Ghosts of the City

Signal: Germany on the Air, StillSignal: Germany on the Air was shot in Berlin in the early eighties, primarily filming everyday events at a single intersection filmed from different vantage points and at different times. While the image resonates with Gehr’s other views of city space, the very atmosphere (partly achieved by a sound track which creates a haunting sense of other spaces) seems to resonate with past terror which has left only a few relics, but which spreads invisibly through the image (‘as smoke you will rise into air then a grave you will have in the clouds’, said poet and holocaust survivor Paul Celan). Still, one of Gehr’s longest and most complex films, also presents a city street location bearing phantoms of past, though less threatening and less distant. Through carefully matched double exposures Gehr weaves transparent passers-by and traffic along street and pavement, as if the street itself retained its memories and held them for us to view. In both films the sense of history and time interacts with the visual contradictions of space as we try to orient ourselves in these urban environments. Tom Gunning