Side/Walk/Shuttle

In Side/Walk/Shuttle, he takes to the glass elevator attached to San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel and rides its 24 stories up and down, constantly shifting the orientation of his camera to offer images of the city as a site of flux, freed from gravity to rearrange itself in perpetuum. While the sensual and emotional experience of all these new views is enough to make one’s life richer (the phrase “city symphony” has never seemed quite so apt), Gehr’s film is also a deeply visceral reminder that the world contains so much more than we can ever know.