For Daniel1992

“For Daniel, Gehr’s longest film to date, records in contrast the early life of his son, someone whom he will live with for all his life and whose places will always be related to Gehr’s. Although hardly the sudden encounter that Gehr happened upon in Berlin, Gehr indicates he initially had no intention of making a film when he began filming his infant son. While Gehr sometimes claims this film is merely a home movie (and in a profound sense it truly is), For Daniel is also one of Gehr’s most thorough engagements with the sense of finding a place. It is, as he has put it, a film of a human being coming into the world, a process here documented and imaged with a tact and care I have rarely experienced in the cinema.

Although I have experienced few films as loving as this one, it is never sentimental. The early images of Daniel soon after birth (an emergency delivery) capture the pure pain of a vulnerable child thrust out into a cold world. His mouth, eyes, hands all seem tensed against a world that seems un-welcoming to the frail creature. Even the baby’s sleep (so falsely idealized by a society frightened to acknowledge the helplessness from which we come) seems a constant labor of flexing hands, stretching limbs. But as time moves on, the world becomes a source of fascination (the mobile the infant gazes at) and curiosity. Spastic motions of hands and face become expressions and gestures, and the infant initially swaddled in blankets emerges into a world. The child discovers space and objects, constantly working at getting to know the world around him through all his senses, feeling all the corners and edges of things, propelling himself through space. Gehr, the filmmaker, finds his subject (framed so closely at first) wriggling out of his frames, and has to pull back to a wider view as his son discovers room to move in. The enclosed world collapses and a larger world of nature and other delights (a merry go round) arises, as the child’s own ability to move greets the world with leaps and hops. Objects once held with simple curiosity become tools that change things, scissors that cut, puzzles that fit together, crayons and clay that take a shape and create form as one uses them. The delight and discovery of this beautiful child is never less than a serious business: the difficult, even if exhilarating, process by which a child appropriates a space for himself, makes his world a place.”

   —   Tom Gunning, “Placing the Films of Ernie Gehr”, Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, MOMI, 1999