Tom Gunning [ The Films of Ernie Gehr ]

III. The City
...Why the city, where people make the most ruthless demands on one another, where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single moment of contemplation, indemnifies itself in memory, and why the veil it has woven out of our lives shows the images of people less than those of the sites of our encounters with others or ourselves.  Walter Benjamin

Still's city street (where an illusionary depth mingles and merges substantial figures with spectral twins) recalls a short article sent to me by my friend Yuri Tsvian, a Latvian film scholar of uncommon perception, which was published at the turn of the century in Rebus, a Russian journal of the occult.

The article, written by M. V. Pogorelski in 1899, has been on my mind for some time. Pogorelski announces that (to quote Tsvian) "the quantity of multiple reflections that the modern city provides us with has turned it into the natural medium of haunting." Pogorelski illustrated his thesis by a description of a ride through St. Petersburg on a modern horse drawn trolley with glass windows, a description whose imagery seems to marry Still, Eureka and Shift I quote from Tsvian's translation:

...In the window opposite you see the real street; it also reflects the side of the street behind the observer's back. Reflections of the front and rear windows of the car fall on it as well; apart from that, the double reflection of the real part of the street under observance is imprinted on it. The fact that the car itself is in movement makes the whole picture especially complex. In clear air and bright sunlight both real objects and their mirages look particularly life-like, and what you get as a result is a magic picture, extremely complex and mingled...

Passing carriages are not one directional any more, they move in a chaos overtaking themselves or passing through each other. Some carriages and passers-by look as if they were rushing forwards, but at the same time you are aware that, in fact, each step they make takes them backwards. If your attention wanders for a second you also lose the criterion that separates real objects from their equally life-like apparitions.

Gehr's filmmaking remains resolutely rooted in a tangible world and its laws, and is not given to spiritualist musings. However, his exploration of the unnoticed workings of those laws and their effect upon perception, his minute attention to the way light reflects and transforms space – and to the way motion shapes and recreates our visual field – all this leads to images that recall Pogorelski's. The spiritualist's writing shares with Gehr's work a discovery of, and vivid response to, a range of visual phenomenon available in the modern urban environment.

I believe Annette Michelson was the first to point out the key role the urban environment plays in Gehr's films. If this important insight had not occurred before, it is partly because the city Gehr discovers differs sharply from the bustle of crowds and metropolitan distractions found in most city films.

One could almost describe Gehr's urban films as meditations, particularly if one acknowledges both the focused attention and occasional desperation of purpose that underlies meditation.

The city in Gehr's cinema functions partly as a laboratory of perception, where effects of light and shadow, peculiar angles of space, flows of traffic both human and vehicular, and effects of time passing all intersect. It also forms another complex system whose secret life Gehr explores, the apex of the triangle of mutual influence whose other points are the cinema apparatus and human perception.

For Gehr the city is also the ultimate place in which one tries to find oneself and often loses oneself as well. If there is a common image in most of Gehr's city films, it is directional signs. These are the indicators which regulate the circulation of traffic: the lines which mark lanes in the street in Still and Shift; the sharply turning arrows painted on the street that guide turns in Side/Walk/Shuttle; the pedestrian and traffic signs posted in Signal – Germany on the Air.

Few filmmakers have so strongly imaged the city as a circulatory system, a channeling of flows. If the modern city is based on a perspectival logic of commercial centers and receding boulevards, Gehr reveals the twists to this logic, its turns off the main drags, the complexity of its intersections, and the multiple centers that a meditative urban vision can uncover.

If every viewer must find her place in a Gehr film, his city films frequently deal with trying to negotiate the circulatory system of the city. This is most profoundly true in Signal – Germany on the Air, where Gehr juxtaposes a series of views of a complex traffic intersection in Berlin. The overlapping vantage points of successive shots tease us with the possibility of mapping out the total space and finally orienting ourselves.

At the same time the array of directional signs and the tangle of urban objects which solicit our attention increasingly convey the bewilderment of anyone who pauses to contemplate this intersection rather than simply being channeled by it. His other films sometimes view the constant city traffic with bemusement.

The speed of car traffic blurs into superimposition not only in Still, but in an even more focused manner in Shift where opaque and spectral cars move forward and reverse, while an often asynchronous soundtrack not only causes amusement but evokes the way traffic in the city is a presence often heard but unseen.

The city also piles up Iayers of history as well as the flow of traffic, as Still and Eureka show. But whether the city itself retains a memory of its past seems both an ironic and impassioned question in Gehr's city films.
The jolting rhythm of Eureka almost stereographically superimposes the hurried purposes of this frenzied cityfolk, all trying urgently to get somewhere, and our awareness of them as frozen in a past, condemned to constantly reenact this effort of transit. Signal – Germany on the Air raises the specter of history most centrally, as certain urban signs remind us implacably of the role Berlin played as the circulatory center of an industrial and military war against the human race.
 
Are the traces of the past still here, are they tangible, or have they vanished? The question asked playfully by the title and form of Still (Still?) here becomes anguished.

One recalls in the midst of this traffic how important an efficient system of circulation was to the Nazi final solution: the elaborate use of the railway to transport Jews to the death centers, the use even of mobile gas chambers mounted on trucks. If this present day traffic intersection carries the freight of so much past horror, then how can we escape it? And if it doesn't – if the traces are truly dispersed and lost – then how can anything be saved?

Could we say that history is also a matter of perspective, of finding a place from which to sight it? How can I explain my experience while preparing this essay of watching Still for the first time in years? In a dark screening room I discovered (along with its spatial mysteries) its ability to recall the feel of a late spring day and the look of lower Manhattan in the early seventies – an experience so vivid I could feel the sun on my skin and sense the smells of the city when warmth returns to it. Part of what gives Gehr's city films their intensity (and their meditative character) is their profound immersion in a particular gaze that is alert to the spectacle of the city in its most unspectacular moments.

Gehr's city films create a sense of the place from which they are filmed, a place defining some spatial distance, a place arranged for vision. Shift often includes the barely noticeable grid of a window screen before its images. And the telephoto lens in Untitled, Part I (1981) provides an extraordinary sense of both observation and distance in perhaps Gehr's most subtle and moving city film.

Whereas Gehr frequently records the more impersonal aspects of the city, here he focuses on the gestures and circulation of human figures. The magnification of the lens allows him to register the intimate details of the texture of skin or the uncertain tread of an elderly foot, while remaining somewhat outside the scene. In documenting the streetside acts of exchange and encounter in a neighborhood dominated by recent emigrants (largely Jews from Russia), Gehr captures a history of circulation and exile written in the bodies of the city's inhabitants.

  Tom Gunning [ The Films of Ernie Gehr ]