The past is never delineated through Gehr‘s film, an unorthodox “city symphony” composed of largely static compositions of West Berlin streets. His refusal to dissertate an active through-line in the sights and sounds opens up a world in which we can identify, through metrical editing and angular snapshots of a city space, universal signifiers coursing through every frame. Combined with an embedded knowledge of the area’s loaded past and Gehr’s recorded, crackling radio broadcasts laid over the images, Signal - Germany on the Air (1985) is a challenging personal work.
