History1970

Film in its primordial state in which patterns of light and darkness are still undivided.  Like the natural order of the universe, an unbroken flow in which movement and distribution of tension is infinitely subtle, and a finite orientation seems impossible.  –Ernie Gehr

If one simply read a description of History, it could seem the ultimate minimalist work or even a neo-dada joke. Gehr made this film without a lens in the camera so that the exposed film registered no representational image at all, simply the dance of emulsion as it was eaten up by light and digested by processing.  Although this might sound like the driest conception of conceptual art, when projected on the screen, the drama of this process astonishes. Certainly this nearly infinite and constantly renewing dance of threats of darkness and points of light evokes cosmic imagery, as if one was witnessing the birth of stars and night, or the primary chaos before the demiurge separated darkness from light.  But this is more than a mystical Rorschach Test. One soon realizes that the process one is watching makes no metaphorical claim, but rather it demonstrates. We are actually seeing, not the cosmos but as Gehr’s described it, “Film in its primordial state in which patterns of light and darkness – planes – are still undivided.”  We need not reach here for an image beyond History or language; we see directly the pulsing of films’ secret life, a rhythm that invisibly underlies the processing of every film ever made. Gehr is no more minimalist that an X-Ray is, and this film is no joke.  History establishes one of the central rules of Gehr’s work: that an almost ascetic paring down of means can yield a nearly infinite return in perceptual richness.  –Tom Gunning, The Films of Ernie Gehr, S.F. Cinemateque 1993

"At last, the first film!" –Micheal Snow