Bill Viola Movies

The Sleepers is a startlingly dark vision of sleeping people suspended under water, unable to make contact with the world outside. Viola describes...

Moving through its five parts, the work describes a cycle of birth through to death, depicting both an eternal, universal Mary, and an earthly Mary...

Seven vertically mounted screens show seven fully clothed submerged people of different ages, genders and ethnicities floating beneath the surface of...

A man sinks down rapidly into the watery depths, but his inevitable and extended ascension's entire sequence, which was only a few seconds in real...

The title of The Morning After the Night of Power refers to a passage of the Koran in which angels descend from the heavens to impart the divine...

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in...

The Quintet of the Astonished shows the unfolding expressions of five actors in such extreme slow motion that every minute detail of their changing...

The title of Vegetable Memory derives from the writings of Jalaludin Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet. Evolving as what Viola terms a "kind of...

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of...

Motivated by the love that bound him to Mathilda Wesendonck, Richard Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde goes far beyond any simple...

Viola experimental short

Part of Bill Viola's "Transfigurations" series, this work shows a mother and her daughters enacting a transfiguration when they choose to pass...

Created by Bill Viola and Kira Perov and opened in May 2014, Martyrs shows four individuals, across four colour vertical plasma screens, being...

The hands of three generations are seen in this work – a young boy, father, mother and grandmother. Slowly and deliberately, the four pairs of...

With a title referring to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant, the film - an ardent dream entirely...

Information is an exercise in technological reflexivity, an early investigation of the material presence of the electronic medium. From a technical...

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...

Driven by a quest to capture a landscape reduced to flatness and sky, Viola travels to Chott El-Djerid. The film opens with images of snowy prairies...