interview with Ernie Gehr

In collaboration with my colleague Arie Altena of Sonic Acts we interviewed the American filmmaker Ernie Gehr as part of the publication that came with this years Sonic Acts festival. For many years I’ve been fascinated by his films like ‘Side Walk Shuttle’ (1992) and his classic movie ‘Serene Velocity’ (1970) and for me it was a great opportunity to be able to talk to Ernie about his work and opinions about the cinematic experience.

The book, Sonic Acts: The cinematic experience is available via SIM-central. Soon a print on demand copy will be on-line to purchase via amazon.com. For the moment you may download a printable version of the interview here.

Experience is being thrown into uncharted territory, then you discover things.
Martijn van Boven / Arie Altena

Early November 2007 the American experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr visited Amsterdam, where Filmmuseum had two nights with his films programmed. On tuesday November 6th Sonic Acts talked with Ernie Gehr for an hour about his work. At the start of the interview Martijn van Boven mentioned the difficulty of getting to see Ernie Gehr’s films. A filmmaker himself, he was heavily impressed on seeing Gehr’s work at the International Filmfestival Rotterdam years ago, and subsequently had tried to lay his hands on other films of his, which had turned out to be not so easy. The easiest way to see something of Gehr now, would be to go online and look at low-resolution clips that are available online at ubu.com. Something with which Ernie Gehr was not so happy about.

EG: My impulse on hearing that some of my films were available on ubu.com was to get in touch with them and ask them to take them offline. It was too painful seeing my films in such a state. Someone who contributes to ubu.com, had told me that if I contacted them, they would take the clips off immediately. But the representation of my works there is so poor that I felt I better leave it, before somebody puts clips on line which look a bit more representative. Because that would be even more painful. For certain kinds of information they might be useful, but if you would like to get the experience of my films, I would advise you not to look at those online representations. I work with a certain scale. Also in my studio I project what I am working on, to see how it works. To see it on a computer monitor is quite something else.

AA It doesn’t give you the real experience…

I am interested in the experience of the work, not necessarily in the outline, or the idea behind it. Otherwise I could have just put the idea on a piece of paper, it is cheaper, and it takes less time to consume. You should look at a film in time. The idea you can get from a couple of sentences on paper.

MvB In our publication and festival we are trying to circumscribe the field of the cinematic experience. Maybe a first question in order to find a position: where would you place your work in relation to conventional, narrative cinema? Is there a relationship between your films and cinema as we know it?

We both use either a camera or a camcorder. The work is either put on film or on tape, or some other medium. And quite often for public presentations we use projectors of some kind or another. There are certain other affinities I guess. I don’t really think about this relationship that much. In an ideal world, I would like to see a broad spectrum of cinematic possibilities, all existing on the same plane. However that is not the reality that we find ourselves in. The industry is very protective of its territory. People are very conditioned, as soon as they walk into a place that is showing moving images, whether it is in the cinema or when they turn on their television, the first thing they lock into is the story. What’s the story? What’s going on? Where are the players? Who are the characters? What’s the plot? It is a conditioning that has happened, and that makes it very difficult to get to see any other work.
Let’s skip the word film, and just use ‘works by’, with no definition of whether it is abstract of experimental, narrative or anything else. People should just take their chances, without using those definitions. I would like to see programs that show a variety of things that reflect the world in which we live. When you walk down the street in any major city – well, in any western city that I know – you come across all those different people from different cultures. Why can’t we have a cinema that reflects a narrative film from India, a narrative film from Brazil, another one from China and another one from the Netherlands. That is the idea of multicultural cinema. And to me that is not it, because it is showing the same thing. It’s just made here or somewhere else, with people from one culture or from another culture. It is not a diversity of cinematic approaches.
The medium itself is neutral. It doesn’t say that it can only be used to tell stories, or to make documentaries. Unfortunately there is an investment to showing only that. Partially it s a conditioning which is determined through the exhibition of film. And it is to some degree an economic thing. If non-narrative film would be shown inside cinema theaters it would take away a part of the income that the film studios are making.
I feel to be on the other side. Given the conditioning which has taken place, I do not mind that people do not have any patience with, or feel totally lost, when anything does not follow mainstream ideas about the moving image. I do not mind that my work is being shown in more specialized venues. It is the only way it can exist. I have shown works in more diversified situations and it is often disastrous, because the work then can not have a life on the screen. People are interfering with the presentation, those who really want to see it, cannot really enjoy it. Putting the work under the term experimental or avant-garde, canonizes the work in a way, but it means hopefully that people who go see the works, understand what they are into, although they might not know the specific works that are being shown. I tend to appreciate that.

MvB Can you image a sort of cinematic experience without a didactic cinematic language in which you have one shot, a consecutive shot and another shot. A cinematic experience that has a direct effect on your senses?

Yeah, that’s possible, sure. But all these terms are quite loose. It is so nebulous in these times. Sometimes that’s a problem, because it’s so generic if someone says ‘cinematic’.
Narrative film is created by a team. It is very hard to assign the word ‘make’ to a specific person because it is a collaborative work of many individuals, some of which are ‘creative’ contributors, others are ‘technical’ contributors. If their work does not match together, the work may fail on some level. But it is the directors who are always credited with the work. I do not see all of them as filmmakers. They are supervisors, they tell others what to do. It is the editors who actually make sense out of the chaotic material. But the person who ends up being credited with it is the director.
A filmmaker on the other hand is someone who actually works with materials that he or she is considering, be it film, be it digital media or whatever. Filmmaker refers really to film, but the terms are loose. Therefore nowadays I quite often just use the word ‘work’. I feel that’s more neutral. What term do you use for the thing I make? I don’t know, so I use the term ‘work’. But people still use all these other terms and I think it is useful to at some times bring up the issue of how ambiguous these terms happen to be.

MvB Could you then say a filmmaker is researching the intrinsic elements of film? The material, editing, the use of space and time?

Sometimes. Even in so-called experimental avant-garde work people’s approaches run from A to Z. Some people are interested in the material and plasticity of film. When you talk about cinematic phenomena what are we talking about? People have different approaches to that. Cinematic to me means something which cannot be done in any other way but through this medium that you happen to be using, in this case film. I am willing to extend it to video. But I think we need another term really. That certainly is true for mixed multimedia, so that it can exist in its own right, because it has its own intrinsic character. But maybe it is too early for that, and we need another five to ten years, before there is enough ground to establish a different language that is separate.
I come from film, so to me these things are interchangeable. But there is a problem that needs to be somehow reconsidered, how to address these issues. Earlier you mentioned computer art, that is not coming out of mechanics, it is not indebted to industrial revolution. Film is a child of the industrial revolution. To make film you use a machine. Film did not come from outer space. There were all these developments before celluloid was invented, and used to make moving pictures, and all that cued to film, was swallowed up. The same happens with digital media and how it uses quite a bit of film language and film traditions. But is has also its own particular character.

AA The past few years you have predominantly worked with digital film. Do you work differently in that medium than before?

Before I started to work with digital video I worked with film for over 35 years, and you carry that luggage, that culture with you. I am not in my twenties, picking up on the new thing without the baggage. I come with an experience of film and carry some of those concerns over, whether I like it or not. I am who I am. But my method in working with digital video is different. It is more tentative than when I was working with film. Some of my work is not all that linear. I have never been able to quite stick with one thing. Quite often after I finish one work I feel that I need to change stylistically, or in terms of interest. Still my works are all interrelated, one can see how certain themes, ideas and ways of seeing connect from one work to another. Once you have the distance of time you can see those connections.

MvB In my experience your works, like Sidewalk Shuttle, Shift and City, all seem to deal with your interest in public space, in the city and its cartesian grid. There is a certain personal perspective present you can only have if you have a camera. So there’s the city, the cartesian coordinates and the filmic pulse. Are these films about you personal view on the city? Is this your interest?

Part of it has to do with having lived most of my life in cities. I don’t know what it is to live in the country. I like the city. I see urban spaces as archeological artifacts of human history, they are archeological canyons of human histories, we have built these mountains and valleys where we exist, and they register with us in different ways. They affect us and mould human lives and character, they either enrich or impoverish our existence. Most of the time I film spaces that have some meaning in my personal life.
There is no way in which you actually can convey the complexity of any place, or any situation. In film you are working with a medium that records surfaces and that has limitations. It is evocative of possibilities, it alters, it is not the real thing in any way. There is a rectangle to it, there are colors that have nothing to do with the colors of life. You can see it, but you can’t move around in the space as you can in life. You are also making a decision when to film and when to stop. Your work is made of several shots. So you are creating this whole utter bizarre thing, and where is it all taking place? On a flat screen.
I like to be able to step back in different ways, and acknowledge the limitations of the medium, pick up on certain aspects of so-called reality, of fragments of reality that I am paying attention to. Through the medium I try to articulate certain things that I sense are taking place, forces. Sometimes the movement of a camera will articulate something that the image itself might not. In for example Sidewalk Shuttle, there are these constant turns so that as a viewer you never really reach the ground.

MvB You lose the sense of perspective as a spectator – sorry for interrupting – and I remember when I was watching the film many people in the audience were tilting their heads to find a focal point. It seems that you are disrupting the time-space relationships in film.

In some senses I was trying to convey cinematically the feeling of being a displaced person, someone who has not found a grounding for a place that you might call home. What prompted me making the film in some degree was moving to San Francisco, from New York, which I thought was home. Although I found San Francisco a very beautiful place to live and very pleasant, definitely nicer than New York, I could not ground myself there.

MvB It surprises me to some extent, that there is this deep personal motivation, because the movie is such a formal exercise.

What prompts the making of a film is usually some experience that you either may understand before the making, or that you can only figure out in the making, which is mostly the case. The problem is clarified in the making of the film. But as a viewer you do not have to know that. If you have seen a number of my works, you will know that some of them are quite abstract, and that the relationship to everyday live is quite stretching. But most of the time I am interested in what an image represents. At the same time I am also interested in an awareness of the medium that I work with, to acknowledge it is not a picture-window, but a work that is coming to you by means of a technology. To me acknowledging the materials, be it film or something else, is important. It is a way of savoring the character of the medium and the intrinsic possibilities that it has to offer. I do not want to create a dream world, that is not so interesting to me.

MvB Can you imagine what would happen if film would disappear? What would we be missing if the interaction between the lens, the object and the celluloid was to disappear? Would a certain way we reflect on the world disappear too? What would be the difference with digital media? Is there something we cannot report or recollect with a digital camera that we could with film?

I do not feel film is going to disappear in the next ten to fifty years. There are archives and museums that preserve the work, and as long as they show it as film in one way or another, there will be some trace of its unique characters. Hopefully, prints will still be available fifty or even hundred years down the road from us. For the general public, unfortunately film is going to be a more rarified creature. Already most people get their film histories and their film aesthetics from watching film on the television or laptop.

AA The new technologies also changes the relationship between experimental cinema and the viewing behavior of the public. Through all the digital technology we use daily, our viewing behavior and the way we deal with culture has changed dramatically too. Think of people watching a Stan Brakhage movie, downloaded from Youtube on their iPods.

When I work with film I do work with scale. When I work on a film, I look forward to seeing it on a certain scale. The minimal size is not a monitor. Even the largest monitor to me is too small, it won’t work for me. The first or the second public screening of Sidewalk Shuttle was in New York in cinema with a large screen for 35-mm film. I was sitting fairly close to the screen, it was wonderful to see these buildings flying through space on the screen. It was so strong, I could not believe it.
The scale is so important. When I edit I use a flatbed or a viewer, mostly a viewer, but I project my films to see the result. I only use the viewer for the cuts, to find the frame where I want to cut. After I make my cut I splice the film together and I project it. It is not a big image, but it is a projected image. I need to see it in that way. With digital media I have 14-inch monitor, but I do not have a beamer. I hope to buy one eventually but I haven’t yet got one. So I make all my decisions on this little image in a rectangle, that is so different. I know, you can now put films in your pocket and you can look at these films at all times. That is the future for the current generation. When I ask my son if he wants to go to the movies, he says he’d rather watch it on the computer. That is where he prefers to look at his movies. There are all kind of changes taking place. I do not feel that my own work is going to be that much effected by not being able to be seen with a lot of people together. Commercial cinema is much more dependent on this communal aspect.

AA But one can also imagine that exactly the situation that we find ourselves in now, creates for maybe a smaller percentage of people actually a desire and need to go somewhere to see moving images in a perfect setting, in order to immersive oneself in that experience.

As long as these are possibilities, places to see things the way they were meant to be seen, people ought to seek them out. Just like contemporary computer art, certain works have to be seen in the context in which they were created. But a lot of work will have to survive in some or other transitory medium, in order to survive at all. Some works will survive, and others won’t. A hundred years ago, people were still working with magic lanterns and slides. You can transfer that to film or to digital media, but it is not the same thing. So occasionally seeing an actual show, however poor and embarrassing the performance might be, is important, to see the potentials that might have been there. I personally would not like my work to survive on an iPod, I’d rather be unknown.

MvB I can really understand why you would not want to see your work survive on an iPod. But can you explain what it is what would get lost when we see your work on an iPod?

The experience. In other works, you just get a grab of what I have done. The problem is that I have made decisions to release the work, based upon my response to the scale, being able to see it in time, and in being an en-captured viewer in certain conditions. I am willing to have work performed differently, but I think with the films the scale to me is very precious. Especially with my early works, I do not know what they would mean in some other medium. Take for example my work History. It consists basically of film grain. It is working in this strange way where things are going to happen after a while, when you are looking long enough at the screen. History goes on for what seems like forever and film grain is all you see. I have no idea what you would make of it on a television, or a monitor, or an iPod. You have to see that work on a screen, projected, in its own time. When you are sitting in a cinema you know, it is going to take a while. You are in a dark space. You have two, or three choices. One is to get up and leave. Two is close your eyes and take a nap. Three is deciding to put up with it, and and-tryingtrying to see what you can see within this world. You are relaxing, there is no projecting forward, no suspense, you lose sense of time and you start to explore the space. It is like optical art. Then suddenly things are going to happen. You sit there knowing the film is in black and white, but at once you see color. The space becomes convoluted as well. You have an experience that has to do with the medium itself. And on an iPod all of this cannot happen.

MvB An iPod-image cannot change the consciousness?

Yes, that is lost. The iPod cannot offer an alternative vision of the world. The world is complex, you can see it in different ways, you can connect to other configurations of the world, other possibilities of existence, of consciousness. There are ways of presenting it, that show alternative visions. I hope that will still be possible in the future. Digital media is not the end. Blu-Ray is not the end. What’s it called HD, is not the end. Those are all transitory media, everything at this point is transitory. To think of a permanent form, that is dreaming.

MvB What you are describing, I have experienced quite a lot when watching abstract avant-garde movies. There is a sort of transformation for one state to another state. You enter into a stage that Stan Brakhage would say is that of the untutored eye, where you have lost your habit of how you have to see things.

And where you have to start to explore. It is like being lost in a jungle. There are no signs ‘this way out’. You just have to start looking where you are, and see where you are. You have to go through the experience of moving through that space, until you find something, and discover something.
In 1971, I was editing a film, It was around midnight, and there was a black-out. I was in the basement of the building, a large lecture hall in the State of New York University, and I had to make my way out. There were no lights whatsoever. This was before they were required to have generators for all these exit signs. It was quite an experience walking through these hallways with wind blowing through, touching the skin and feeling how the wind feels around the cheeks and ears. I was going through darkness, until I got somewhere. It was an experience of space unlike anything I ever had before, I never had it again, and I still remember it. It took about half an hour to get out. I felt out the walls. The next day I walked through that space and it was as usual, my conditioning has returned, I could close my eyes and I would know where I was and where I had to go. But on that occasion of the black-out I could not rely on those instincts. It was quite an experience. It was heavy. But that is what experience is: being thrown into unchartered territory, then you discover things. You do not want that all the time. But on certain moments it can be very pleasurable, or very painful. It can be rewarding in either case. It opens things up.

Thanks to the Filmmuseum for inviting Ernie Gehr, and giving us the opportunity for the interview.

Ernie Gehr made his debut as a filmmaker in 1968 with the short 16-mm films Wait en Morning. His early work such as Serene Velocity was often related to Structuralist Film. His oeuvre consists of over twenty works. Gehr teached at the San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded the prestigious Maya Deren Award of the American Film Institute.

Filmography
Morning (1968)
Wait (1968)
Reverberation (1969)
Transparency (1969)
Field (1970)
Serene Velocity (1970)
Three (1970)
Still (1969-1971)
History (1970)
Shift (1972-1974)
Eureka (1974)
Behind the Scenes (1975)
Table (1976)
Untitled (1977)
Hotel (1979)
Mirage (1981)
Untitled: Part One 1981 (1981)
Signal - Germany on the Air (1982-1985)
Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991)
Rear Window (1986/1991)
Listen (1986-1991)
This Side of Paradise (1991)
Glider (2001)
Cotton Candy (2001)
Passage (2003)
Carte de Visite (2003)
Precarious Garden (2004)
Before The Olympics (2005)
The Morse Code Operator/The Monkey Wrench (2006)

Copyright to the authors.

admin @ April 26, 2008