Imagination Is A Simple Thing:
Ernie Gehr's Mechanical Magic
Francisco Rojas • 10.04.2025
“I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: 'I'd be a damn' fool if I didn't!' These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.” - Dylan Thomas
A few months ago last year, infamous Argentinian podcaster Eial Moldavsky said that art does not exist because “every artistic thing existing in the world is just authors expressing, in a more or less fictionalised way, their personal story. That’s all.” Aside from the fact that this so-called philosopher —his influencer activities include uploading 60-second reels explaining some key philosophical topics, despite the fact he hasn’t even finished his degree— can barely conceive of art beyond traditional narrative logic, what's really objectionable about these remarks is the sheer classist and capitalist tone within them, implying that art has no value if every single person has the capacity to imagine it. It does not matter if there are commonalities or differing ideas between the visions of each individual, because there is no such thing as a reality, or one representation that is absolute and capable of obliterating all others. If there is no such thing as an elite capable of bringing the arts to the common people, then it makes more sense to believe that art does not exist at all.
Moldavsky is the son of a famous actor and comedian, Robert Moldavsky, so maybe Eial isn’t just a hypocrite. Maybe he's unable to distinguish himself outside of the elite and that’s why his perspective is so cynical and smug. In a way, there’s not much difference between Moldavsky’s comments and that of Samuel Jackson at the Oscars stating that documentary is the best shortcut to being the smartest person in the room. It may have been just an unfunny piece of text from the ceremony script, it still speaks volumes about the way we think about art in general. We're basically part of an ecosystem that measures work by its importance, quantifies its informational value and places it in the food chain accordingly. Is this the most depressingly plutocratic way of looking at art that one could imagine? These days, in the era of social media, “content” and ''likes'', it seems to be better to think of art as a thing of the past (if it ever existed). Not only because it isn't useful in a universal, tool-oriented way, but also because there’s no way anyone can create something new from scratch, especially if at the end of the day everything is ''just'' information. If there is no such thing as the ultimate novelty, the latest original radical new release to rule them all, what’s the angle? Where's the hook? It is a symptom of the modern age that people who could not be further removed from a studio head worry and manage their artistic concerns and thoughts according to the whims of industry concepts and complexes.
If you're looking for an alternative and completely different way of understanding art, then look no further, because few filmmakers working today could illustrate it better than Ernie Gehr, who continues to imagine and playmate images out of quotidian scenes to the point that some even forget to acknowledge his last 20 years of filmmaking; in very similar way to Ken Jacobs, Gehr has seen his filmography expand at an ecstatic pace once he started working digitally. His place in the history of the avant-garde is more than secure within the canon, the same canon that has been incapable of recognising Gehr's 21st century oeuvre. Until now.
About a year ago, MoMA dedicated a retrospective to Ernie Gehr’s late career period. Organized by Francisco Valente, Mechanical Magic was composed of 26 films, 22 of them were works from the new century, most of them being from the last decade. The retrospective included a handful of his celluloid works, most notably his masterpiece Table (1976), but it evidently had as its primary goal to highlight the films that Ernie Gehr has carved out of the digital format. ​And here's the thing. These are the works that have been unfairly ignored by academics and tastemakers. P. Adams Sitney is perhaps the best example of this. Sitney is arguably the most important historian of American avant-garde filmmaking. Having said that, his distaste for digital is pretty well documented and so Sitney's mere presence at one of the retrospective screenings could have been considered something out of the ordinary, though unsurprisingly, he only attended the screening of the 16mm work.
In a previous piece, I mentioned Thom Andersen’s opinions on avant-garde filmmakers working digitally at the turn of the century; he mentioned a lack of rigidity, the filmographies and the individual films themselves, no longer as consistent as before. But Andersen’s mistake, or his bias, is ignoring the means of creation of those celluloid pieces compared to digital. There is an economic context that has to be acknowledged, and that economic reality undeniably affects the logistics of creating any kind of (art) work; it brings its own set of obstacles, problems and solutions. Film, due to its cost, demands a particular kind of precision and maybe because of that it only allows a certain way of crafting a piece, you can’t mold time in the ways you can do with digital these days, it's something that didn’t exist decades ago. Digital brings an entire new spectrum of possibilities. It’s more malleable and allows more extensive explorations, to repeat, retry and distill a scene, a moment, a shot. James Benning made films like Small Roads (2011) and Stemple Pass (2012) entirely on digital that behave in a different way compared to his celluloid work, and nevertheless, they could very well be his two definitive films. Digital was a way to actually “capture” time, something that would’ve been simply impossible to do on 16mm. Ken Jacobs also found a new avenue through digital, with his Eternalisms. And here is Ernie Gerh, who’s been working with digital for more than 20 years. None of these filmmakers have gone back to the film strip. Is there a reason why they should? Would it help their body of work to go back to a format they haven’t touched for multiple decades? In what way has their work been damaged by the use of digital? Probably none. In fact, a more interesting question to ask would be; what films would Ernie Gehr be making today if he had digital all along? If the experience with the format was 60 years instead of 25?
Filmographies getting bulkier, in a way gives the individual films within them a reassuring quality. They are expressive impulses inside a huge organism of ideas, of an enormous human machine made out of sensitive mechanisms. Maybe the totality of the body of work becomes harder to pin down, but that is the result of a way of making that no longer responds to economic pressure that could harm the discipline. It’s a craft that answers to a call that feels more sincere because of its immediacy. The most absolute of liberties is when artists can really find the actual purity of their work, without outside distractions or interventions. These works are not interested in their place within a scene, festival or their possible ripple effects. They are direct impressions of what the artist wanted to capture. The films can stand on their own in the face of insignificance. Gehr, Benning and many more have decided to embrace constant creation and in a visual universe that keeps growing exponentially, they’ve been able to share their visions and be themselves.
Sunday in Paris (2016) was Mechanical Magic’s opener and there was probably no film more fitting, we’re talking about Gehr’s film that reconciled, better than any other, his past and present way of working. Sunday in Paris is, in a way, a sister film to Signal - Germany on the Air (1985); both are composed of shots of a camera panning while fixed in different corners of a city. But here Gehr uses Paris as a puzzle, dividing the image in three different horizontal sections, sometimes stretching moments across them, sometimes creating the illusion of either a continuum or of multiple scenes taking place in each segment, hiding the illusion, the eye anticipating different kinds of changes.
One of the big problems when one uses shapes, or decides to “mask” the image within a particular form is reconciling how much we are just watching the shape itself, the circle, the square, while ignoring the images within it, and how much are we watching the global image, the entire shot, the relationship with the negative space included. Gehr introduced the films in the retrospective saying he is a “city walker, and a city filmmaker of both interior and exterior phenomena, a chronicler of the invisible daily life in the city''. Maybe this simple, elemental observation is the reason why Sunday in Paris allows the opportunity to see the segment and the totality at the time, because Gehr is just as interested in the way people and vehicles move within the frame as he is in the movement of the camera and its effect across the 3 different sections. His way of operating the camera is as modest and ordinary as the way subjects enter and leave the frame, as the way the elements that populate the shots and the city itself behave in it. The pans on Sunday in Paris aren’t clean, which makes it all the more surprising when two sections seem to match perfectly even when the moment isn’t really the same. The illusion is as visual as it is temporal. Film critic, writer, programmer and filmmaker Paul Attard, in a short review on Letterboxd called it “Rubik cube cinema”. And I really can’t think of a way of describing it that it’s any better than that.
More often times than not, the word “superficial” is used to refer to something that is empty, that lacks depth, an unintelligent work, but many of Ernie Gehr’s films are superficial because they occur on the surface of the image, they deal with that dimension, they are interested in the way surfaces, from the film stock, film format and the entire world that can be captured through the camera, can shape the work itself. Back in the Park (2021) shows conversations and movement of people sitting at the outside tables of a city cafe, everything registered with the camera upside down, the shot showing the “characters” as silhouettes. Shadows are the constant in this film, but eyes can’t take their attention from the little rocks in the pavement, the blocks that made the street, the fallen leaves in the ground. If Back in the Park is, in a way, a film about porosity, Construction Sight (2018) is the complete opposite, based on the most even and flat surface possible, glass. In any film, the fact that a camera is able to capture images is already a sort of magical result, but the spectral quality of a mirror, or a reflection within a frame has always been a recurring theme for many filmmakers, like an enigma, or an irresistible impulse. Construction Sight flows very slowly, very similarly to Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (2008), and they share the same pleasures too; both are, essentially, not only films about a working class space, but also, they are both films about color, about the different tonalities that are found within a landscape, in a fire truck, in magazines on the street, and yes, in the clothes of the pedestrian. Despite its parsimonious rhythm, the entire film is composed of fixed camera shots, making the viewing experience a stimulating one due to the many different reflection and images that are present in any given shot: when a person opens a glass door the internal speed of the frame changes as if it’s something out of a fantasy. Not only the multiple reflective surfaces are the reason for this (Gehr has two different “self portraits” in this film), but also digitals ability to have the entire shot on focus. And if we’re talking about multiple stimuli and speeds, Flying Over Brooklyn (2020) might be the one of the most definitive ways of understanding that way of seeing, with the slow movement of the clouds intermittently obscuring sunlight, while birds, insects and a helicopter fly across the blue sky. The distances of the elements in relation to the camera aid the illusion of different speeds, and a helicopter passes by much more slowly than a fly. By the end there is a feeling that no matter which moment a person chooses, the city is always creating its own symphony.
The second program opens with two films that live in a different quantum realm compared to the previous as far as recording and capturing textures and surfaces. Both films feel very similar to Field (1970), an early film by Gehr where the camera movement creates a diagonal pattern, like a long black and white stroke of the brush over the image, a year before Michael Snow did something similar at the top of the mountain at the end of La Région Centrale (1971), where the camera effectively created a living abstract painting. Maybe the relationship between these films serves as a background to understanding celluloid as a particular classical element, earth, in this case; you can draw over it like a line in the sand, there’s a sense of pulse and directionality in any given line over this little piece of ground that is the framed shot. Following that idea; which element would be comparable to the texture of digital? Gehr presents many different possibilities across all of the Mechanical Magic programs, but particularly in To The Birds, it might be the wind. The background, the empty space here is the most perfect of whites instead of black, with some digital particles of blue and green bursting in the “non image” from time to time. Sound is synchronic and the color cumulus moves, at first as tree leaves would, but as the soundtrack suggests more and more birds, the particles take flight from one side to the other. In experimental/avant-garde cinema there’s a trend of using sound as a mere accompaniment, which sometimes produces the opposite effect of having the image seem like the secondary dimension to the fluid abstract quality of sound, to the point that even the editing sometimes gets nullified by the mere presence of a sound to “make sense of it all”. Gehr does not make that mistake. In fact, he finds a way of making sound the axis of the film, at the same time as the images illustrate abstractly what the aural dimension seems to suggest, like a call and response, both gears working independently but creating an effect when you make them work together. To The Birds triggers a sensation as if sound is conjuring the images on screening, giving order to an entire world, out of nothing. On the other hand, the immense Autocollider XX has a sort of sustained doppler effect, a never ending loud traveling noise, like living inside an airplane’s engine, while the movement gets reduced to a series of lines on the screen. It’s a horizontal universe where images are completely flat, each change is a global one, the metamorphosis is uniform, like a blood flow of street colors and textures that barely exist. The drive doesn’t start and it doesn't t stop, there’s only an account of its force, power and forward momentum.
The second program ends with two films. Delirium (2020) is a simple piece in which sunlight creates shadows on a wall. Tree leaves and bushes become fragile silhouettes, undrawing themselves and becoming abstract. It’s a very ordinary scene, the way light behaves in the afternoon, before the sun sets. At times it seems nature is able and willing to create art by itself. In Pedestrian Activities (2023), Gehr moves the camera restlessly, drawing lines of distortion over the images, the sound capturing every beat and vibration from the apparatus manipulation. The most interesting part of the viewing experience of this film is being able to see the unaltered landscape scene and the post-transformation scene virtually at the same time, each movement registered by our eyes in fractions of a second, a testament of the rapid capacity our vision can be able to capture things. Adults, children and elders of different races and conditions can be seen walking the street, fleetingly appearing in the material. Gehr never stays still, but he still allows us to see a city that is multicultural. Everyone goes out to walk in the street, at least in this film, everyone is the same. How many potentially different films exist in the minds of all the people we see briefly throughout this 26-minute walk?
In Stan Brakhage’s Unconscious London Strata (1971), a stimulating abstract portrait of England’s capital, between vibrant colors and reflections, as if the city is contained inside a prism, there’s a segment where Brakhage films the Big Ben for a few seconds. Years later, Brakhage revealed that at the time he was filming the tower, the pedestrians, seeing a bearded and grey man “trying” to get an image of the landmark, noticeably letting the structure enter and leave the frame constantly, offered his then wife, Jane Wodening, to help the poor old man to take a picture of the tower he was so obviously struggling to capture. Jerome Hiler in an interview with Martin Grennberger and Daniel A. Swarthnas mentioned how he thought the abstract paintings' place in history was already “settled”, but at the same time “one still hears My five-year-old could do better than that! from people standing before an undeniable masterpiece”. Why mention these things? Because fifty years after Unconscious London Strata, Ernie Gehr finds himself in the same situation Brakhage did. Near the end of Pedestrian Activities, while filming the windows of a shop, a voice comes up, offering assistance to Gehr in operating the camera: “Do you need some help?”
This could be seen as something negative, the discipline remains so deeply unrecognized and even mocked at times that even an important filmmaker gets disconcerted looks when he goes out to play with the camera. But again, Ernie Gehr didn’t dedicate his life to film in order to be an important figure. His work is a response to his curiosity and imagination. And if fifty years from now, people will still offer help to a man that moves his camera energetically, maybe that means a gesture like that, using the camera in such a way, still creates the same impact it did a handful of many decades ago. To work the camera with such energy while trying to create thick threads of color and light within an image is still quite an unexpected and radical decision. It’s an ode to a cinema beyond tradition and convention, beyond film as a path to success, beyond what is acceptable, agreeable, or what is supposed to be the correct way of using an instrument. The camera might be a machine, but there are still many ways of using it (in)appropriately that will keep this cinema alive and in good health. Maybe the best artists of this discipline are getting older, but they still see the possibilities of the medium with young, fresh eyes.
The third program felt like an obligation, considering it was a program consisting of only 16mm works; again, the only screening P. Adams Sitney decided to attend. Hard to blame him when it includes Table, one of moving images’ high watermark moments, even in its unofficial version that circulates online (sadly, the only version the eyes of this writer have been able to see). Table is a very elemental piece, a still life that becomes animated through three marginally different shots, the table ready for tea time filmed with natural light, untouched, a traditional representation of it, and two layers of color, one of red and one of blue. The inches of difference between the shots give the work a feeling that this could’ve been a sort of early 3D experiment, but the work is meant to be seen as a rhythmic piece, in which each layer enters and leaves rapidly and constantly. With Serene Velocity (1970), Gehr had already made a major work out of shots without action, without movement, with the motion suggested by the montage. Table is probably the culmination of that technique, kinetic and musical despite its stillness.
Neither Rear Window (1991) nor Mirage (1981) were available for those of us who couldn’t attend the screenings physically. The one that was available was the unknown (until now) Along Brighton Beach Avenue (a.k.a. Untitled: Part One) (1981), presented as a digital copy of the film originally shot on 16mm. If cinema finds its purity when it can’t be defined into words, then Along Brighton Beach Avenue is one of the purest films to ever exist. The camera looks downward, from a balcony to the streetscape (as Heinz Emigholz might have put it), the coats, hats and bags of the pedestrians, the protagonist of this very simple piece. The diagonal framing and its rhythmic editing turn into an hypnotising force; the way the hands, the gestures are captured, the way people leave and enter the frame. In terms of compositional power, this film has nothing to envy any of Robert Bressons films. And it of course has a time capsule element to it. Compared to all the other films in the retrospective, it serves as a way of showing what the city and its inhabitants looked like forty years ago and how much has changed. But the most powerful gesture is the fact that four decades after the fact, Gehr still returned to these scenes and images.
It’s hard to criticize the fact that these 16mm films were included in the program, even when considering that this retrospective is primarily dedicated to Ernie Gehr’s digital work. Especially when we consider that this particular program was a way of reintroducing Along Brighton Beach Avenue to the world, as pairing that film with other 16mm works is not only logical but essential. Even so, I’m afraid there could be some people who could maliciously imply that it was a way of reminding people of the films that Ernie Gehr used to make, but won’t anymore. Almost like an apology. And that would be a wild assumption to make, considering the next film, the one that opens program four is a film from Gehr’s 21st century period and it might be the best he has ever made.
Glider (2001), might be the defining film of Gehr’s career. It has all his interests: textures, the obliteration of three dimensionality, the reorientation of the frame and the human eye. Made through a camera obscura, Glider behaves like a sort of celestial vision, travelling like an impossible omnipresent eye over the landscape, buildings becoming intelligible, fading as if the wind is taking them away, becoming part of the terrain that is the film itself, while the becomes gradually more immense, the image getting rounder and rounder, depth becoming flexible and the eye can almost pierce through the solidity of the concrete world. Curving like the Earth, while textures turn infinite, this film creates vertigo out of completely flat images, which is like saying that this film is able, through nothing, or at least, through very little, to hold the entire world together within an imaginary sphere. This film by its own already earns the right to have the magic alluded to in this retrospective’s title. A true miracle.
The handful of remaining films in program five come to further develop that very concept of magic. Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides II (2019) is a recording of various magic lanterns and with them, the primitive fascination that comes with them. Probably the key to being a curious and active artist has always been to see things with the eyes of a child. Gehr also takes his time to show the way the devices work, the mechanism that makes the illusion possible. In the same way I’ve mentioned some other time regarding Jacobs’ The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), cinema differentiates itself from mere magic in the sense that there is an added pleasure in having the process of the magic trick revealed to us. Understanding the intricacies, the sometimes simple movements and decisions that make the desired effect possible doesn’t hurt the trick, in fact, it makes it more powerful. In Slumberland (Thanks to Winsor McCay) (2015), a sort of reframed double-channel video work made using an early cinema piece as basis, brings back simultaneous stimulus, seeing the same film in different orientations and times, the horizontal framing like a box that holds Gehr’s own magic lantern illusion. The unfairly undervalued Creatures of the Night (2024) is one of Gehr’s most quietly pleasant works, where drawn silhouettes are animated as in a book for children (or a flip-book, as Ernie mentioned in his excellent interview with Paul Attard). Its composition feels very similar to a Warhol print or serigraph, like Single Car Crash (Double Disaster) made for the screen. Many contemporaries to the pop art movement have consistently declared themselves against that way of seeing making art, but it’s hard to separate this film from such pieces, where the use of negative space is key, color and the way elements occupy the space in the frame, like the work of a designer as much as from an animator. With very simple changes, Gehr eliminates the visible mechanics from the equation, and leaves the rest on the screen, the simple and humble joy that comes from just watching colors and objects in space. A work of active and concentrated vision, where the shifts in the images recognized themselves as not much different from the way the shadows of the tree leaves change in Delirium. Medicine Cabinet (2023) closes this program, a sort of sister film to Pedestrian Activities in the sense that we see again the real time “brushstroking” align with the sound frictions of the camera, but this time, capturing plants, trees and flowers. Gehr sees the street and the city in the same way he sees flora and herbage in a garden (and vice versa). Consequently, the same enthusiasm of being able to distinguish the world before and after its transformation is integral part of this film, here in an enormous and ardent green scene.
The fifth screening has a couple of films that feel closer to diary films, which is something of a rare occurrence in Gehr’s filmmaking, despite the fact that he always has registered the present world without much fiction beyond his aesthetic interests. Chambers of Time (2010) is a winter scene piece where a boy is making a snowman. Gehr agitates the camera around, but he also lets the material breathe a little, sometimes just looking at the winter sky, with the small white snowflakes falling against the grey background. It’s Gehr at his most Mekas. Approposessexstreetmarket (2018) presents various moments inside a market, a sort of street center of the town. It’s a sort of actualité in Gehr’s cinema, the ordinary scenes here as a sort of capsule of working class living inside a specific point in the city; occasionally Gehr places the camera over a bright table to generate reflections, duplicating the image. Through the Hoops of Time (2020), on the other hand is a silent piece in which Gehr returns to slow motion, but without a tripod this time, the shutter speed being the most important aspect of this film. It works as a silent counterpart for Medicine Cabinet, here the visual traces of the camera movement being deliberately slow, the greens are more opaque, which makes the entire material feel more fluid, the plants getting a grey, watery feel.
New York Central (2020), the film that closes this penultimate program might be Gehr at his most radical; another piece of simultaneous framing, this time in different and sometimes extreme saturations. The concept of negative space returns in a more literal sense, with shots with negative images over positive images. Here all the shots are synchronized at the same speed, every change happens at the same time, which means each and every variation is a reflection of itself. Sometimes the geometric aspect of the film reminds Rothko, but the internal movement, more than any other film in the retrospective, reminds the mechanics and mechanism of a gear. Frames are precise and straight and movements are fast and clear. The fractions of a second where the camera moves to fall into another shot basically reorganized the world itself, this entire visual organism.
The sixth and final program is a sort of recapitulation of the wide range of techniques exhibited at this point. High Wire Act (2023) is composed of a few different shots of clothes drying over a wire across buildings, the shot upside down, the clothes effectively walking a tightrope. Bon Voyage (2015) is made out of three synchronized and simultaneous images from the same piece of early cinema where a ship is leaving a port. Each image with a slight variation on its coloration, but here the layers of color are made to mesh with the others.
Lisbon Views (2022) and What’s Up! (2023) present ideas regarding color similar to New York Central but contained in smaller schemes. Lisbon Views starts with images of trees over parked cars on the street, the trees with some purple flowers. From then on, the color correction will gradually turn more aggressive, trying to enhance the purple tone of the flowers, with the shots turning more and more irreal in a chromatic sense. The effects and changes maximize their power throughout its progression, structurally feeling very similar to the ways of Marie Menken, first setting the stage and then playing around it. Whats Up! starts with a digital high contrast black and white street scene and then becomes a piece of multiple layers, multiple exposures, or digital superimpositions to be more precise, coming in and out fluidly, with the colors becoming stronger and more saturated as more layers get in top of one another. There is never such a thing as a central image, as a visual main line, the flux of images and bright colors, the constant metamorphosis being the raison d’etre.
And then there’s Carroll Gardens (2024), undoubtedly the most popular film of the retrospective. Strictly speaking, this film shows a similar technique to Pedestrian Activities and Medicine Cabinet b but this time, we have a silent piece in our hands, so the camera movements are effectively abstracted from the context they were taken, at list in a physical sense. Not using sound also gives Gehr the opportunity to maximize the rhythm of the piece and to tweak some things in the editing. Even if he didn’t, this is a frantic work, the images vibrating like a flickering film. It starts with some tree leaves in an incessant pulse, drawing violent lines and patterns, then, slowly giving way to architecture, cars and pedestrians, distorted street scenes, and by the end the film returns to the trees, all in a exhilarating and rich visual journey. Carroll Gardens is the work a painter makes when they have found a complete familiarity with their brush, the result of years of work and experience. In a fair world, Carroll Gardens should be considered over many of Ernie Gehr’s most notable work, and not because those earlier works don’t deserve their praise (they do, plenty), but because Carroll Gardens is truly one of the best films of this decade, experimental, narrative, you name it. This is an instant classic, but sadly, like much of what surrounds some of the biggest names in avant-garde filmmaking, it’s a given importance, sometimes undeniably aided by how hard it is to see them. Some curators have shown a willingness to disregard digital entirely, or at the very least to consider any work made in the format as inferior to any work on celluloid, regardless of technique and even talent. And that has convinced some viewers that they shouldn’t cherish these digital works as much as they do with a celluloid piece, even if the results aren’t as enthralling and impressive as in a film like Carroll Gardens. Are we really interested in cinema then, or only in what it says about us, in all its peripheral aspects? The events that are so big that they could even do without the films themselves? It’s true that Ernie Gehr has a name and a reputation, a status hard to rival as far as the avant-garde scene would concern (assuming such a thing even exists). It’s also true that not any programmer or curator would be willing to give these digital pieces a screening room, a place to be shared and viewed. People could argue that some of the films are abhorrent, a bit careless and even plain ugly and they may very well be right in some cases. Yet on the other hand it is deeply significant to have an artist like this show his work to the world, an artist that remains as curious as ever, who still shows enormous curiosity to his surroundings. How not to admire somebody still this constantly inspired by the world and willing to create as much as his body allows him to?
For Ernie Gehr, magic is mechanical, in the sense that there can be no illusion without setting the gears in motion. It is the miracle of a watchmaker's craft. A communion of concrete factors making movements possible that would be inconceivable on their own. It’s the coordination from hand to eye, eye to mind, and mind to hand, and finally, hand to camera, the tool, the instrument. We can know each and every movement of the film beforehand, every step of the way, and we still are in awe when we see these images in motion.
Hopefully, new technologies like AI’s abominations will never interfere with a discipline like this, despite the fact many festivals, institutions and programmers insist on having them share sections and screenings. These films, unlike the prompt scams, aren’t looking to be useful or efficient, they are not artefacts that want to solve a concrete and limited problem, that start and end in the same place, like any new product or piece of content. Ernie Gehr’s cinema is the best example of this infinite search which is divided into different projects, different images that the artist can understand, or at least conceive unconsciously, then throw themselves into the adventure of turning the immaterial into the physical world, having other people interact with them. Imagination is simple, it’s everywhere, everybody can find illumination in the ordinary scene, in the quotidian experience. Sunshine falls with the same force on all of our foreheads. These patterns, shadows and reflections are there, outside, in the world, for all to see. There’s as many possible films as new viewers, as many images as each and every one of us are able to imagine. This search has no end. There’s no concept to follow, there’s not a point to this, but to explore the world, to lose ourselves in our imagination, to try to understand every particle of light, every movement of the universe, and to be illuminated by it.
