIII (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 13m)
Brooklyn Series (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 8m)

Photographic Phantoms (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 26m)
A knock on the door. A revisitation. All things must pass. But passengers cross the tracks many times acquiring the color of time. Transparencies soldify and converse imposing their material evidence on each other creating a new surface, a new space to travel, and an unforseen Face. Touching phantoms, Faces that look back at us from a place we cannot reach. Electrical charges from sibling fingers. A diver in middair, an infant in amber. An album bound in flesh and light. – Mark McElhatten

Winter Morning (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 18m)
Inconvenient miracles escape prediction but require attention. Roadblocks are building blocks for daily adventures in seeing. Snowscreens. -M.M.

The Quiet Car (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 18m)
Inside/out at whisper speed, symmetries in locomotion churn soft and feathery floating like a dream. A nocture before nightfall.  -M.M.

Auto-Collider XVIII (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 13m)
A slice of life. An advanced exploration of motor- coordination. Taking to the streets for a new formulation of optical mechanics in a darker key and a slanting grade. -M.M.

Brooklyn Series (Ernie Gehr, USA, 2013, 8m)
A translation of volumes in space into a vibratory painted desert and living lines. A new register in an optical Richter scale. -M.M. 

This is it, folks – a program of Primal Cinema!  Moving image tone poems culled out of the fabric of everyday life, and the plastic possibilities of consumer grade digital technology.  This program includes reflections on photography, the scattering and transient character of human lives, two portraits of my Brooklyn neighborhood, the pleasures of driving a car cinematically, and our fascination with travel.   In each of the works, pertinent topical matters are intricately woven into a complex cinematic fabric where aspects of perception, pictorial space, and the character of film or digital media have the upper hand, and are brought to the foreground, meaningfully explored, and celebrated.   As some ancient sideshow barkers might have hollered in the early days of cinema – “Not to be missed!  Get your tickets today!”.