Field


Rental Format(s): 16mm film, 18 fps

The frame encloses a rush of diagonal streaks in black and white without any distinguishable depth or recognizable imagery. The speed is so great and the optical highlights so homogenous that it is very difficult to determine whether the movement is downward from the upper left corner of the screen or upward from the opposite corner. I assume that this puzzle is integral to the experience of the film, and furthermore that Gehr deliberately transformed the natural landscape into the very perceptual paradox which Faraday noted in the movement of spinning wheels and which subsequently became the theoretical basis of the phenekistoscope and all subsequent machines for presenting the illusion of movement. ... Nature is so blotted out that we can only take his word for where and how it was shot. Curiously the natural sublime sneaks back into the film by association. The rush of lines and the spires of shadows suggest cascading waters, mountains and pine forests."
- P. Adams Sitney, monograph on Ernie Gehr, 1980

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film, 18 fps $35.00  

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