"SERENE VELOCITY established Gehr's reputation as a major filmmaker of the generation that began exhibiting works in the Sixties."
- P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film

"SERENE VELOCITY is one of the few really unique films I have seen during the last few years. It is so emphatically single-minded and complete in its exploration of the various ironies and multiple levels of its imagery that it leaves one stunned. Just when you have settled into a one-groove visual interpretation of the given space you are viewing, Gehr transforms this space in such a way that your awareness of it becomes something entirely different."
- Bob Cowan, Take One, 1974

"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. Without ever having to move the camera, Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films, they would have been these."
- J. Hoberman, The Village Voice