One of the things I love about 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps my favorite movie, is the way its ending uses film to show the evolution of humanity beyond the confines of our everyday understanding of space and time. Serene Velocity, available for viewing here, basically refines that idea to its essence. It shows us a well-defined space, a hallway, that it then completely breaks apart simply by cutting between different shots, and our whole feeling of space is broken apart at the same time. It’s mesmerizing and overwhelming.
Our usual notions of space and time are based on our view of them (our visual field) from a single position and with a smooth movement forward in time. Even when we think of an “objective” viewpoint, it tends to be conflated with what we would see if we just stood there looking at something. And when we think of space and time from a scientific or mathematical perspective, it tends to be as a rigid structure through which things move. By alternating between the different shots, the film breaks down all these notions by not allowing us to see the hallway from the position of an idealized spectator, and it simultaneously makes the hallway into a fluid rather than rigid space. Also, I think the length of the film is essential, since the film’s rhythm, particularly of its variations in lighting, serves to explore the moods of the space.
It’s also something of an attack on what I think are some basic misinterpretations of cinema: the notion that film simply records “reality”, and the opposite notion that film simply presents illusions, fabricated images that are pointedly unreal. The broken up hallway is clearly not simply a recording of the outside “external reality” of anything; it is an exploration of entirely different dimensions of that “outside” which we are in and which we experience. At the same time, it is not presented as a “pure image”, as a symbol or illusion; it is presented as as an exploration of the actual reality of the space, the limits and extensions of it—not in its empirical, “objective” dimensions, but in its dimensions of feeling and perception. Or as Gehr said it,
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.
Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, avant garde, favorites, movies, perception, space
