I don’t think there’s much difference between now and 20 or 30 years ago, aside from the added stress in our daily lives.
I’m still very much involved in challenging myself and the viewer. I want to see. I want an experience of a work. Someone is making something — I really want to understand what that person has created. I want to have a sense of the work, as a human experience, hopefully making my life a little bit richer. And that takes time. It takes time to see things. It’s not that my vision is so slow. But I really need time, and I think so do other people.
Sometimes when some of my work moves slowly it’s to force someone in a way, including myself as a viewer, to actually look at what is there, to discover things. I don’t see everything I’ve recorded or put together or recorded till later on.
I find it really pleasurable. And part of it comes from looking at paintings and listening to music — over and over and over again.
Can We See Philosophy? A Dialogue With Ernie Gehr
by Peter Catapano and Ernie Geha
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/can-we-see-philosophy-a-dialog-with-ernie-gehr/?ref=opinion&_r=0
The common currency of philosophy is language. But does it have to be?
In other words, can a non-verbal, visual experience qualify as philosophical inquiry? Can philosophy be an act of seeing rather than a verbal one? Can it be a film? Can the vehicle of expression be light?
Not surprisingly — we are discussing philosophy after all —the answers to these questions vary. Some claim that a film can not do the “hard work” of philosophy — that is, the detailed, often complex reasoning that spoken and written language can perform so thoroughly. While distinguished written works in the 20th century by thinkers like Stanley Cavell established film as an appropriate subject for philosophy, the question of whether a film itself can be or do philosophy remains more contentious.
Ernie Gehr is generally considered one of the most penetrating and influential avant garde filmmakers working today. Gehr, who was born in 1941 and is often grouped with the “structuralist” filmmakers of the 1960s and ‘70s like Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, creates non-narrative works — sometimes jarring or disorientating, often meditative — that naturally raise questions about the physical world and human perception. (This 2011 New York Times article by Manohla Dargis is an excellent general introduction to Gehr’s work.)
Whether or not one accepts the film-is-philosophy assertion, Gehr’s work falls firmly into the realm of direct experience and inquiry. According to the film scholar and writer Scott MacDonald, whose series of “Critical Cinema” interviews with filmmakers are a standard source in the field, Gehr is one of a number of filmmakers whose work is animated by the “idea of using cinema as a retraining of perception, often of slowing us down so that we can truly see and hear.” Works like his 1991 film “Side/Walk/Shuttle” subvert the viewer’s learned sense of motion, environmental sound and gravity. His most famous film, the 1970 “Serene Velocity,” uses a single drab interior — a hallway in an academic building at SUNY Binghamton — to do the same with our sense of perspective, space and light. Many of his more recent works (he has made nearly 50 since switching from film to video, for financial reasons, in 2004) pose the same challenges.
As a filmmaker, Gehr makes no particular claims to philosophy, but believes that the various components that go into the viewing experience, including the material of film and video themselves, are “all part of the experience of consciousness.” Film, he wrote in 1971, “does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind.”
With the idea that philosophy is connected to and enriched by and sometimes advanced by other arts, I interviewed Ernie Gehr for The Stone at his home in Brooklyn in September. The occasion for this talk is a premiere screening of five of Gehr’s new video works, all from 2013, to be held at Lincoln Center on Sunday, Oct. 6, as part the New York Film Festival’s “Views From the Avant Garde,” where 45 programs of avant garde films and videos are being shown this week.
Below are edited excerpts from our discussion.
Peter Catapano, editor, The Stone.
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STONE: The visual diet of ordinary people — at very least the 2.5 billion or so who are connected to the Internet — has changed drastically in the past two decades. The amount of created visual language we consume — photos, television, movies and video clips — is exponentially larger and the pace at which we consume it much quicker. How do you think a young person raised in this environment would see your films?
E.G.: I don’t know. Most likely it would vary from one individual to the next. There are definitely differences — I wouldn’t say in languages but in techniques.
For example, movies from an earlier period, say the ‘50s or ’60, may now seem very slow to some people because the cutting or action was not as fast as in contemporary movies. The cutting was minimal, with some exceptions — 20 seconds, whatever. Now commercials and television have become great factors in people being able to just such switch channels. I’m using the term “commercial” in a really neutral sense; I’m not putting anything on it.
Likewise with sound. In order to keep people’s attention, movies use sound more intensely now than ever before. The idea of a moment of silence, for example — a producer would panic if a director would do that. It’s also played in movie theaters at a higher volume than it’s ever been. I just find it too much sometimes.
It doesn’t mean that people are picking up on things more rapidly than they did 40, 50, 100 years ago. I doubt it. It’s just that these rapid cuts — the best examples are contemporary coming attractions, TV commercials or MTV — are not involved with making you see something or reflect upon something.
Maybe if human creatures are around 1,000 years from now something will happen to our wiring. If things keep moving in the same direction, maybe humans will be able to pick things up faster. But I don’t think there’s much difference between now and 20 or 30 years ago, aside from the added stress in our daily lives.
I’m still very much involved in challenging myself and the viewer. I want to see. I want an experience of a work. Someone is making something — I really want to understand what that person has created. I want to have a sense of the work, as a human experience, hopefully making my life a little bit richer. And that takes time. It takes time to see things. It’s not that my vision is so slow. But I really need time, and I think so do other people.
Sometimes when some of my work moves slowly it’s to force someone in a way, including myself as a viewer, to actually look at what is there, to discover things. I don’t see everything I’ve recorded or put together or recorded till later on.
I find it really pleasurable. And part of it comes from looking at paintings and listening to music — over and over and over again. I’m talking about not songs but instrumental music, where I try to understand how a passage here may go with something that I might have heard earlier.
STONE: What sort of music do you listen to?
E.G.: I listen to mostly, but not exclusively, classical music. My favorite composer is Charles Ives. He constantly surprises me. Here you have music, especially if you hear his work in a concert hall, you hear it almost for the first time. It’s amazing how much is happening. And if you don’t pay attention, it’s a problem.
STONE: A recent article in The Times noted how large museums are moving towards proving the public an “experience” — like the recent “Rain” exhibition at MOMA —rather asking them to sit and look at something static. Is it true that people want to be in control of an experience or is it more about capturing more people into a space?
E.G.: Numbers seem to play a huge role. The more people that come to a museum, the better — as far as the museum goes. And part of it, I totally understand. Museums are getting larger and larger, and employing more people and there are more and more expenditures and in order to survive, they need greater attendance. But it’s a dual thing — the more people you have, it’s like going to a shopping mall, and it becomes difficult to have an experience.
I sound elitist in that respect but I don’t mean it that way.
I used to enjoy going to museums very much because it was a place where … I’m not sure I would use the word meditation, because when I am focused on something I am actually quite tense. I try to see it with all my senses and that means I can’t think about myself so much but respond to everything that’s there as fully as I can. And that really requires time and concentration.
And people don’t have time now.
STONE: If you look at the very popular new age trend of meditation, of trying to slow down and reduce stress by finding quiet time — we find something akin to self-help versions of what a viewer might get watching some of your work, which is very focused on certain images and forces the viewer to pay attention. Do you think there is some sort of need for people to focus the mind in this way, even though they think they want more and more stimulation?
E.G.: The first work of mine that you saw was “Still” (1969-1971). Part of what I was interested in was going counter to the grain of the quick take. This was the era of the Vietnam War, and you would see films that were for or against the war. I always felt like these movies were at the time hitting me on the head telling me “this is good” or “this is bad.” I couldn’t think for myself when I was seeing any of these works. And I wanted very much some work that would just feed me information, just neutral, just report. I like to decide for myself. Because the world is made up of so many people, with so many different perspectives. We’re not going to agree on everything. And to tell me it’s good or bad is always, among other things, an oversimplification of reality. And by reality I don’t mean just world events but even what we are looking at. So “Still” was in part made with some of that perspective.
And if you look at it even in terms of subject matter — forget about how weird it looks for a second. Here you have a shot of a street [31st Street in Manhattan], fairly common, mundane. There is nothing special about it, nothing sexy, attractive about it. Some people are passing by. So if you sit there in this movie theater and you start looking, and let’s say you’re not interested in formal perceptual issues, you watch this minimal amount of cars passing. What is this image? It’s an urban setting. Buildings across the street. There’s a store, “Early American.” Next to it, Kastos, a soda/lunch place. There’s a tree surrounded by concrete. Nature exists in this way in an urban setting. We’re not in the country.
So it gives you time to reflect upon that. Also the concrete, the street, there’s just continual traffic. I know it’s horrible — the sound. So how good is that for human existence? Maybe you’ll think about that maybe you won’t. So without my telling you this is good or bad for you, it’s just presenting to you, just giving the continual take, no editorial, just showing you, not just the exciting moments. It’s just a continual take, letting you decide whether that is good for human existence.
STONE: In an attempt to respect the categories of philosophy, I looked into some views on the distinction between film criticism and film philosophy and came across this in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Whenever scholars attempt to spell out what film is (Is film art? How is it different from other arts?) their discourse becomes necessarily philosophical.” Do people who actually make films think about questions like this?
E.G.: Yes. That is an issue. What is it you are making? It’s always an issue.
In the late 1960s, I had recently completed my first two 16-millimeter films — a short piece called “Morning,” and “Wait.” Around that time, I went to see an Ingmar Bergman film called “The Seventh Seal.” These big philosophical questions about life and death. And I kept saying to myself, O.K, this is a big issue you’re talking about. But you’re not talking about film. I made these two little pieces that have to do with light, and the absence of light. Each frame is recorded at a different exposure so it’s either existing or not existing.
What is film? Why work with it? It’s like why do you use paint? Or why do you use paper and pencil or written language? It was very important, yes.
But things just happen. There was no particular course where one thing led to another. I didn’t start saying, “So what is film?” then came up with some idea. It was worked out intuitively, and a lot had to do with life experience with the medium of film, of going to the cinemas from childhood on and having different responses — to the place where the movies where shown, to the image and screen, to what the movies were doing to me, psychologically and especially emotionally, being kind of moved in different directions and finding that I had no control over them. So that molded to some degree my coming to film.
But another factor was coming across a flip book. It might have been before I was 10 or somewhere in my early teens. Somebody gave me this flip book, just sheets of paper and as you use your thumb to move those sheets, still images take on a life, they start to move, but you can move them forward and backwards, you can flip it around. If you take out the staple as I did in that point in time, and shuffled those images around you could get somewhat of a warped image from the straight look of what was there, say, someone jumping over a fence.
This was something I felt I could do myself. I wasn’t thinking “Oh, I can work with John Wayne in 35 millimeter!” This was real; it was exciting to me, the possibilities that were there. The relationship of a still to a moving image — that was so haunting. And I think my clearest articulation — thought not the only one — I made in that respect is the work “Serene Velocity.” It deals with space, and what happens on the plane, with the fact that you are working with this deep space and the same time with frames, no movement. It’s all in the way we see. It’s real. The experience of space is real.
It is a question that is always haunting me: What is it that I’m working with? It’s also, What is a film? What is a digital work? Is it the physical item? Is it the projector? The strip of film? The tape? The disc? It’s all part of it. It’s mixed media. And the way these things all interact tell us so much about human perception and experience and the way one sees anything in the world.
I do reflect upon that. And if that is reflected in the work it needs to come from within the work, rather than something superimposed.
STONE: Like in the Bergman film, where they ask the question or state the problem and we or the characters are meant to think about it? But you are using the language of the image instead.
E.G.: Yes. And it requires the viewer to lean forward and ask these questions. What are these 16 or 18 or 24 flickerings? What is meant by the “life” of the film? You pull the plug, and there is no film on the screen. You close your eyes and there is no film, even if there is one on screen. So these are questions that do weigh. How to articulate them with the medium? You need to reflect upon the medium itself. What are the characteristics of the medium and how can you make them come alive for someone else?
Photographic emulsions, those chemicals — they are so alive. Light strikes them and there’s this phenomenal thing happening. You have to respond to that. You have to imagine and try to bring that alive in a work. And that’s not easy.
A Playground with No Supervision: An Interview with Ernie Gehr
by Daniel Kasman
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/a-playground-with-no-supervision-an-interview-with-ernie-gehr
3 shots, 3 setting sun, and a world’s worth of light and play. Ernie Gehr’s Waterfront Follies, screened in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program, as well as at the Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar at the New York Film Festival, sets the rules and let’s the world (and the audience) do the work. Gehr records three Brooklyn waterfront sunsets in single shot long takes on his digital camera, each take accompanied by a direct sound recording from the area. Each shot, each sun, each waterfront has a remarkably different character.
The first is the showstopper, the most dynamic of the trio. With boat traffic at its peak, it plays with depth of space as rivercraft come in and out, closer and farther from the camera, and a lone cloud dissipates while the water gets darker and more desolate as the sun lowers towards the horizon. As the last ferry leaves the shot it feels like a world has evacuated some impending doom. If it were not for the hilarious soundtrack at the start of a Spanish man approaching Gehr somewhere behind the camera and talking travel and food as the filmmaker tries to say as little as possible, this vibrant opening gloaming might seem positively apocalyptic.
The high point for light is the second shot, flatter than the first, with a quay breaking into the bottom 1/3 of the shot, changing the quality of light, water texture, and color in the frame. The drama of the first shot’s water activity is replaced by the drama of the sun itself—not its setting but, shockingly, the way its movement interacts with a horizon of invisible clouds in such a way that the sun literally appears to be disintegrating before our eyes, crumbling as much as a liquid blob can, bit by bit. Bells sound constantly in the background in what initially seems like mourning—until, several gloomy minutes later, the sun re-emerges, reformed, triumphant.
The bells link the 2nd shot with the last, which peal over a soundtrack where another passerby asks Gehr what he intends to see or find by shooting the waterfront, to which the reticent cameraman replies: “we’ll see.” Before the screening at TIFF, Gehr suggested the audience “see as much as they can, moment to moment, second to second,” and these three shots, despite their utter simplicity and the patience asked for from the audience, are replete with micro-narratives, color, emotion, and the textures of painting, of cinema, and of the movement of life.
I had a chance to talk with Ernie Gehr in Toronto about the film. Special thanks to Alley Pezanoski-Browne for assisting in the interview.
***
DANIEL KASMAN: How did this video get made?
ERNIE GEHR: In the past I would apply for grants. I wanted funding but I was also shy. I didn’t get as many grants as I wanted to, and later on there’s more competition, a new generation of filmmaker, and they’re competing and I’m supposed to be established and when you’re established, they ask, “why are you applying for grants?” But I wasn’t making a living! So there were frustrations and I wouldn’t apply, I made a living teaching, but I didn’t want hold onto a regular teaching position for a long time. I didn’t teach all the time; I didn’t have money all the time, and I didn’t have savings; my parents couldn’t support me. So I made works when I was able to. Otherwise you would have seen—not as many as Brakhage—but probably twice as many pieces. You churn out X number of pieces one year, it doesn’t mean you’ll make as many next year, you might have a break, the tension is out, and I can’t do it. I try to work, try to be interested, but I need to take a break from making something, live my life for another few months and hopefully something will instigate a new work at that point. I can’t predict!
KASMAN: Did Waterfront Follies come from a period of productivity?
GEHR: Between 1988 and 2005-2006 I taught on a regular basis at San Francisco Art Institute, so that was the only time when I taught without any stopping; I also taught at Berkeley at the same time. Then I stopped teaching and moved back to New York, and I have some time on my hands, and I’m getting old, and I know I should work as long as I’m mobile. It’s mostly feeling a pull or being attracted to something, so I just work. When I work with film, because it’s so expensive, I have to pay for every frame, so to speak; I have to be certain what I want to do and how I want to do it. So my shooting ratio was as close as 1-to-1 as possible; it hardly ever was, but I tried. But with video, you have a tape that’s one hour, and buy many of them for cheap, so I allow myself the luxury to follow an impulse without asking myself why do I want to record this image. It takes me a while sometimes to become conscious of why I found that image. I trust my intuition; I’ve been working since the 1960s, and there’s some things you do consciously and certain things where you follow your intuition, you know something is driving you to work in a particular way to follow certain possibilities. You may not be able to articulate that, and sometimes it’s even dangerous for people to articulate themselves, because then you can end up simplifying it, and the tension that you need to feel is gone.
KASMAN: So I guess we shouldn’t be talking about the work!
GEHR: Oh it’s different, what’s completed is completed. There’s work that’s not completed that I never talk about, I never talk about works I want to make. Even when I apply for a grant—I say when—there’s the problem of the description they want of what I want to do. The way I work, it is very difficult to write down what I want to do, then I may not be interested, I would have to refer to that paper, what I said—it’s embarrassing. So I fill out applications so vaguely it could apply to anything, though it may not convince anybody.
KASMAN: Did this video originate from a specific idea? Or perhaps from the location?
GEHR: It’s in Brooklyn, near Carroll Gardens, on the other side of the BQE.
KASMAN: The three shots, are they all from the same geographic location? Because the last two shots have the bells pealing on the soundtrack, which is missing from the first shot.
GEHR: They were all recorded in my neighborhood, in Red Hook. I shot this near Fairway market, on the other side of which the Statue of Library, but I just avoided putting that in the shot. [Laughs] So I shot towards New Jersey. I guess you see Staten Island a little bit in the last shot, I think.
KASMAN: Where did the sounds of the bells come from?
GEHR: If you go to Fairway, to the right, there’s a little barge that has a miniature museum, and that barge has these bells inside. So I just placed my camera near it, and the sound is there.
KASMAN: How much set-up did you do, or was the location found by chance?
GEHR: I was recording material for a different piece, which is still a work in progress at the moment. I was walking around the other side of the area, towards that Ikea, and going back to my car suddenly there it is in front of me—this sunset. I said to myself, “this is such a cliché, how could I do this,” but somehow a thousand different things were running through my mind. It looked a bit like Monet, this sunset; that shot’s actually not in the film, it’s in the other project. But I set-up the camera, I said, “it’s tape, I can always erase it.” And it only took ten minutes for the sun to set, it was very beautiful, and I’ll use that take for something else. Looking at that take subsequently, I had some other thoughts and that included the possibility of making something. So it began by recording an image that seemed too much, for me—someone else might of found this a romantic image.
KASMAN: What were you thinking that let you get past that immediate negative impulse?
GEHR: Let me put it this way. I don’t always succeed, but I’m interested in a work that’s like a field, a force field. A playground where there is no supervision, someone doesn’t say look over here, see that over there now; but more like a place where you can get lost, discover your own movie if you wish, your own pleasures. I look at a lot of works in other media, paintings and music, and I often have a problem. I admire some works that are so careful that ever brush stroke is determined and very carefully placed on the canvas and you can see how it relates to everything, how it makes absolute sense along with every other brush stroke—I can admire the craftsmanship, but I also find it claustrophobic, I find I need a space that’s more open. I’m looking at things for myself, I want the freedom to be able to see and decide for myself what’s taking place there. That’s something that’s not possible with things that are too directed. So both with the title of the work and with in terms of what I looked at, I determined the outer parameters of the work, what’s within the rectangle, zoom closer in, farther out, I determine the focus. The beginning, the ending; I know the work is going to be flat no matter how 3-dimensional the location is. I do hold a lot of control, and ultimately I feel I am responsible for the work on the whole, even if I set the recording, walk away, and come back. Because I look at the work and what it’s doing or not doing, and if I accept what it is, if I release it, I’m responsible, whether something is intended or not intended.
KASMAN: How much did the soundtrack of each take influence your decision to keep that take in the final work? You said at the screening that you chose these three takes from roughly 20-25 you shot.
GEHR: Each take had its own character. That middle section, for example, would have been very tough to put it out there as it is with its duration. Its soundtrack, the bells, are a relief that allows you to have a rhythm outside of the slow change of the shot. Actually, the changes are dramatic.
KASMAN: When I realized the sun’s color mutation made it look like it was crumbling…I had never seen an effect like that. And then it re-appears!
GEHR: Yes, one of the things I’m interested in in this particular work is the color changes.
KASMAN: At the screening in Toronto, Darren Hughes asked what the video would have been like if you had shot it on film. Aside from saying that you had no idea since it was not shot on film, you said to make Waterfront Follies you set the camera up, set it to manual, and any sort of changes in color or texture in each take was based on the relationship between the light coming into the camera and the digital recording of this light. Is this interaction something that interests you about digital photography?
GEHR: Those effects would have happened on film too, though I don’t know how it would have looked. One thing that is different is that when you are working with film you are working with an intermittent projection of light, and even if you think you see it, it is different; on video there’s this interlacing taking place. On digital the image is softer. I wasn’t working in HD, I don’t know if the image would be sharper.
KASMAN: In the second take, because of the dividing line of the rocks which separate both part of the water and part of the frame, my eyes kept being drawn to the radically different color and different rhythm of the water on the inside of those rocks, closer to the camera. In combination with the long-take and still camera, it achieved a kind of hypnotic quality. I gradually thought—and I don’t know if this is true or a more experiential reaction—that the digital video couldn’t keep up with the roiling texture of the sea. You mentioned that the first take you shot, the one that’s not in the film, had an Impressionistic look, like Monet, and this is almost what I saw, a pixilated swath of color with the movement of the sea that the digital almost could grasp but couldn’t quite capture. A great texture to the image.
GEHR: At this point, after so many years working with video, I don’t even know the difference between film and video. I don’t even know what it would be like on film! First of all, I couldn’t do this on film. I didn’t see the clouds when I was shooting, and so when the sun disappeared halfway through the take, if I was filming, once the sun was hiding under the clouds, I would have stopped, “ok, that’s the end of the take.” But with videotape, I held it wanting to see how the light would change, the temperature of the color. And in regards to what you were saying about the digital texture, there are layers in the water. There’s a rhyming thing—it’s almost embarrassing, and it’s only an afterthought—there are the dark rocks in the foreground, and they rhyme of course with the rhyme with the rectangle of the frame itself, and in the background the trees in New Jersey, and its grey. It’s the old classical thing where if you have a color that’s dark you put it in the front and so it seems closer and you make the color lighter and lighter as the distance is supposed to recede. So you have these two bodies of water, and the colors shift slowly. The water that’s further away there’s only a little bit of green at the beginning of the take, but by the end the whole thing is green, it’s amazing. The body of water that’s in the front remains the same purplish color, except for the beginning when it takes on the reflection of the sun, but the farther body looks like something else, it’s this red thing, this red color, but it’s not like the reflection in the closer body.
I’m really amazed at how the sky, for example, seems to have a certain kind of depth to it when the sun is there, and when it’s really gone the shot is flat like a Rothko painting, these clouds. I had never thought of Rothko for this!
KASMAN: You mentioned at the screening this that was only the second time you had seen Waterfront Follies on the big screen, having made it on your 14-inch monitor. How does the work play differently for you when projected?
GEHR: It’s important to see on the big screen, at least for me. One level has to do with the scale. There are qualities of the work that only become apparent when you see it on the big screen, maybe not even on the first viewing.
KASMAN: If you are editing or putting this together on a small screen, that’s a pretty dramatic difference in terms of what you are seeing there versus what might be seen when projected.
GEHR: That’s really nerve-wracking for me; I get very nervous the first time it is screened. I know I should project it. When I work with film, the only time I use a viewer is to find the frame. I edit with the projector, so I watch it with the projector. I made films to be projected, not to be seen on a viewer. And I couldn’t judge the character of the work except when it was projected. It’s only been with video, because I don’t want to spend another $800 or $1000 on a digital projector.
KASMAN: So it’s back to economics again.
GEHR: Yes. I feel at this point there are too many times when I’m really thrown off, and I make changes after the screening. It’s happened with little pieces I show at Views from the Avant-garde in New York, I notice things I hadn’t seen on the monitor, so the works get re-edited. Though most of the people who are there never get to see it again. It’s a problem. I try to see it on a big screen, but it’s not the same actually seeing it on a theater screen. There are works that work better on a monitor, of course.
KASMAN: I remember a work of your screen recently in New York, Shadows where the shadows and light play against the walls; that, for example, I can imagine has a level of intimacy that works better on a small screen rather than blown up.
GEHR: Yes, on a big screen that one was nerve-wracking. It’s not just that there’s people, it’s seeing it on this other scale. It’s personal, I have to take a step back because I’ve been too close to a work.
KASMAN: Would you want to shoot in HD if you could, is that another issue of economics? Or do you prefer standard definition.
GEHR: I’ve been working with the same camcorder since 1998. It’s a Sony TRV-900.
KASMAN: A resilient camera!
GEHR: I was lucky; but now the zoom has a mind of its own. I’m interested in an HD; the cost has been a problem. I want something that’s light; ideally I want something like a small little camcorder, but the manual controls on those are ridiculous. And the expensive ones—not that I want to buy them—are too heavy and too intimidating. You can’t work in, say, this coffee shop and record something. With a small camera, I can put it down here and record that couple over there and then put it back in my pocket. The other problem is that I work with tape, which lasts for years. For HD, 99.9% is solid state or something else and there’s this competition between the companies, and they aren’t all compatible. It’s crazy. It’s only a question of time, and then they’ll change to a different format, and then something else. Solid state won’t be around forever, so I have to live with that too. Still, I will be switching, soon.
What has really held me back from HD has been the format. Because unless you block off the sides you are working with a widescreen form, going from squares to rectangles.
KASMAN: I don’t know if this is possible since I’m not a filmmaker, but I assumed because the HD image was so high resolution that you could crop your own frame from the master, widescreen image.
GEHR: You can do that, but then you have these two black areas, and if you project it you can matte the image with curtains of the theater, but if you show it on a monitor you have these black areas. It’s a totally different personality, for me. Opening up the frame has this other feel, and I’m trying to deal with that personality, and I’m still having a problem with that.
KASMAN: That’s part of the fun though, right? Finding a solution to that problem.
GEHR: I have to accept it, frankly. There’s something about it I don’t like, the wide image is clunky. Say if I want to cut, once it opens up, the emphasis is on the horizon, and it changes the dynamics. The wider the image, the more violence there are in movies, lighter sound, all in order to get beyond the point that…
KASMAN: …the edits are jarring?
GEHR: Yes, and you need shorter takes, so it’s like clash, clash, clash. It’s an entirely new dynamic. I have to live with it, come to terms with it.
KASMAN: Well, you don’t have to.
GEHR: But my camcorder is dying, so I will.
photo: Waterfront Follies
by Ernie Gehr
American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of sublime extended landscape that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film’s structure and soundtrack work as a reminder of the constant intersections between life’s impulsiveness and beauty.
—tiff.net