Anthology Film Archives

WINDOWED WORLDS: THE FILMS OF BARRY GERSON

May 31 – June 3

May 31 - June 3, 2024

“I see myself more like a poet, but using film images. I like my work to be felt, to make you feel that you can almost touch it. Film is an ethereal thing, images float out in space, and I don’t concern myself too much with practical aspects. […] To me, the dream world knows everything. The dream world is the real world, and it is wise.” –Barry Gerson

An artist, filmmaker, poet, and composer, Barry Gerson’s body of work encompasses 16mm and digital moving-image works, paintings with photographic elements, sculpture, as well as performance (as an actor and a performer of throat music). He uses the formal qualities of film in the service of visual poetry, creating moving-image works that reflect his lyrical exploration of the nature of existence.

Though Gerson’s early films were screened alongside the major avant-garde filmmakers during the 1960s-70s, written about in the pages of Film Culture and other journals, and included in the distribution catalogues of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema, and Castelli/Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, they have been more rarely screened in recent years. Though reminiscent in some ways of contemporaneous films by Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, and others, his films are ultimately highly distinctive, evincing a particularly sustained focus, on the one hand, on exploring the formal properties of the filmic image – the extent to which the “window” of the frame transforms and organizes the observed world into an interrelationship of shapes, lines, and qualities of light – and on the other hand, on using photography to draw out the spiritual or “magical” dimensions of his environment.

Following a two-decade hiatus from filmmaking, brought on by the rising costs of celluloid and a tendency by some to group his work with that of structuralists, Gerson revisited the medium in 2002. He soon turned to digital media, and since 2008 has steadily produced works in that format. To celebrate Gerson’s gifting of his films to Anthology, and the publication of his new book, “Elixir of Light: Intuition, LED Lights and Healing Oneself Through the Super Brain”, we’re thrilled to present the first sustained focus on his moving-image oeuvre for many years, with four programs devoted to his 16mm works from 1961-82, and a fifth program showcasing a selection of his more recent digital works.

“[Gerson’s fascination with light and framing allows him to build cubistic scenarios of lines and blocks of color, as displayed in the paintings of Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and in Edward Hopper’s ‘Room by the Sea’ (1951). Gerson’s camera movements are never the result of apparatus technology. It is the filmmaker who moves, who approaches the world, feels and sees, transforms, reframes, and changes perspectives, creating new realities and paracinematic sculptures. […] The vibrant energy of the objects, sustained in time as ultimate force, exults us and moves us through space smoothly. The eyes are not merely witnessing – stimulated by the lack of objectivity, our vision readjusts preconceived impressions regarding shape, color, timing, and texture. Displacement here, as in life, is an opportunity for change and improvement.” –Mónica Savirón, LUMIÈRE

“Over the…years I have worked in various mediums, each having informed the other in a symbiotic relationship of images and ideas. My overriding concern has involved an ongoing investigation to illuminate the spiritual in the physical world – to make it perceptible, palpable. Since all matter in the Universe pulsates rhythmically, it is therefore, in constant motion. My films/videos become an activated metaphor to elucidate this phenomenon. I attempt to create psychically charged images that are in a constant state of flux – structured formally but with a poetic intent. Through the use of slow movements and small changes the images become felt, eliciting an almost tactile response.” –Barry Gerson

“Barry Gerson emerged in the late ’60s with a series of short films, each exploring a slightly different aspect of seeing. Each little film was centered around a limited, restricted theme, very rigorously structured and executed. As he progressed, his concerns grew in subtlety and complexity. […] His forms are varied, his style is clear and sure, his techniques are complex, his content is magic. These works are among the most interesting in the current American cinema.” –Jonas Mekas, VILLAGE VOICE

Gerson will be in person for all five programs!

Special thanks to Barry Gerson and Paul Smart.

Unless otherwise noted, all film descriptions are by Barry Gerson.

For more info about “Elixir of Light: Intuition, LED Lights and Healing Oneself Through the Super Brain” (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY) – a memoir of the artist’s explorations with color LED therapy lights to heal the various maladies that accompany aging, combined with a reiteration of his theories regarding the energy powers of light and intuition, featuring a foreword by former Whitney Museum and Smithsonian curator John Hanhardt and an introductory essay by French neurologist Pierre LeMarquis – visit: https://stationhill.org/

PROGRAM 1:
THE NEON ROSE 1961-65, 41 min, 16mm

The narrative form expanded, utilizing non-linear sequences within a linear structure. Past, Present, and Future are interwoven and therefore perceived as existing on the same plane.
AUTOMATIC FREE FORM FILM 1968, 16 min, 16mm, silent“A series of exquisite camera creations using a few scraps of phenomena culled from both city and forest for its basic color/light materials, the film has the perfect tension, quietude, impossible existence of a beautifully colored floating soapbubble (and you can even sense it pop at the end).” –Ken Jacobs

Total running time: ca. 60 min.
Fri, May 31 at 7:30.

PROGRAM 2:

GROUP I:
GRASS 1969, 1 min, 16mm, silent
Grass to reeds to sky – the gradual melting of grass image to become the blue of the sky.
ICE 1969, 2 min, 16mm, silent
Sensual icicle images in process of melting – drops of water eventually fall.SNOW 1969, 1 min, 16mm, silentThe mystery of snow illusion – a snow-covered walkway is followed to a short flight of steps to a bicycle wheel transposed by snow.
VIBRATIONS 1969, 8 min, 16mm, silent
“VIBRATIONS is a truly photographic poetry, a transformation of sunlight into art light.” –Michael Snow

GROUP II:
WATER 1969, 4 min, 16mm, silent
Two images of a lapping water level, used at the beginning and end of the film, counterpointing the middle section consisting of flying through clouds and mist.CONTEMPLATING 1969, 12 min, 16mm, silentThe body fluids reacting in unison with the ocean waters.
GENERATIONS 1969, 8 min, 16mm, silent
[D]ynamic shapes emitting energy from the living forms created by subtle camera movements combined with compositional awareness.

GROUP III:
SUNLIGHT 1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent
Sunlight patterns on a window in constant change through subtle camera swings – the motions repeated giving the light a fluid quality.
FLOATING 1970, 15 min, 16mm, silent
Moving images from a windowsill looking out on a cityscape transformed in time and space.
AFTERNOON 1970, 8 min, 16mm, silent
A darkened room in Time with yellow sunlight streaming onto the floor through parted red curtains gently swaying in the breeze.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sat, June 1 at 5:45.

PROGRAM 3:

GROUP IV:
BEADED LIGHT 1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent
“In BEADED LIGHT, Gerson applies an ambiguous procedure to our perception of color and light.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM
DISSOLVING 1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent
An ambiguous shiny grey substance at the bottom part of the frame counterpoints horizontals of clouds and fog as the camera moves up and down – shifting the perspective and therefore the space. A lone bird flies across on a perfect horizontal path.
BEYOND 1970, 4 min, 16mm, silen
t“The foreground discloses the red hair and the shoulders of a girl lying on a beach. [...] At the very end of the film, he raises the camera to a higher angle and the portions of the beach previously obscured by the girl’s form becomes visible and the two spaces – the girl and beach, foreground and background – are joined.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM

GROUP VII:
PORTRAIT OF DIANA 1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent
PORTRAIT OF ANDREW NOREN 1972, 4 min, 16mm, silent
These films are personal light portraits. I consider them unique and beautiful.
LUMINOUS ZONE 1973, 28 min, 16mm, silent
The film is composed of six sections, each having a basic image which is recognizable only in part. The images are framed by various sized black rectangular mattes. [...] Specific rhythms are developed through the use of single frame in conjunction with changing rectangular matte sizes which in turn makes the screen appear to change size.
TRANSLUCENT APPEARANCES 1975, 22 min, 16mm-to-digital
“In [this film], thirty-five different shots of Niagara Falls are blocked by horizontal, monochromatic mattes. The object is shaped – water flowing seeking a form that will suffice.” –Mónica Savirón, LUMIÈRE

Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Sat, June 1 at 7:45.

PROGRAM 4:
THE SECRET ABYSS 1979, 12 min, 16mm
Evocations of a space in the mind – limitless, soundless. Blackness punctuated by bursting water bubbles ascending and descending into the unknown. The color red evokes feelings of the inner self – a microcosmic viewpoint for an expansion of time and space.
SHADOW SPACE 1973, 6 min, 16mm
A confined space alive and teeming with energy – shapes merge forming new shapes.
CELLULOID ILLUMINATIONS 1975, 32 min, 16mm
The film is in three sections each dealing with a different manifestation of the relationships between colors and shapes and their effect on our perception of movement through light.
EPISODES FROM THE SECRET LIFE 1982, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent
Poetic structure created through masking out of two separate images juxtaposing opposite motions, resulting in two visions of the world being viewed simultaneously. Our ideas about space and time, and about what and how we perceive are challenged.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Sun, June 2 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 5:
“Since 2001, my use of the observed world has, to some extent, given way to an imagined space created in the studio through the use of minimal sets composed of objects, which I paint, interacting with controlled light and shadow. At a certain point in time, I began to mix the use of studio objects with elements of the real world. This has enabled me to meld my mind images with material from the natural world. An emphasis is placed on light, color, and texture, elucidated by the use of slow, deliberate, camera movements. This creates a sense, as if one is feeling, touching, the images, i.e., forms responded to by one’s whole body. It becomes an ‘imagistic sculpture’, about volumes in motion and space.” –Barry Gerson

LATE SUMMER 2013, 11 min, digital, silent
STRETCH AND PULL 2014, 3 min, digital, silent
THE UNIVERSE 2009, 7 min, digital
CRYSTAL CANYONS 2016, 3 min, digital, silent
LEAVES OF LIGHT 2022, 4 min, digital
FOGGED WINDOWS 2013, 17 min, digital, silent
SNOWS OF REDUCTION 2010-12, 5.5 min, digital, silent
BLUE FOLLIES 2012, 13 min, digital, silent
MEXICO 2023, 3.5 min, digital

Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Mon, June 3 at 7:30.

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