Signal - Germany on the Air


Rental Format(s): 16mm film

"... SIGNAL is a city dirge, a tensely ominous diary of a visit to Berlin, one of the grimmest loci of twentieth-century consciousness. ... Gehr's visit was not a casual tourist excursion. But for an 'accident' of history it would have been his childhood home. ... On the surface, Gehr's film looks like another exercise in choreographic human, vehicular, and architectural arrangements into formal patterns of conjunction and difference. His means are astonishingly simple: straight camera recording of a central and several ancillary sites, sharp cutting, and indigenous sound recording. But within these parameters Gehr unfolds an elaborate interplay of presence and absence that far exceeds his documentary approach."
- Paul Arthur, Motion Picture

"[W]hile reintroducing social concerns, SIGNAL does not give us facts about the Nazi period or present-day Germany; Gehr's film is instead about a form of thinking. It addresses the mental processes that might govern looking at a Berlin street, rather than literally explicating present or past. ... Gehr's particular vision in SIGNAL is doubtless inflected by the deep emotions he must have felt in trying to view a city that at one point in its history would have denied his parents life and him birth."
- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $140.00  

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