Personal Effects: Works by Gregg Biermann
Films, Stills, and Collaboration with the Barrymore Film Center
Opening Reception at Gallery Bergen: September 18, 6:00 p.m.
Screening at the Barrymore Film Center: October 19, 4:30 p.m.
Gallery Bergen opens its fall season with a solo exhibition by award-winning experimental filmmaker and Bergen faculty member Gregg Biermann. Personal Effects features a selection of Biermann’s large-scale video installations and stills spanning three decades of work. The show runs from September 18 to December 5, with a special screening event on October 19 at the Barrymore Film Center (BFC) in Fort Lee.
Presented in partnership with the BFC, the screening will premiere Biermann’s recent hour-long film, Personal Effects, a rotoscopic meditation on his near-death experience in 2024. The film will be accompanied by two short works, followed by a discussion led by BFC curator David Schwartz.
Biermann is known for dissecting classic Hollywood films through algorithmic editing and digital manipulation, creating dense visual experiences that explore the mechanics of cinema itself. Drawing from formalist traditions and reworking them with contemporary tools, Biermann’s work is both conceptually rigorous and emotionally disorienting. A longtime New Jersey resident, Biermann is co-president of the New American Cinema Group/Filmmakers Cooperative and has taught at Bergen Community College and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
In Personal Effects, Biermann confronts the existential and artistic aftermath of surviving “sudden cardiac death” in 2023:
“The problem of death eats all other problems because no subject remains to experience them. After discovering that my collapse had been recorded, I realized I had the raw material for a film that could process the emotional and philosophical weight of that experience.”
— Gregg Biermann
The October 19 event at the Barrymore Film Center—built to honor Fort Lee’s legacy as the birthplace of American cinema—underscores Biermann’s ties to the region and its cinematic history.
What Critics Say
“Biermann processes Hollywood classics through mathematical formulas that obscure meaning but remain endlessly watchable… He’s violating our assumptions about cinema by turning film into something closer to musical composition or visual theory.”
— Kyle Harris, Westword
“His work reflects the disorientation of our time — visual, social, political, and biological — forcing us to find new bearings in a world constantly shifting.”
— Jaimie Baron, Experimental Response Cinema