View from Above

Shift, This Side of Paradise, Side/Walk/ShuttleShift views from above the abstraction of the street and its movement, its almost Mondrian-like patterns of traffic, vehicles and direction signs. Sound, editing and superimposition create a shifting sense of encounters, as if literalising Eisenstein’s theory of montage as collision. This Side of Paradise records Gehr’s encounter with a flea market in West Berlin briefly before the Wall came down. This film profoundly embodies Gehr’s sense of the precarious hold people have on the world, a concern evident in sound and images, as well as his disorienting use of a puddle’s reflections, which invert a world that itself seems turned upside down. In Side/Walk/Shuttle Gehr’s camera hovers like an alien space craft above the streets of San Francisco. Actually shot with incredible dexterity from a tourist-oriented transparent elevator, it presents a fragmentary puzzle-like series of urban views within a confined area. In contrast to the abject earthbound viewpoint of This Side of Paradise the panorama here captures the rigid space of a late capitalist city, high above the earth, as sounds seems to filter up to it, as if from some other world. Tom Gunning