Side/Walk/Shuttle1991

"Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle presents one of America’s most photographed cities, San Francisco, in images that confound us with their unfamiliar viewpoint and trajectory. We appear to float, to fall and rise, to hang suspended over the cityscape. Even stranger, the city itself appears at points liberated from its fixed geography, its sense of gravity. It seems to have become a freely spinning offspring of Spaceship Earth­—sometimes upside down, sometimes dive-bombing towards the ground below.

Momentarily released from the pull of Earth’s gravity, we never truly leave it. In this film what goes up also comes down. Shot from a glass-enclosed elevator that climbs to a restaurant at the top of the Fairmont Hotel, Gehr’s film ascends only as high as that tall building and the city’s hills. The sense of aerial feats comes entirely from the variety of camera angles Gehr manages to achieve. We do not ride a space shuttle but rather cycle from sky to earth, like a child’s toy propelled back and forth in seemingly endless play.

Gehr’s films generally explore blind spots of experience and perception. Moments of disorientation provide only one aspect of his cinematic voyages. The films ultimately ground themselves (though, more often than not, uncomfortably) in place and history. I say ‘place’ rather than ‘space’ because his films consistently attempt to find a place, to orient a viewpoint, while simultaneously evoking the forces (physical and historic) that make gaining such a grounding so difficult.

The process of placing oneself, as a viewer or as a filmmaker, implies its dialectical partner: displacement. Displacement makes the process of finding a place a precarious, vital, and profoundly aesthetic experience—one that sharpens and tests the senses. For Gehr, a sense of place always contends with the precarious and often violent processes of history, which, in the twentieth century, combined with politics and technology to displace populations across the globe as much as launch ‘men into space.’ The places Gehr surveys in his films—whether New York’s Lower East Side streets, Berlin’s intersections, or the San Francisco Bay—always bear the burden of history. Thus, this vista of San Francisco recalls not only Eadweard Muybridge’s panoramic photographs taken not far from this very spot a century earlier but also the myriad meanings the Golden Gate has had in chronicles of immigration and speculation.

Side/Walk/Shuttle images our nation’s history of expansion toward horizon, its dream of manifest destiny, but with a late-twentieth-century irony that avoids despair over history’s deceptions by carving out a space for contemplation within this vista."

                                                 — Tom Gunning,  Radical Light,  U.C. Press, 2010 

Shown at The New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Rotterdam and London International Film Festivals.