Artist in Person Described as "a filmmaker's filmmaker" by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, Ernie Gehr has been making films since 1968 and received the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990. He is teaching Avant-Garde Film at UC Berkeley this semester. Serene Velocity (1970, 23 mins, Silent): "Serene Velocity is a literal 'Shock Corridor' wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway....Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala."-J. Hoberman Table (1976, 16 mins, Silent): "A celluloid equivalent of a cubist still life-with an uncanny element of Vermeer as well. The subject is an ordinary kitchen table, a homely clutter of crockery and utensils (transformed) into a stuttering, hypnotic shuffle."-J. H. Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991, 40 mins): "The work was...informed by an interest in panoramas and the urban landscape. In this latter respect Eadweard Muybridge's photographic panoramas of San Francisco from the 1870s as well as the over-all topography of the city itself were sources of inspiration. (T)he shape and character of the work was tempered by reflections upon a lifetime of displacement, moving from place to place, and haunted by recurring memories of other places, other possible yet unlikely 'homes' I once passed through."-Ernie Gehr