Henri Ehrlich has been into SCENES for a long time. Scenes from the news, scenes from the street, vaudeville scenes, battle scenes, lyrical nature scenes, experimental scenes…Over the years he has found, collected, represented, sold and used scenes of all kinds for hundreds of films and tv productions.

It all started in 1970… Carrying 2 shopping bags filled with 16mm A + B rolls, magnetic tracks and various trims and outs from his senior film school project, he wandered into the Manhattan offices of Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries looking for a job. There, Bernie Chertok told him in no uncertain terms that he would be wasting his time if he took a job with Grinberg where all he’d be able to do would be to screen and log ABC News rushes. A real dead end.

The rest is History (see SCENE HISTORY).

Screening raw news footage, before it was formatted for TV into 30-second “cut stories”, or narrated to death in documentaries, was an epiphanous experience. Here one could see real life, witness events, listen to speeches and debates without editorial interference. Ehrlich was enthralled by the richness, humor and drama of the scenes in these rushes and wished only to share them with the public in this pure, unadulterated form. This became an obsession that spread to other kinds of collections and before long he was finding and collecting scenes of every kind, using them and showing them in every imaginable context and configuration.