Serene Velocity
Encyclopedia
Serene Velocity is a 1970 American experimental short film. It was directed by Ernie Gehr
and filmed in the basement hallway of a Binghamton University
academic building.
To make the film, Gehr locked his camera down in the center of the hallway, shooting several individual frames at a time. After each set of exposures, he changed the focal length on the lens, zooming in and then out in increasing increments. What begins as a small difference in apparent distance several frames at a time expands to extreme closeups and wide shots jumping back and forth.
The film runs about twenty-three minutes long and is silent.
In 2001, the United States Library of Congress
deemed the film "culturally significant" and named it to the National Film Registry
. The film was preserved by The Museum of Modern Art in 2006.
Ernie Gehr
Ernie Gehr is an American experimental filmmaker closely associated with the Structural film movement of the 1970s. A self-taught artist, Gehr was inspired to begin making films in the 1960s after chancing upon a screening of a Stan Brakhage film. Gehr's film Serene Velocity has been selected...
and filmed in the basement hallway of a Binghamton University
Binghamton University
Binghamton University, also formally called State University of New York at Binghamton, , is a public research university in the State of New York. The University is one of the four university centers in the State University of New York system...
academic building.
To make the film, Gehr locked his camera down in the center of the hallway, shooting several individual frames at a time. After each set of exposures, he changed the focal length on the lens, zooming in and then out in increasing increments. What begins as a small difference in apparent distance several frames at a time expands to extreme closeups and wide shots jumping back and forth.
The film runs about twenty-three minutes long and is silent.
In 2001, the United States Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
deemed the film "culturally significant" and named it to the National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...
. The film was preserved by The Museum of Modern Art in 2006.
External links
- http://www.ubu.com/film/gehr_serene.htmlStreaming video of Serene Velocity at UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
] - Ernie Gehr links page