Serene Velocity


Download from UbuWeb
Format: avi | Size: 150mb
Source: fitz
Runtime: 00:14:52
(-according to other sources it's 23 minutes, but… well it's what I could get –fitz)
 
Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space. —Ernie Gehr, January 1971
-"SERENE VELOCITY is a literal 'shock corridor' wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway. Also plays off the contradictions generated by the frame's heightened flatness and severe Renaissance perspective. Without ever having to move the camera, Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala." —J. Hoberman
In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Related Links:
- EG SERENE Software
EG Serene is available for the improvising of digital video in real-time. The software adopts and "open sources" the structure of the 1970 film as the basis for temporal reconstruction of your own selected digital videos in quicktime movie format.


... just in case

Ernie Gehr

In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space. -Ernie Gehr, January 1971
Ernie Gehr began making films in the regular 8mm format in the 1960s and has worked steadily since then, completing more than 24 films. A self-taught artist, Gehr has established himself as one of the true masters of film form, and his graceful sense of style and subtle, poetic sensibility have deeply affected the cinematic avant-garde. His films have screened internationally, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musee du Cinema in Brussels and at the San Francisco Cinematheque, and he has received awards and grants from numerous institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute. Currently a faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, Gehr has also taught and lectured at the University of California at Berkeley, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Deutcher Akademischer Austauschdienst in Berlin. In March 1995 he received the 1995 Adaline Kent Award Exhibition, an award presented annually to a California artist. Ernie Gehr and Bruce Conner are the only two filmmakers to have received this prestigious award, which includes an honorarium and a solo exhibition entitled Brother Can You Spare Some Time? in the San Francisco Art Institute's Walter/McBean Gallery.

 
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