Movies: Bill Viola

Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves toward the camera/viewer, pausing every few steps to ring a bell, at which point he is momentarily thrus...

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and ot...

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in partnership with Peter Sellars as artistic collaborator, and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen....

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles....

The ascent of the soul in the space after death as it is awakened and drawn up in a backwards flowing waterfall....

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustra...

Migration is an analysis of an image, a metaphorical exercise in perception and representation, illusion and reality, microcosm and macrocosm, nature and consciousness....

Internationally acclaimed and award-winning video installation artist Bill Viola juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother's death with images of his own son's birth to explore foundational and potent themes of beginnings and endings, the cycle of l...

The rituals and philosophies of indigenous non-Western cultures recur throughout Viola's work. In 1976, he travelled to the Solomon Islands with portable color video equipment, which was then a new technology. The first of two "visionary documentarie...

This diptych opens with the image of two parallel streams of falling water. A female torso moves into the background of the left screen while a male torso mirrors her on the right. Both figures move slowly to the foreground and into the light, cuppin...

In A Million Other Things (2), changes in light and sound on the edge of a pond during an eight-hour period from day to night are composed in rhythmic variations resembling music. When the sun sets, an individual in the landscape remains the sole vis...

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an art...

Two naked, life-sized figures, each around 70 years old, track torches across their aging epidermises as if rooting out the pattern of their pasts. The skin itself becomes a metaphor for lived experience and the prospect of its termination....

Viola experimental short...

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A documentary short in Chott el-Djerid....

Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination, focusing on the phototropic vision of a moth. Writes Viola, "A moth emerges from a discarded letter as the...

Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video installations for London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Martyrs and Mary, the first art commissions of their kind to be installed in...

The fourth video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "The Voyage" features an elderly man who is dying, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him....

Hailed as the "Rembrandt of the Video Age," renowned American artist Bill Viola became the first contemporary artist ever to be featured in a one-man show at London's prestigious National Gallery. This documentary directed by Mark Kidel features rare...