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Reverberations of Light

Combined programme | IFFR 1998

Morning, Wait, Reverberation, Field, HistoryGehr’s earliest films undertake a systematic exploration of the way the basic elements of film, light, image and motion can relate to each other or be pulled apart. By exposing frames for longer periods than normal shooting allowed (up to a minute and a half) in Wait, Gehr rediscovered not only the stillness within motion pictures, but a new relation to light as it ate up the emulsion. Light’s effect on the image, creating or destroying it, is central in Morning as well. Reverberation uses rephotography to crack open the energy of film’s primal matter as images submerge themselves in a dance of film grain. In Field Gehr began his exploration of camera movement, as his sweeping pans convert space into streaking bands of black and white confined within the quadrilateral of the frame. Perhaps the culminating film of this exploration is History, a film which records nothing (it was shot without a lens aimed at a black piece of cloth), but the chemical processes of cinema itself: a roiling surface in which, as Gehr has said, even light and dark are not yet separated, like the moment before Creation.

In this combined programme

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