Bill Viola Movies

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...

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers is a collection of works that address the desire to transcend the perceptual and cognitive structures of...

Continuously running video installation: in a small alcove, a wood column extends from the floor and ceiling, with a gap in the center formed by two...

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history,...

Viola describes The Wheel of Becoming as concerning "the notion of the parallel nature of reality, that is, simultaneous events separated in space."...

In terming these tapes "songs," Viola references the relation of his work to musical structures and to the poetics of Romanticism. 4 tapes (Junkyard...

The rituals and philosophies of indigenous non-Western cultures recur throughout Viola's work. In 1976, he travelled to the Solomon Islands with...

"Reverse Television" was created in the mid-1980's by video artist Bill Viola. The 30-second portraits were about portraiture and the idea of a...

Two figures are captured in slow motion, walking closely together, across a stretch of the Mojave Desert towards the camera, with no end in sight.

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical...

The video installation's alternation between slow and fast-moving images, as well as soft and loud sounds, represents faltering thought processes. A...

Anima, which means “soul” in Latin and is the root of the word animation, is from a series of works inspired by Renaissance paintings of...

In this work's left panel, The Crossing (1996), a walking male figure is consumed by fire on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the...

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...

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

Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination,...

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh,...

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

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

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...