Eureka

Eureka (1974), to me, suggests the expressive potential that structural film can have. Taking an early cinema actuality film and slowing it down through frame-by-frame shooting, Ernie Gehr creates a meditation on cinematic time. From the description – and from what I know of the use that 60s and 70s avant-garde filmmakers made of early cinema – I expected more tinkering with the image, either by montage, image manipulation or projection effects. Instead the film presents the original footage with a film speed (3-4fps? Gehr says he extends each frame 6-8 times) that hovers right at the cusp of our perception of continuous motion. The spectator thereby is both able to see the individual frames and to follow the movement. At times this gives a ghostly effect. Meanwhile, the slowness of the shot – a barely interrupted dolly along a city’s trolley tracks – is matched by the overall busy-ness of what passes in front of the camera. Motion becomes a controlled, ongoing revelation of space and activity.

Classroom audience: I suspect undergraduates, beyond the most advanced, will find this challenging, given the running time for a limited number of shots. Would work very well in a class on early cinema (where I saw it, in fact), or a unit on structural film, or cinematic time.

Basics: Ernie Gehr, 1974, 16mm, b&w/si, 30m, $90

Distributor: Canyon Cinema 16mm rental, $90 + shipping + fees

Useful readings: Mary Ann Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time
Scott MacDonald, "Ernie Gehr: Camera Obscura/Lens/Filmstrip" Film Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 4. (Summer, 1990), pp. 10-16.