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

Metrics and Rhyme

Pattern, measure, structure, correspondences, rhythms and combinations. This group of films join forces to think about the different expressions of these ideas in cinema. From the geometry in the composition of a shot, to the precision in the cuts, going through the ordering of the world in preconceived structures. The form as reason and guide, the own possibilities of cinema (and only of cinema) put in game, and turned also into a form to play. 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