Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

March 28, 2016. The Harvard Film Archive screened new works by Ernie Gehr, including New York Lantern, Photographic Phantoms, A Commuter’s Life (What a Life!) with introduction and post-screening Q&A by Haden Guest HFA Director and filmmaker Ernie Gehr.

Haden Guest  0:23  

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I'm really thrilled to be here tonight to welcome back Ernie Gehr who is a truly multifaceted and innovative artist whose films, videos and installations have sustained a rigorous and wonderfully expansive interrogation of the moving image as an artistic and historic medium. Gehr has been dazzling audiences since the late 1960s when he first began to work in 16 millimeter, creating a series of deeply influential films that include such iconic classics as Serene Velocity, Still, Side/Walk/Shuttle to name only three of his many masterworks.

In 2001, Gehr shifted dramatically from film to video. And with that leap began a rich and marvelously prolific new stage in his career that found him constantly testing the limits of his new medium. I think in particular of works such as Glider which bends and turns the world viewed from within a camera obscura, or his still ongoing Auto-Collider series which explores the automobile as a vehicle for heightened and hypnotic expansion of the moving image.

Gehr has also been very active as an installation artist. He has a new piece called Carnival of Shadows, which is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. They've even extended that show for another three months, so popular has it been. The title Carnival of Shadows signals Gehr's long and abiding fascination with the deeper history of the moving image, the histories of the various modes of cinema that flourished before cinema, as we know it today was even born. This thread found first expression in Eureka from 1974 which Garin masterfully reanimated in 1906 travelogue film, voyaging down San Francisco's Market Street just before the great earthquake of the same year. In recent years, Gehr has turned increasingly to earlier forms of cinema before cinema, embracing the magic lantern, philosophical toys, and 19th century photography, in particular, as subjects and inspirations.

Tonight's program brings together three beautiful and quite mesmerizing recent works which showcase Gehr's unique skills as a historian and thinker of the moving image. Three films that rigorously yet playfully explore the untapped, often unruly powers of the image. In the first two films, New York Lantern—whose title of course evokes the magic lantern—and Photographic Phantoms, Gehr animates still photographs to create moving images in the most richly cinematic and emotional senses, conjuring lost worlds, intimate memories, voyages to distant lands, the last film A Commuters Life (What a Life!) takes us on another voyage, this time by train, but a train marvelously kaleidoscopic, like none other we have ridden on before.

Before welcoming to the podium the conductor of tonight's ride, I want to acknowledge the presence tonight of a gentleman who's had a deep and lasting influence on experimental cinema and on me personally, this is P. Adams Sitney. I know he's gonna groan and complain to me about this afterwards. but I want to just reflect on the fact that my first encounter with Ernie Garr was sitting in the audience, the conversation between P. Adams and Ernie Gehr in Los Angeles many years ago and I'm moved by that and… Can we have a quick round of applause to P. Adams Sitney?

[APPLAUSE AND HADEN’S LAUGHTER]

And now, Ernie Gehr!

[APPLAUSE]

Ernie Gehr  4:36  

Thanks so much. Haden, for your flattering introduction. I much appreciate it. And to all of you, welcome. It's great to see you. And it's great to be back at Harvard to show some work here. I don't have anything to say before we look at the work, but I'll be open to any questions or comments you might have, and I'll respond the best way I can on this occasion after the screening. So thank you for coming again and hope you find the work enjoyable and worthwhile your time. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

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John Quackenbush 5:26

And now Haden Guest.

Haden Guest  5:26  

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Ernie Gehr!

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you, thank you so much, Ernie, for this wonderful, wonderful program. I wanted to begin by talking about the train. The train, which you remind us, has such a privileged, important relationship to cinema as both a sort of primal subject and sight of the cinematic imagination and plays a really important role, of course, in the last and second film, and it’s also present as well in the first. And, you know, the way in which the train is both driving—let's take A Commuter's Life—literally forward and then at the same time we start to see different figures of tracks in the electric wires, the way in which our voyage sometimes seems to be into the image, we're plunged into this tunnel of trees at time, we're moving along a series of tracks… I was wondering if you could reflect a bit upon the role of the train in these recent films of yours?

Ernie Gehr  6:52  

That's a tough one to respond to. Well, let's see, let's say the first two pieces, they take place, from my perspective, in the present, looking at these photographic images from another time and responding to them—myself—responding to them, in some ways, and also very well aware of the contradiction, if you wish, between a still image and a moving image. But they're married, you know, they really are one and the same, in order for a film—and I’m talking now about film, f-i-l-m, rather than digital or some other format—is possible through a series of—what it is it?—at sound speed, twenty-four frames per second. There are twenty-four individual stills, and they are transformed into this moving image in our consciousness, somewhere inside of our brains. It’s really a bizarre experience in a way. And I'm haunted by those qualities, and it's a train ride, you might say, to do that.

The last piece, for me, is more a meditation about the present, about what does it mean, commuting? I mean, it’s like a sarcastic title, but also it has a double edge. It's also What a Life!, you know? It's complicated. There are all these horrors that come up. If you look at those images, even the most benign image—like trees or whatever, or rooftops—they take on these frightening characterizations in the wires. In some ways—although the last piece is a digital work—their very much still rooted in the industrial revolution, just as the landscape that we're passing. You know, we may say we're in the 21st century, but we're really still making use of a technological phenomena in many ways, like the train itself, which used to be and still is a symbol of the Industrial Revolution, and I'm using it sometimes and at some level. I'm not saying “Oh, it's all about this,” but it's in there for me. So I'm very interested in train rides.

It's also like if you want to think about it, I'm just throwing these things out. I hope they make sense somehow. Let's say the second piece, for example, Photographic Phantoms. They are mainly so-called amateur photographs. They were originally small images. They’re stereo glass slides. They precede the 35 millimeter transparencies, and they're about the same size. And there was some commercial work available, but most of it was actually employed by people to record family events, picnics, weddings, celebrations, partings, leaving, you know, and it gives you an idea. And I picked these up over many, many years. It's not that I picked them up in order to make this work Photographic Phantoms. I was attracted to these images since the early 70s. One of the things I used to do when I began to work with film, very much interested. And now it looks like I'm going away from your question, but hopefully not.

Once life is also like a train ride, in a way, but okay…. I began to work in film fifty years ago—50, 51 years—1966 with 16 millimeter film. And I was very much interested in the roots and traditions from where film came from, how it began. And in the 60s, this is a period when the Library of Congress, had preserved many of the films from the turn of the century onto 16 millimeter film, and made it available and they began to be shown in places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It also became available both in 16 and 8 millimeter for anybody to purchase them. And I was one of those individuals who was beginning to do that, because I wanted to know where it was coming from. But somehow, even the earliest work that I would see, seemed to indicate that film came before—not film, I'm sorry—the moving image, the traditions that were delineated in very early film 1895 or even earlier, came from other traditions that preceded it. And it was very much also dependent upon the so-called photographic image, otherwise, the whole idea of the moving image through film may have died out, evaporated, before the turn of the century. So that was one area I was very much interested in. And that had also to do with many other factors, my own history, that of my parents, my relationship to Europe. These were qualities that were haunting to me.

What I was interested in these stereo images, is they gave me indications of the scattering that had taken place, especially in the 20th century of human lives, unlike in previous centuries, where most people would live, work and die, within, let's say, a radius of maybe 15, 20 miles from where they were born. Very few people really traveled, only those who could afford to do that. But with the Industrial Revolution, both with ships and the train, it was possible for people to travel, either because they wanted to, they had to, or they were looking for work, so people begin to move. So families begin to be scattered, dispersed. Your son, your daughter, they would go somewhere else, to look for a better future somehow. And so there's this tearing apart of human traditions.

And I felt this selection of images that you see was like an album of images, an anonymous album of people who were in different places. The images all came either from Europe or the US or South America. And those are the ones that I was able to pick up. Okay, maybe I'm going too far. So...

Haden Guest  16:40  

Well, let's continue to talk a bit more about Photographic Phantoms, because I want to talk about the movement between images, the way in which one image goes to another. There's a kind of playfulness here at times as the sort of graphic matches. And even the sense that at one moment, we seem to see this woman turn into a bird. We seem to see this man in a chair suddenly turn into a child in the same chair, so there's a sense in which I feel like there's movement between images, almost like a child's imagination. And then we have this suggestion, “First voyage to Europe with Father,” and so at moments, it feels as if this is also told from a child's point of view, or…?

Ernie Gehr  17:24  

Possibly. Maybe I'm still a child in a way. That's interesting. It's not something I was working on. They were accidental givings by the process of crossfading. You know, one image fades out, the other one fades in. And, there are sometimes beautiful things that happen. Like one of my favorite ones is near the beginning, you have this ship on the water, and then it superimposes at some point, briefly,in the middle of a tree, and it's wonderful.

I was also trying to kind of animate these still images, but not just moving them. Maybe the word I shouldn't be using is “expressing” attitudes or feelings. I still remember, it really came across very strong this evening for me near the beginning: you see a market somewhere in Europe, and in the center, you have this child, maybe ten, maybe younger, you know, he's looking away from the camera. The camera is recording him looking into the market, so to speak. And then it's superimposed and this couple looking out from a window, and when I go to them, you know, away from the child, their faces and their hair, their wigs suddenly crawling... It's amusing to me. I couldn't have thought of a better way of articulating it. I had the choice, of course. of taking it out, but I liked it. So on I feel responsible for placing it there.

Haden Guest  20:04  

You're also playing with this, this stroboscopic and sort of solarized effect. It creates this sort of image and after image, and it seems one of the things you're insisting on is that each image is also the shadow of itself. I feel like that's also something very much–

Ernie Gehr  20:18  

Just to try to rephrase a little bit of what I was trying to say, in a different way... You know, you look at these photographic images, any photographic image of the past, and there are a lot of emotions, that you go through a lot of things that, you know, it's not just a dead image, especially if you really pay attention to those images of people that once were alive, even if they died only yesterday, they're no longer there. So you see this ghost, this phantom, there, and one tends to respond, and I try, in some ways, in a muted way to bring that into the work, so the choices that I was making had something to do with that.

I work a lot, as you know, intuitively, and by that, I mean, I know why I'm doing things. And I'm not trying to create just a picture window, but also acknowledge the artifice of what I'm working within what one is looking at. That is very important to me. But I'm also trying to bring these things back to life to some degree, so that somebody looking at the work can say, “Gee, so this individual who put this together, was responding to these things, and quite strongly.” Ultimately.

Haden Guest  22:26  

I think the work is very effective in that sense. And thinking about New York Lantern, I mean, this is the New York that we've visited so many times in many of your other films, but this is a completely different world. And I'm really moved by the way in which we recognize certain places like the Flatiron building, and yet this is of course, a lost world, a completely different place. This is a city of hope of dreams, but also of loneliness and poverty and fear. And that's palpable in these images. The movement here is different from Photographic Phantoms. Here we have this slight superimposition. There's a kind of layering here. Each image has a trace of the other image, a kind of memory of the other image.

Ernie Gehr  23:20  

Well, I may be wrong, but [it was] one of the very few times where I was working with borrowing music, you know, somebody else's work. And so I needed to work counter to the music, which I highly respect. It’s Charles Ives, fragments of Charles Ives’ music, which is also from that period where the images come from. So much of what I ended up doing, and to do with trying to work counter to the rhythmic character of the music. Sometimes I give in, but most of the time I try not to.

Haden Guest  24:12  

You even break it into almost discrete movements with the silence in between.

Let's see if we have any questions in the audience. We have microphones. Does anybody have questions or comments for Ernie Gehr? Steve Livernash.. Steve, if you just wait for the microphone….

Steve Livernash  24:34  

I was interested in the colorization of many of those images. And I know that in film work, it was a very expensive and unusual thing to do. But perhaps you were taking these filmstrip slides and things and... Were they generally colorized so they could be sold for a higher price?

Ernie Gehr  24:58  

No… Well, okay 19th century photographic images were not necessarily black and white; they were printed sepia-color, you know, photographic emulsion, and sometimes bluish. So those are qualities that you would find if you look at original 19th century photography.

Yeah, I did not colorize any images. Sometimes it's the contrast between the digital medium, and the photographic image. I mean, those colors in in, in the images themselves are much more subtle. But I did not go for any kind of a colorization; it's whatever I recorded. I accepted that. So to me, it was important to have those variations, but I did not create them.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Yeah, we're talking about the second piece.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Okay. They were hand-tinted. All the color that you see in the first piece, all the slides that have color, those were hand-tinted originally. I have a much larger collection. So about three times what you see, are most of them are hand-tinted and beautiful to look at as photographic images themselves. So there is nothing that I did to do that. That would have been a total mistake on my part, I feel.

Haden Guest  27:13  

I think those hand-painted images so beautifully evoke this meeting of the artisanal and the industrial world, which is in the films themselves too. Even the coloring on the three figures that you end the film with… They both could seem such poignant figures, and yet at the same time, maybe there's a kind of optimism? I feel like those colors really add a charge to that image, a personal touch that I think is so important in the work.

So other other questions, comments? Oh, yes.

Ernie Gehr 27:52  

Let me just say one thing since you're bringing that up. In the last phase, I did work on the color. We're talking about the train piece, the last. There, I did manipulate the dials and change the colors.

Audience 1  28:19  

I’m very interested in the third film. I thought it was incredibly beautiful. But I would like to hear a bit more about how you structured it. Because when I think of a commute, I usually think of home-to-work or work-to-home and would expect then logically the film to begin in one station or to begin at dusk, and then you arrive home and it's much darker. But that didn't happen here, which I thought was very, very interesting. I’d like to hear why that didn't happen.

Ernie Gehr  28:52  

Okay, part of maybe– Could you hear it?

Haden Guest  29:00  

Did everybody hear the question?

Yeah. It's just the acoustics. But this idea that [INAUDIBLE]

Ernie Gehr  29:15  

The structure of the piece. Well, it starts, more or less, with these immigrants coming to the US–

Haden Guest

The last piece…

Ernie Gehr

Oh, oh, oh, the last piece! Ah, yes. Thank you. That's true. It's actually chunks, and they're not necessarily linear. Yeah, if you try to retrace that trip, it was shot between Boston and New York and back and forth.

Haden Guest  29:53  

While you were teaching here.

Ernie Gehr 29:55  

Yes, 2012. Yeah, four years ago, spring 2004. Let's see, structure… This is not quite an answer to your question; you won’t be satisfied with it, but I need to let you have your own experience of it. It's like evening, nighttime, and then daytime. But it's also going into darkness, which has its own magic. The lights, I mean, are incredible! You know, it's just beautiful, I think. And the spatial things that happen towards the later part of the so-called evening—actually, it was evening not night—but if you call it “night sequence,”... It’s just wonderful, the way these spatial things are happening between different planes, you know, but it's like going into darkness and then having to come out of it.

There are ironies in the piece. Near the beginning, if you listen to the soundtrack again, somebody is zipping up. I didn't add them; it's all straight recordings, the sound. What I clipped out, among other things, is the train conductor telling you you're arriving somewhere, or we'll be getting somewhere. But near the beginning, there is somebody opens a briefcase, and near the end of the night sequence, the same thing happens only in reverse, you know, somebody's closing their briefcase. So we are arriving towards the city or the end of the movie. So there is a certain degree of humor that's been inserted. It's not necessarily that that sound happened exactly at that point. You can separate the two very easily. And you can add/subtract sounds as you wish. So there are levels that have to do with a certain kind of amusement that I had with where things are. But basically, I wanted– Words fail me right now, so I can't tell you the structure. But it was mostly felt out. Looking at it again and again, and seeing how these passages were moving forward. It has a shape, but it's a shape that has to be experienced, rather than if I told you some of the ways in which I put it together, it's like cheating you really. So you have a chance to see the work again. Second time, you'll have a better sense. It's like a large symphonic orchestral piece,and what is the structure? You need to respond to that. And you'll have a better sense than if you know, “well, it just goes from this point to that point.”

Haden Guest  34:05  

I use the term kaleidoscopic in the film, because it seemed to me, at different times you're working almost like a sculptor. It's like these shapes that emerge, these patterns that emerge and seems like that's one of the movements, one of the ways the film works, maybe not in terms of structure, but–

Ernie Gehr  34:24  

Yeah, no, there are a lot of I think there are several different– It depends what you pay attention to, what you’re following… My suggestion is to stay with the work in the present from moment to moment, and see as much of what is taking place on screen. If it evokes something, great, but just see as much as possible and how the rectangle itself is continuously being transformed by light, darkness, colors coming in, dissolving, shapes that evoke maybe a house or something else, and it’s there and it goes away the next second. Again, you know, I mentioned, think of an orchestral piece, you have all these instruments, all these notes, and in order to appreciate it, really get into it, you got to listen to all these notes and see what they're doing to each other, the colors they evoke, how they're working with and against each other. One of the moments that I really love is when these wires which constantly play this musical game with the landscape, you know, it suddenly starts to vibrate, and it looks like, what is it? [LAUGHS] It's so bizarre. I don't know why it happened. I mean, you know...

Haden Guest  36:10  

Two bridges meet and this crown of sorts...

Ernie Gehr  36:15  

And it forms an eye, which actually, if you look at it on several occasions, the sky from the two sides, they do form an eye. So, you know, the lights from the bridge, in a way, kind of hug and literize the eye that's already there in a way.

Haden Guest  36:44  

Wonderful.

Any other questions or comments at all? If not, I want to ask you to join me in thanking Ernie Garr for this wonderful ride!

Ernie Gehr  36:55  

My pleasure. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

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