Ernie Gehr’s Marvelous Cinema
Program One
Screening on Film
$10 Special Event Tickets
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Wait
Directed by Ernie Gehr.
US, 1968, 16mm, color, silent, 7 min.
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Reverberation
Directed by Ernie Gehr.
US, 1969, digital video, black & white, 25 min.
In his first sound film Gehr masterfully abstracts sound and image track into tactile and textural fields. Against a complex arrangement of deeply sonorous urban and machine sounds, the image – 8mm film re-photographed several times – is alive with swirling, pulsing film grain. Filmed at and around the World Trade Center's construction site, Gehr's mysterious film follows a nameless young couple (Canadian actress Margaret Lamarre and experimental filmmaker Andrew Noren) as they drift either in or out of love.
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The Astronomer's Dream
Directed by Ernie Gehr.
US, 2004, digital video, black & white, 15 min.
A lovely homage to the supreme magician of the cinema and Gehr’s hero, George Méliès.
Particles of dust – insolent creatures – filling the air with dreams and enchanted sounds of night, tantalizing the real with their dance of veils. Be quick! Be quick! They are awakening… Curtains!
Gehr's justifiably most famous work is a sublime meditation on camera movement and the inherently disorienting properties of institutional space. The Museum of Modern Art's gloriously restored and newly struck 35mm blow up of Gehr's iconic film intensifies the experience of this truly mesmerizing film.