This Side of Paradise


Rental Format(s): 16mm film

"Sounds and images were recorded at the Polish flea-market, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, autumn 1989, a few days before the Berlin Wall came down. An uneasy, almost sort of carnival atmosphere pervaded the place and like some magical crystal ball, reflected both the past and the future."
- Ernie Gehr

"To watch this film is to journey into the underground .... When Gehr inverts his camera, the world turns up-side-down. Heaven and Earth change places. The mud above, the sky below - which side of Paradise, indeed?"
- J. Hoberman

"Gehr has used the reflecting surface of the dirty water puddles to undo the separation of what is valuable from what is not valuable. There is no dichotomy of chance and intention, but instead a lived perceptual encounter. ... Value and fact are equally real/equally illusory in this world out of the mud. The filmmaker's clarity of reception to what camera and recorder touch permits existence to whatever is found. ... Displacement becomes the ground for new place. We see a moving foot flare as the film ends ...."
- Susan Thackrey

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $60.00  

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