Field (Ernie Gehr, 1970) (Patreon)

Through the kind assistance of Mr. James Hansen, I was able to finally see one of the few classic Ernie Gehr films that had thus far eluded me, and it did not disappoint. Made in the same year as Serene Velocity, which many still consider to be Gehr's signature film, Field exhibits completely different compositional tendencies while also adhering to the same abstract painterly approach as SV. Dozens of commentators over the years have likened SV to a Frank Stella canvas, and this comparison is certainly not wrong. Where Stella was interested in generating a form of painting that pushed attention from the center to the frame, as a kind of propulsive gesture, Gehr's film was similarly attentive to the energy vortex that could be created simply by continually redirecting a viewer's focus from the edge to the center and back again.

There is no direct painterly analogue for Field, but it feels as though there should have been, like Gehr hit upon a kind of intellectual gap in minimalist painting that needed filling. Every bit as dynamic as SV, and arguably more, Field works more directly with the problems of flatness and depth, the problem of light as a force that can suggest space simply through the undulating movement of black and white. Field consists of a series of diagonal motion lines, presumably produced through high-velocity camera motion. The lines consistently move from the lower left-hand to the upper-right hand corner of the screen, and as the film wears on, there is an occasional flash of white.

So essentially, Field is a study in black, white, and gray, with the intensity and thickness of the lines changing depending on light quality and, presumably, the objects in front of the camera that are being abstracted through motion. So sometimes there is a smooth, even palette of gray, while at other times Gehr gets some deep, chunky black lines that play against the white to create momentary pulsions of depth and push/pull. The overall sensation is not unlike being inside a tornado, or at least as one might imagine such a sensation might look if it could be meticulously photographed.

Field never fundamentally changes its shape. The lines of activity remain essentially where they are. What changes are the "grooves" in the film, the thickness and grayscale value of the different parts of the frame of reference. This is why, much more that Serene Velocity, Field really does achieve a kind of "motion painting" effect, why it could plausibly be projected on a wall in a museum between an Agnes Martin and a Robert Ryman. The fact that it has a photographic basis -- that real things and places passed before Gehr's lens to produce these swishing effects -- strikes me as of little consequence. 

"Color field painting," that final stage of the Greenbergian experiment, generally led to a lot of theoretically correct but aesthetically moribund canvases. We can understand why Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, etc., did what they did, but that doesn't make it any more compelling. What Gehr shows us is that the logical next step in Greenbergian aesthetics -- the step that, of course, a painting-only doctrine could never take -- was activating the picture plane. And that required cinema.