Along Brighton Avenue (A.K.A Untitled: Part One, 1981)1981

"Untitled: Part One is a half-hour series of brief close ups of people on the street, shot from a high but still intimate angle as though Gehr were working out of a first story window, a tenement stoop, or the stairs of an elevated train station.  In a constant interplay of figure and ground, the film shows fragments of feet, heads, hands and elbows against the backdrop of an ancient sidewalk.  Gehr periodically blurs the focus to emphasize their shapes, editing to create imaginary interractions.  At times, his subjects saw the air-like magicians to conjure the next shot.  Most frequently, Gehr practices a kind of visual rhyming in which different subjects of similar shapes “complete” each others movements over the course of several shots – such match-cutting reduces a heady, spiral rotation of human forms around an empty patch of weathered pavement.  

Untitled is fast on the eye, with many shock cuts and staccato camera moves. But, partially because the people in it are bundled up in winter clothes, one experiences it as a series of cushioned jolts- the collision of soft buky forces that, even more than steel and chrome vectors of Shift, enter the frame from all directions.  Gehr’s subjects use their hands a lot, and these expressive, vulnerable, fleshy sensors take on a like of their own.  In one sense, Untitled is a jagged assemblage of the most transitory gestures; in another, it is an exercise in Hals-like Portraiture, in which an entire character is evoked through isolated details (the back of a neck, a pair of sollen ankles, the angle of a hat)."   

– J. Hoberman. Ernie Gehr   Walter McBean Gallery, S.F. Art Institute 1995.