Bill Viola Movies

Viola experimental short

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

American video artist Bill Viola explores the life cycle as an enveloping whole instead of the hegemonic view of life as a linear progression. The...

2005. Video/sound installation. Performer: Robin Bonaccorsi.

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

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

This video work is one of a group of pieces known as 'The Passions' which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings....

Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979, by incorporating a large body of water, with video and sound recordings of nature, was pioneering in its use of...

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

Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The...

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

The title of The Semi-Circular Canals refers to the portion of the human ear that regulates balance. Viola constructed a platform on which he and the...

Playing Soul Music to My Freckles is a minimalist performance in which a bare loudspeaker, playing an Aretha Franklin song, is seen on the artist's...

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

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

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...

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

Video/sound installation featuring two channels of color video projections from opposite walls of a large, darkened gallery; custom video switching...

Slowly Turning Narrative includes two projections on a large central rotating screen. One presents images of virtually everything that constitutes...