Cotton Candy (Ernie Gehr, 2001).
Ernie Gehr dislikes labels. Whether it's being called a “structuralist,” a “filmmaker,” or even an “artist,” he would simply prefer to avoid all of that. “It’s too precious,” he tells me with characteristic humility on the eve of his historic six-part retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in March. “At the end of the day, I'm just a human being. These labels may be useful to some but meaningless to others. While I am concerned about how things might be perceived, it's ultimately subjective. Like vision.”
It’s a fitting statement, considering that few others have explored the subjectivity of vision as thoroughly as Gehr has over his five-plus decades of output, all while employing the most minimal of means. Once described as a “master of reduction” by Peter Tscherkassky, Gehr distills a visual experience into its purest form. His carefully considered 16mm films aren’t loud or showy; often lacking a soundtrack, many are meant to be projected at silent speed—sixteen to eighteen frames per second—and can achieve a zen-like level of clarity and specificity. Even if Gehr had entirely stopped releasing new work at the end of the 1990s, as he himself was convinced would be the case, his legacy would still be cemented with the likes of Serene Velocity (1970) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991), as well as other titles that range from ghostly experiments in long-take superimposition (Still, 1971) to exercises in duration utilizing rephotographed found footage (Eureka, 1974).
But since the turn of the millennium, Gehr hasn’t been slowing down; if anything, ever since he made the switch to digital for economic reasons, he’s been more active than ever before. “Just think of it like this: from 1967 to the end of the century, I made, what, 21 or 22 16mm works,” he told me. “Since 2000, I’ve created approximately 120 digital ones.” That is a stunning revelation considering how few of these recent works Gehr has ever shown publicly. None of Gehr’s digital work has ever been in distribution, though heplans this year to deposit several recent titles into The Film-Makers' Cooperative’s vast collection. We talked about this—as well as Stan Brakhage’s influence, his love of early cinema, and much more—at his home in Carroll Gardens.
NOTEBOOK: As your retrospective at MoMA approaches, featuring a significant number of world premieres as well as 35mm preservations, can you share your feelings about seeing these works in this new context?
ERNIE GEHR: In some ways, I’m anxious, and in some ways, I’m looking forward to it because it will be my first screening of most of this work on a big screen. And I do make work to be seen on a screen, not on a TV monitor or a laptop. I work with scale, and even if I’m working with digital, I’m still very much in that world. But I have to make all my choices based on this 15-inch screen [points to iMac]. So, I do what I can. But there is anxiety. When I’m working, I look at one piece at a time; I’m not thinking about how this will go with another one or anything like that. The juxtaposition of works, of which there are 26 pieces altogether, will be interesting to see: how one plays with and against another. So, I can’t tell until I see it. I may just run out. [Laughs.] Okay, I doubt I’ll do that.
Construction Sight (Ernie Gehr, 2021).
NOTEBOOK: Considering the large volume of digital work you’ve produced in the last few years, can you speak to what keeps you so actively engaged in your creative process these days?
GEHR: I really do not have adequate words to describe things. I’m not very good with language. If I deal with a visual image, it’s a whole other thing for me. But let's say that I think my way of working is more of a hobby. It’s something that keeps me alive. There are different ways the world can tear you apart—just pick up a newspaper. Working for me is like a child sitting down and playing with some toys. I immerse myself in my own existence and ways of seeing things, and for a short time, it’s like going to therapy, in which a therapist helps you stay alive. It won’t change your life, but it keeps you a little more balanced; it’s like nourishment, like food when you’re hungry. When you eat, you don’t think about that anymore.
I never thought of making a living from my work. My interests do not fall into an area where people would give me money to make a film, and I totally understand that. Not that I dislike narrative films or documentaries, but that’s not what I want to do. Again, I work with a camera and a computer the way a child would pick up their toys and start to play. The process is often very satisfactory. In recent times, especially in the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve been freed from the pressure of having to show work. When I finish something, I forget about it for a while. Sometimes when I work on a piece, I see it 50 times back and forth until I know it by heart. So, I need distance in order to respond to it anew.
NOTEBOOK: What type of mode do you find yourself needing to enter into to reach this state of creative immersion and exploration?
GEHR: It depends on where I am at that point in time. I focus on the moment, on the things that are in front of me: a camera, a situation developing in front of my eyes, something that triggers me to act. I work intuitively most of the time.
Pedestrian Activities (Ernie Gehr, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: So would you then say that spontaneity is a key factor in your work?
GEHR: Yes, it is. At every level. I’m interested in immediate sensory responses to phenomena that are taking place, whether onscreen or in my everyday life. I look at both of you right now [Attard and his friend Max—Ed.] and one of the things that stands out is that you wear glasses, and he doesn't; you have a dark jacket, and he doesn’t. You know how these things play; I respond sensually to what these things do to my eyes. And it’s not about where it’s ever leading to; that’s not the point. It’s an experience at that moment. I will follow a pattern that I have pre-established if I feel like there are developments and it’s overriding the structure of a piece that I may have written down, but if it’s just a demonstration of an idea then I’m not interested.
NOTEBOOK: This has me curious: what was your first major encounter with art in a way that you would call foundational?
GEHR: I remember when I was about eight I walked into a store and picked up something called a flip-book. I played with it, and it was wonderful discovering the process of projecting a moving image, where you take a series of stills that look close to one another, and I was able to see at that stage a still and the process of motion at the same time. There was also the blur of one page replacing another while flipping, and the phenomenology was something that stayed with me, and I would only pick up on it in my twenties when working with film. Suddenly, it made sense: it was something I wanted to see in a different way.
NOTEBOOK: Can you take us back to your earliest memories of encountering the moving image outside of the flip-book? How did those experiences shape your interest in working with film?
GEHR: I didn’t grow up with a TV, so the idea of the moving image on a screen was not something I was familiar with until my mother took me to a theater palace when I must have been about either three or five. I remember we walked in and the movie was already in progress. The auditorium was dark, the ceiling was tall, and there were these huge rows of chairs where everyone was sitting and staring at the same thing: this massive black-and-white image. I had never seen anything in black and white! I saw things in color! It was a period movie, with all these people looking so funny with their capes, and I couldn’t understand how this place could be so dark when it was so bright outside when we entered. The contrast was so stark. The process of making sense of these things—the space, the architecture, and the illusion of the screen—haunted me. The first time I thought of actually working with the moving image was with the flip-book, about five years later. I had paper, I had a pencil, and I would draw images and mix them together. I never thought I would be a filmmaker, but I loved the process.
Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, 1958).
NOTEBOOK: How did you eventually find your way into the world of experimental film?
GEHR: I didn’t have any money and I never had the type of personality you’d need for Hollywood to make a movie. I was living in New York and I was working in an accounting office on Columbus Circle. I was good with numbers, but I was miserable. One evening, in 1966, I was drifting through the streets of Times Square. I didn’t have any plans, and it suddenly began to rain; I took refuge in a doorway for a building I would later learn was the Wurlitzer Building on 42nd Street, and I was standing there when I noticed a sheet of paper that said “Brakhage: Anticipation of the Night. Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Tickets $1,” and how to get to the theater, which happened to be in the lobby of the very building I was in. I had never heard of Brakhage or anything else on the poster. But it was clear that it was a movie, and while it wasn’t something I was interested in, it was raining so heavily, and when I checked my watch, it was close enough to start time that I decided to go.
The titles came on, and what struck me immediately was that there was no music. Usually films started so loud and this didn’t; it allowed me to focus more clearly on what I was seeing. Then came these images that were unusual in every way. I wouldn’t say I struggled with it, but the process of trying to make sense of what was taking place made me hauntingly interested. I didn’t totally understand the film either; it was baffling later when I found that the main character hangs himself off a tree. What? That was so disappointing to me. But there was a sense that I started to pick up on texture, color, rhythm, and that interested me because it reminded me of music, and I had never thought of it in relation to film.
So I left that screening and returned a few times after to view other work. By then I came across an ad in the Village Voice, where Jonas [Mekas] was writing at the time, for a workshop that made 8mm and 16mm equipment [available] free of charge on the Lower East Side. So, in time, I thought I could make films like this myself; I wasn’t thinking of this in terms of a career or anything, just something to do in my free time.
My first recorded images were shot in early or mid-November, and I ended up filming a roll of standard 8mm film. I was interested in, and this speaks to Brakhage’s influence at that point, capturing the wind: hitting the wall, turning corners, working with warm and cool colors. I would also scratch, from frame to frame, with a pair of scissors and a nail, shapes directly on the celluloid to convey a gust, much like Brakhage. He was not only an inspiration but an influence. But that eventually subsided.
Reflections on Black (Stan Brakhage, 1955).
NOTEBOOK: When would you say you shed Brakhage’s early influence?
GEHR: I worked with standard 8mm for only a couple of months. I was a bit troubled by the films I was making, and it wasn’t due to Brakhage’s influence. There was something about them that was a problem, but I couldn’t figure it out. Usually I would just discard them after finishing them. Around this time, I had also borrowed a light meter from Millennium for a week straight. I walked around New York City reading light in my free time. And that’s when I learned that I needed to trust my eyes because the reading and the needle were totally meaningless; I didn’t know what it meant. From there on, I would look through the viewer and open and close the diaphragm of the lens to make it darker or lighter based on what it looked like to me.
So, eventually, I wanted to make a sound film where I would juxtapose different images with different sounds that had nothing to do with one another, and since standard 8mm was a silent medium, I needed something else. I ended up borrowing a 16mm camera from someone who also had a loft, who I asked if I could film at his space with a friend, Gary Smith, who was going to Millennium from Kansas City. So we get to the loft, and my friend asks me if I know how to thread this camera and I say, “No, I’ve never done this in my life.” So he decides to thread it. We then put it on a tripod, another thing I had never used up till that time. Before, I was like Brakhage: moving through space and time. But now, I can only swing left or right. So what do I do now? I became confused. I didn’t want to record any flower pots or furniture; I wanted to move through space. I felt defeated; I stopped working and moved back to Milwaukee for the summer with my parents. I didn’t want to be an accountant, but I was still unhappy with the 8mm work and 16mm seemed too impossible. I didn’t feel like a filmmaker.
I then began to think why I was interested in film in the first place, as nothing I was doing seemed satisfactory. In time, I realized I was looking for a different experience than what the representational image offers us all the time. And as a result, I began to think about going back to New York, and the person I befriended, Gary, told me I could stay with him and his wife for the time being. When I moved in with them, Gary gave me some rolls of film as a welcome home gift, and with those, I, rather intuitively, filmed the front of their loft as the sun was rising over the East River, which is how Morning [1967] was made. My first two 16mm films, Morning and Wait [1967] have a lot to do with light: it’s basic to film, basic to what it does to film itself, to the emulsion; I wanted that to come alive, to become a sensual experience instead of reading whatever ”correct” light is
Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970).
NOTEBOOK: After these early films, you then made three—History, Field, and Serene Velocity [all 1970]—over the summer at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Remind me again, was it Ken Jacobs or Larry Gottheim who first approached you about a teaching position?
GEHR: It was Larry, who was actually the first person to ever send me a fan letter. He had been at the St. Lawrence Film Festival upstate and saw my films, and wrote to me saying how much he liked the work. He eventually invited me to show work, which was my first gig ever at that point. I only had a few films to present, and yet, after the screening, Larry and some of the students, who were very receptive, asked if I was interested in teaching, to which I told them immediately I had never taught a college course in my life. So I went back home, went into a Barnes & Noble, and bought a copy of Ed Pincus’s [Guide to] Filmmaking, thinking it was going to teach me what I needed to know in order to instruct a class. And as I’m reading it, I’m thinking to myself, I don't know this stuff. What am I going to do, remember how to load a camera? So, I call Larry up and tell him that I don’t think I’m the one he wants there, and that he should get Ed Pincus instead. To which Larry goes, “We don’t want Ed Pincus, we want you!”
So I went up in the summer of 1970, and was incredibly anxious before my first class. And right before, I decided: I’m just going to talk. And I did. I can’t remember anything else that I said, but I told all the students to borrow a camera and that we would take things from there after they recorded some footage. And they loved this enough [that] I was invited back twice for two courses.
Table (Ernie Gehr, 1976).
NOTEBOOK: I want to talk with you about one of your films from the ’70s that I’m particularly fond of, one that’s going to be playing on a 35mm restoration print: Table [1976]. Fred Camper evoked both Cézanne and 3D comic books in his write-up of it.
GEHR: That one was made as a sketch for something that would have been far more explosive.
NOTEBOOK: Really now? The film is already plenty explosive as is.
GEHR: There were possibilities that I wanted to pursue further. I did a test in January 1971 in which there was a large round table with about half a dozen friends sitting around it, and I was going to film with only one camera, and it was going to move around the table with different combinations. And the test was a total failure, in that it took two or three hours and I only got six feet of film. So I knew I needed a railing, which would have been expensive to pay someone to design. For years, I was in pain that I couldn’t do it, as we [Gehr and his wife, Myrel Glick] kept moving around at the time. Then, one morning in 1974, I had a Bolex, I had a tripod, I had a piece of wood where I could block out the two positions I would film. Myrel had gone to work for the day, and it was sunny out. And I thought, I'm going to try this, at least one stage. I had wanted a moving camera but abandoned that. In the mid-’70s, there were all these people making structuralist films, so it made me move away from that. Plus, my interests were drifting away from that headspace at the time. So I settled on two filters, instead of the several I would have used, along with shifts to no filters. It really would have been an incredible kaleidoscope, but it never came to fruition.
NOTEBOOK: There’s another film of yours from the ’70s that isn’t talked about much that I’m also fond of called Untitled [1977], which P. Adams Sitney describes as a “delicious slow pulling of focus over four minutes in which snowflakes, streaming like intercepted chalk marks, fall in front of what seems to be a field, then a pond, and finally is recognized as a brick wall."
GEHR: At the time, I was trying to do this piece called Animated Shorts. And I recorded maybe four or five pieces, and that piece was one of them. I gave up on it at some point, deciding it was hopeless, but that was going to be one of the sections of Animated Shorts, which might have ended up being an hour the way I was thinking about it.
Untitled was recorded where we used to live, which was a small railroad apartment. There was the rear window, the kitchen with a table, the table in Table actually, and the bedroom, where this film was recorded. I shot out the window when it was snowing, where the camera was running continuously, and I shifted the lens from one extreme, so-called close-up, to its wide-angle deep focus position, which is towards the end of the film. That’s it. And I didn’t know if I would like it, but I did. Though, it’s untitled because it was going to be part of Animated Shorts and when it wasn’t, well…
Signal—Germany on the Air (Ernie Gehr, 1982–85).
NOTEBOOK: Your filmic output begins to slow down a little bit once we hit the ’80s. With some hindsight, is there anything you can point to that may have contributed to this?
GEHR: It all had to do with economics. It’s funny. I would have film screenings in the ’70s, and I would have this small audience most of the time of some people I knew. Then this strange thing started to happen that I had nothing to do with: I would have a screening, and then, suddenly, there would be more people. Really, more people? Then, at the next screening I had somewhere, there would be even more people. So, somehow, more people, or a new generation, became interested in the work. So I was invited to more places.
I was also teaching more at the time. I went to Chicago twice, where I was offered a tenure-track position, but I decided not to. I taught one semester in Frankfurt, when Peter Kubelka was having a sabbatical and he asked me if I would be interested in replacing him. I had a fellowship to spend time in Berlin, which is where I made Signal—Germany on the Air [1982–85], and it was renewed in short forms one or two times. So it was an opportunity for me to travel around Western Europe, and I took advantage of it. I was so-called “popular,” so I didn’t have time to work sometimes.
NOTEBOOK: But then in the ’90s, you took on an even longer teaching position at San Francisco Art Institute. Can you speak on that experience?
GEHR: First of all, there was the concern about security. I was in my mid-to-late 40s and had no future. [Laughs.] Not as a filmmaker, and not as anything else. And there was a point where I knew it would be harder to get teaching jobs. Before that, I had a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence, and I did get another year’s offer. At the same time, I got a regular position, not a tenure track, but unless you goofed or got bad evaluations from students, you were more or less guaranteed to be back year after year at San Francisco. That attracted me. So we moved to California.
I often had to improvise and make up courses left and right because the school frequently wanted new courses. At some point, they made me chair of the department, which I still can’t believe happened, as I’m truly the last person I’d ever select for that role. But I developed a liking for teaching. I felt like I could reach some individuals, and that usually happened every semester with two or three individuals, and that was meaningful to me. I will say, I helped as much as I could, and I still correspond with several of my former students. I’m grateful that I could make a decent living as a teacher and not an accountant again.
Side/Walk/Shuttle (Ernie Gehr, 1992).
NOTEBOOK: This is also around the time you make Side/Walk/Shuttle [1992], which you had to make in secret, correct? The hotel you filmed at wouldn’t give you permission to film in their elevator?
GEHR: I had a friend, who was a former student, and he had class, so he knew how to talk to people. And he said he would talk to the PR department at the Fairmont, and he tried to get permission. He really did try. But they asked which TV station would this be broadcast on and they wanted money. So the only way I could film with a Bolex and a motor, which was heavy and uncomfortable, was to hide the equipment under this raincoat and as soon as the elevator doors would close, I would have to take it out immediately and put it in position. I was kicked out of the elevator twice because when you went upstairs to the top floor, there was someone at a desk waiting for people. So I would have to stop and hide the camera, and when the door closed again, I would take it back out and move it in position again.
After the second time they caught me and told me not to come back. I didn’t work for about six months. And I could also only film during lunchtime, or else the shadows of the tall buildings would cover everything. After all the images that were recorded, there was one building that I wasted about ten rolls of film trying to film that looks like a pyramid. I wanted to turn it around, but I didn’t have the capacity to control the image that way. Unlike Eadweard Muybridge, who from across the street of a hotel recorded this 360-degree panorama, I only had a 180-degree view. So while it’s not linear the way the piece comes in, it’s basically a 360-degree view of the Bay Area. Each take is another panorama; it’s not just “we go this way and that.”
NOTEBOOK: How did you transition from working with 16mm film to digital? I recall you mentioning that it was prompted by a commission you received.
GEHR: I’m forever grateful to Mary Lea Bandy, who was the head of the film department at MoMA, who took me out to dinner one night and asked me how I would like a commission from MoMA to make a work for a large exhibition on the last twenty years of the twentieth century. But she stressed it had to be on that and also on the new century. I proposed a 16mm film and the project was accepted, but the budget was way above what she had in mind. She asked me to cut it in half, and I’m not really good at those things. So I submitted another project, called Cotton Candy [2001], which had to do with the roots of early cinema and the movie's rapid rise to these penny arcades to palaces, and then the quick displacement of that by new electronic developments like computers. And I used all the images from Musée Mécanique, which had a great collection of player pianos and fairground characters, who don’t realize they’re frozen in time.
Cotton Candy (Ernie Gehr, 2001).
NOTEBOOK: Could you elaborate on your fascination with early-cinema actualities and shed light on the origins of your collection of pre-cinema devices, many of which are prominently featured in the five-channel installation Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows [2004]?
GEHR: When I began to work, I was interested in finding out what the roots and traditions were of cinema in general. So what I ended up doing was going to be a Sunday matinee program at MoMA—it was some Edison and Lumière—and finding the work interesting in that the early people that worked with film… were not filmmakers! They were trying to figure out what to do with this medium. And so there was a kind of exploration of possibilities, and I appreciated that. So I began to look into early film, which was difficult but not impossible at the time, as there were some distributors selling prints.
Then one day I walked into a camera store downtown, looking at some used cameras, and an older man with white curly hair walked up to me. I tried to ignore him, and he told me, “You shouldn’t buy an 8mm camera in a shop. You need to get one for much cheaper at a camera fair.” He then gave me a discount card for the New-York Historical Society Convention that happened every few months. So I went to one, and I was shocked at all the stuff that was there, at least 200 collectors and dealers selling and trading paper ephemera and equipment from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. And whenever I moved around the country for teaching, there would be conventions like this one. So this is where I discovered all these pre-cinema devices. Even though I say I don’t care about names or titles, the word pre-cinema is sort of a put-down, because it means film is on one level and these are on a lower level.
NOTEBOOK: It implies some of these things are mere toys.
GEHR: It does, but it’s wonderful that it’s a toy. It lets you play with it. When things are expensive, you have to be careful. But you can easily replace a toy. Its durability allows you to tinker and to discover new possibilities.
NOTEBOOK: After this retrospective ends, people will be able to rent some of your digital work for the first time ever from the Film-Makers’ Coop. Could you speak to what motivated this decision?
GEHR: I am getting prints to put back into the Coop, and I have to go through and decide which digital work will go in. Some of the work that has been more visible of mine, including digital work, are not part of these programs [at MoMA]. I want to see these works projected. But yes, the Coop will have both: ultimately twenty pieces that show a range of my work. For a long time, I wanted to make my digital work available on disc, but now buying discs is a thing of the past! So now you need a work that will sell thousands of copies, and if not, there’s no interest. So there was this great hope this might happen after Criterion released that Brakhage set, but for some reason it never happened. So I haven’t approached anyone, but I want the work available for people at home. It’s partially my fault, but I’m still open to that. Until then, it’s Coop.
And I’m not trying to hide the work! With the films, it was easy. I worked at the Coop, so I left my prints there. But with digital, I didn’t do that. To start with, there was no real standard of what an image should look like. I distinctly remember going to Berlin in 2002, showing work in five different locations, and we had to make adjustments in each one in terms of color or brightness and they all looked different. We would have to sometimes take half an hour setting these screenings up, and this was a problem. I didn’t want to release it like this; you may have heard that the only way I’ll show work is if I’m there, and it’s not that I need to be invited, but I just need to see how the work is going to be presented. But by this point, it’s all fairly standardized, and most projectionists don’t even like to touch their settings. I’m just trying to keep doing my hobby, you know. Making these little movies, or these flip-books, as I call them.