Ernie Gehr. No blockbusters here, just mind expanders

Ernie Gehr (Photo: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)

By Manohla Dargis

There are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian. The work can also be oblique; this is not a bad thing! His 14-minute film History (1970), to take one extreme example, largely consists of what looks like a sparkly black-and-gray blob that brings to mind a hallucination of a desert night sky, like van Gogh on acid. What you’re looking at, and perhaps losing yourself in, isn’t a representation of something outside the camera, but film itself: those clouds of dye in color film and churning grains in black and white that make up the actual image you see. info

Lux Algebra

Side/Walk/Shuttle, Ernie Gehr

Algebra is the branch of mathematics that studies the combination of elements of abstract structures according to certain rules. In this edition we appropriate a word that evokes science to play within programming with the different expressions that the algebra of light -that is, the algebra of cinema- can have. For cinema is a temporary art, in which montage and structure (and its combinatorial rules) are basic pillars. info