Serene Velocity (1970) User Reviews

Shock Corridor

[ackstasis · 4/10 · 17 May 2010]

I've got to say, the human brain certainly didn't evolve to survive an Ernie Gehr-style work-out. The image captured by a movie-camera does not approximate reality, but instead exists in a world completely detached from our own everyday experiences. Gehr once described film as "a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space." In 'Serene Velocity (1970),' space is the most important variable. The director planted his camera in the deserted basement corridor of a building at Binghamton University, and continually tinkered with the focal length on the lens. Maddeningly and unrelentingly, the camera's perspective of the hallway rapidly switches back and forth, and then the human eye starts to play tricks on the mind.

I leaned forward towards the screen, and suddenly felt as though I was hurtling down the hallway, its previously angular walls now bending inwards, and its path twisting and turning like a wayward mine-cart railway (yes, I did have an 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)' flashback). This surreal sensation of movement occupied me until around the five-minute mark, and then I lost most of my interest. Though determined to keep my attention fixated on the screen, the illusion of movement had soon left me, and I instead felt as though I was simply standing in a lonely corridor, the lights flickering on and off in an epilepsy-inducing fashion (it's curious how my brain began to entirely block-out every second image). While not without interest to experimental aficionados, 'Serene Velocity' nevertheless made my eyes hurt, and now I'm going to bed.

Maybe not serene, but amazingly interesting

[Polaris_DiB · 9/10 · 16 April 2008]

Further proving that a "concept film" can be truly fascinating, Ernie Gehr's "Serene Velocity" is an almost infinitely shifting visual experience--only that the word "infinitely" is a false and kind of rude way of going about it, because the concept itself is about the limits and variables of the zoom lens.

The structure is simple: Gehr films a hallway at incremental zooms so that a pulsing back-and-forth effect occurs for the 23 minutes the movie plays. It is that length only of the necessity that four frames per shot over evenly spaced shots throughout the entire length of the zoom is covered evenly. The hallway itself is ambiguous in its significance: some read it as being a message about institution, some find it incredibly abstract, and others are more interested in the changing nature of the few objects (like the exit sign and the water fountain) that actually do get captured. Basically, however, the hallway is simply pretty with its evenly-spaced lights creating a black-and-white chiaroscuro and its parallel lengths extending into a black infinity: literally, the hallway itself is exactly like the concept being filmed, in that its split/cut into flashes of white in the midst of black (like film), it's flat and angular (like film), and it projects outward (like the zoom lens).

Once the process starts, however, things change. The actual result of the concept is hard to clarify because it continually changes as the space changes and is also subject to the individual perception of whoever is watching the film. At times the rectilinear hallway becomes bent by the pulses, which has been discussed as an attack on the Western use of parallel and converging lines in art for depth; at other times, the hallway seems to come out of the frame instead of into it. Sometimes the cuts literally feel like the film is attacking the eyes; sometimes the movie is intensely dizzying (in opposition to its title). Sometimes it merely looks like a strobe light; sometimes frames-within-frames appear or the screen looks like it is ripped or split. Sometimes you can tell what you're seeing; sometimes it looks like you're falling into blackness.

These things happen at no specific time and are completely incidental to the structural design of the hallway itself, doors, the aforementioned exit signs, how much white there is and how much black, how far along the hallway the zoom has gotten, and, at the end, how much day-light begins to fall through a window at the end of the hallway that previously was just a black abyss. As an abstract piece, Serene Velocity is about the closest one can get to a piece of music: one can sit back and watch it many different times over, and the effect will be pleasurable (or maybe dissonant) all over again. There are those who could still argue against the result, saying that there is no inherent interest in a movie that is only a hallway and a zoom lens. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that those people probably haven't seen it.

--PolarisDiB

A man, a movie camera, and a hallway

[madsagittarian · 10/10 · 30 September 2002]

Ernie Gehr's structuralist masterpiece SERENE VELOCITY is a hypnotic film which is nothing more than a rapidly edited, rhythmic piece consisting of two shots of an office hallway (one long shot, one zoomed-in close up). Our persistence of vision makes us believe that this film is a perpetual zooming in and out from one end of a hallway to another. Rather, it is a carefully edited and timed film, which consistently cuts back and forth between these two shots. The result is a mesmerizing piece which, as it progresses, treats the eyes to much profundity out of something so simple. We begin to notice the perfect geometry of the composition as the lines of the hallway converge to the center. The film becomes some kind of cosmic heartbeat, as this meticulously timed work of art becomes visual music. There is no beginning, middle or end. It is for the eyes what Steve Reich is for the ears. For an equally hypnotic viewing experience, see also Gehr's masterpiece SIDE/WALK SHUTTLE.

Art

[jrb223 · 10/10 · 2 January 2002]

This film manages, by repeating the rather claustrophobic image of a hallway, to abstract the film image to the point that it becomes merely a surface exploration of line, movement, color, and so on. It is a truly intriguing and beautiful film.

Concept Over Execution

[Tornado_Sam · 29 June 2020]

Along with a few others, "Serene Velocity" is considered one of the most important structuralist films ever created, one made during the earlier moments of the structuralist film movement. Like other such recognized films of the period, the short bases upon itself upon one significant concept frequently used in all of structuralism: flickering and stroboscopic effects. Many artists had been experimenting with such effects for several years by this point, in a variety of different ways: Tony Conrad, and his strobe effects through alternating black and white frames in "The Flicker" (1965), and Paul Sharits with flickering color frames in the films "N:O:T:H:I:N:G" (1968) and "T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G" (1969). But Ernie Gehr's most known work tries this concept on a different level by using real photography in one simple setting to achieve a more unique look, and while the end results aren't exactly as effective as one (including myself) might hope, it nonetheless does an interesting job taking advantage of that one setting.

"Serene Velocity" is set in a little-used basement hallway of a university building, pointing the camera down the dimly-lit corridor to make a visually interesting view. The entire film is a consistent pulsing (it's really not flickering so much) of the camera lens switching between that far away view and a zoomed-in view of the end of the hallway. The illusion is simple: when one looks at it in a certain manner, it feels as though the camera is flying down the corridor, never reaching the end, in the manner of a loop. To some extent this works, and as an illusion it is interesting in using this particular setting to make it possible. The real problem for me is that the movement itself is not a quick flicker, nor does the movement really change significantly. If one do pay attention, they can see the second shot get closer and closer to the end of the hallway so that by the end it is practically all the way down, but this happened so gradually I didn't notice it until later. The effect of the film doesn't really take off and keep the viewer consistently engaged, it mainly just sits there (another viewer said about the same). My expectations might very well be far off - Gehr may never have wanted it to truly flicker - but it was really the use of this powerful effect that would have made it for me.

Of course, it still goes without saying that the concept and the setup remain interesting. The use of the setting to create such an illusion is visually interesting to be sure, and any good filmmaker who entered the hallway and been inspired like Gehr was would do the same thing. But the execution remains somewhat limited in what it does because the effect never strongly takes off, and to me it felt like the potential of the idea could have been explored further.

4.7.2024

[EasonVonn · 7 April 2024]

A dive into cinematic perception.

The climbing paces of changing camera focal lengths is just like having sex in this hallway, instead it is not a genital, it's a camera, and we expect he could traverse the door break the limit, like those cinematic motif "the struggle of freedom and astrict." But it didn't.

I don't understand why but I kind of seeing the same threads of autonomy of camera in all those structural films. Ernie Gehr is a moderate example, his works are leaning to some certain societal experiences itself, though cinema is including in it, but in the cinematic experience, it can somehow individualized.