Ernie Gehr Movies

A four-channel video work taking inspiration from a lush park environment and the proliferating presence of security cameras in public life.

American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of extended sublime that presents a view of the Brooklyn...

"Throughout his long career, Ernie Gehr has explored cinema's unique potential to reveal the limits and possibilities of visual perception and the...

"Before my son was born, friends would ask me "Will you make a baby movie, now?". "Of course not!", I would answer. Yet, right after Daniel was born...

This film accompanies Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic.

Gehr replaces the camera lens with a half-spherical piece of plastic and filmed around his apartment, producing bands of color and light.

16mm film (black and white, silent)

Film by Ernie Gehr

For about sixty minutes, STILL peers through a New York City street level window, watching the storefronts and windows across the way. People come...

In New York Lantern and Photographic Phantoms, a new narrative lyricism and political outspokenness enters Gehr’s cinema, haunted now by...

2023. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Silent. Digital. 22 min.

This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working,...

A meditation on silence, vanishings, and phantoms of light.

"I have a number of doctors that I have to see – getting older and it’s an issue all the time, and they are on the Upper East Side. I...

"The concluding work is Circling Essex Crossing. In this piece, what arises out of a series of images documenting the construction of Essex Crossing...

"The second piece on this program, Aproposessexstreetmarket, is what I consider to be the heart of the trilogy. It offers glimpses to the kind of...

Abstract short film.

A stereoscopic view of a suburban backyard.

2020. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. Digital. 8 min.

The film is a half-hour series of brief close-ups of people on the street, shot from a high, but still intimate, angle. In a constant interplay of...