"Ernie Gehr is a filmmaker's filmmaker... Like Michael Snow, Paul Sharits and others, Gehr has addressed himself to the fundamental qualities of film as film: the paradox of apparent motion, the 'anxiety' arising out of three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional plane, the tension between the photographed image and its material base." (J. Hoberman, Village Voice) Shift (1972/74, c. 10 min, Color): Houston Street in Manhattan, filmed from the window of a 6th-floor loft. "Gehr achieves a delicate balance between the pull of the film as a material thing in itself and the pull of the image as representational" (The Kitchen). Mirage (1981, c. 12 min, Color): "The filmmaker replaced the lens of his Bolex with a semicircular piece of plastic found in a Canal Street junk bin.... The resulting footage is surely the most disorienting negation of Renaissance perspective afforded by any film since (Gehr's 1970 film) History." (J. Hoberman) Rear Window (1986, c. 15 min, Color): Ernie Gehr's latest work, presented tonight in its premiere screening. Signal-Germany on the Air (1982/85, c. 40 min, Color): "Like Atget...Gehr could be said to photograph the street as though it were the scene of a crime. Signal marks the filmmaker's return to Berlin, the city from which his parents were driven in 1939. In this sense, minimal as it may seem, Signal is a film about culture shock, about coping, about memory, about evidence, about the things that remain" (J. Hoberman). "A closer look at Gehr's earlier work reveals...(that) the horror under the surface of daily life has always haunted (his) images. It has been more apparent recently, in the cartoonish automotive violence of Shift.... Signal differs from the earlier work in that it gives a name to the horror" (Harvey Nosowitz, Film Quarterly, Winter '87).