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| An image from “Side/Walk/Shuttle” (1991) by Ernie Gehr. Shot from the glass elevator outside the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, the film uses long shots and inverted images, among other techniques. |
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.
