Ernie Gehr

"Born in 1941, he began making eight-millimeter films in the mid-’60s. The precipitating event, he told the writer Scott MacDonald in a 2002-3 interview, was a program of Stan Brakhage films that Mr. Gehr caught in New York on a rainy night. The works excited him partly because in their abstraction and attention to color, texture and rhythm they were closer to his experience of 20th-century painting than of movies, and he continued to seek out more of the same. He eventually ended up at the Millennium Film Workshop and borrowing a light meter from the filmmaker Ken Jacobs (with whom Mr. Gehr shares an interest in early cinema). As he walked around New York reading light, as it were, Mr. Gehr…