Sound: Joseph Byrd, Michael Moore; Picture: Pat O'Neill. A bilaterally symmetrical (west to east) fusion of human, biomorphic and mechanical shapes in motion. Has to do with the spontaneous generation of electrical energy. A fairly rare (ten years ago) demonstration of the Sabattier effect in motion. Numbered after the film stock of the same name.
"Fetishistic." - Isabella Beeton
1965-1967, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $35
Sound: Cisko Curtis
A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, "false tones" caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as "containers" for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in EASYOUT and DOWN WIND.
Award: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1971
1971, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $60
Sound: Stan Levine; Mix: Don Worthen.
Has to do with a consideration of one possible conceptual model for human existence: that of a primitive form of yardchair, upon which sits The Creator, impassively observing the inexorable flow of His mountains. The name "Easyout" is derived from a commercially available bolt and stud-extracting tool, whose function seemed strangely parallel to that of the film.
Awards: First Prize, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Yale Film Festival, 1972.
Exhibition: Cannes Film Festival, 1974
1972, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $35
Credits: "Is It Love" by Tyrannosaurus Rex.
To some extent an educational film in persimmon-eating, invaluable to those encountering this delicious fruit for the first time. Also contains some background material on persimmon culture and some interesting animated "wallpaper."
(Universally renounced by film festivals.)
1972, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $35
Sound: Stan Levine; Mix: Don Worthen.
A thoughtful treatment of some of the problems we (mankind) have been having in dealing with our fellow species, animal and vegetable. Actually an undercover "structural" film, this one seems at first to be some sort of berserk travelogue. I spent years going to travelogues as a child, and still have a great fondness for visiting natural history museums in strange cities.
Award: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1973
1973, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $60
Saw: Chris Casady; Key: Mort Subotnick; Blue Paint: 7-K Color Co; Mix: Don Worthen. Actually, seven short films, one-and-a-half to six minutes long, united by a common soundtrack. Each is an evolving "still life," made up of meticulously assembled but spatially contradictory elements. For example, in one part the sun can be seen, by its shadows, to be traveling in one direction in the upper half of the screen, and in the opposite in the lower half.
Commentary on Part 5:
P: Now you might say this is an interesting sort of design ....
B: But after a while you'd grow tired of looking at it. It would lack interest.
P: And so the artist must always temper his repetition of movements of forms with what might be called a certain amount of variety.
B: Suppose I enlarged some of them, changed their direction, make some smaller, add dark values and lighter values ....
P: Or perhaps a tree, sharply contrasting in value from the surrounding shapes.
B: There is sharp contrast, at this point, between the fan and the surrounding objects in a Great Triangle someplace perhaps a mile or a mile and a half above the surface of the Earth.
P: And here we see order; order which includes omission and alternation from nature.
Award: Tom Berman Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1975
1974, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $72
"When a giant trowel is plunged into the floor of Monument Valley, it's as though John Ford had hired Claes Oldenburg to dress his set. The film, O'Neill's most ambitious to date, with a dreamy, narrative subtext underlying its sensuous surface, is framed by abstract animations which denote scratches or scraped-off emulsion in much the same way that Roy Lichtenstein offered a benday-dot brushstroke as a painterly gesture." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"Almost every sequence in SIDEWINDER'S DELTA concludes with a rough end - punches, flares, white flashes, etc. But unlike the academy leaders of RUNS GOOD with their rhythmic, emblematic and referential functions, as well as their purely reflexive alienation effect, these glimpses of film technology in SIDEWINDER'S DELTA serve primarily to delineate and verify the conceptual unit of O'Neill's filmmaking, for we can see directly at what stage his idea was completely formulated, and in the case of some early scenes with sync-punch mattes, exactly what elements were compounded in what way to compose this particular idea structure of ideograph." - William Moritz
1976, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $80
"FOREGROUNDS, like SAUGUS SERIES, is devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities. The most visceral of these prints a rotating boulder, occupying half of the screen, over a slow lateral pan across the desert (painted by Neon Park). A faint superimposition of leaves on top of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O'Neill begins to animate 'scratches' over the image, one's eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1978, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $56
The day they filled all that gravel in front of Jack and Jerry's old studio on Venice Blvd.
A yellow bird fascinated by reflection.
Several views from the San Francisco Marine Museum on a gray day in December.
Three views of Mercer Street, New York after the second big snowstorm of January, '78.
Several fogs, a strange puddle, and a female Husky induced to howl by humans.
(This film is perhaps best seen after one of the others, like a "chaser.")
1978, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $35
Originally presented as a continuous-loop installation. The event on the screen is symmetrical in time: it consists of two pendulums slowing to rest, one seen in forward time and the other upside-down and backward. Kinetic energy seems to transfer from one to the other. As the pendulum's rate of movement increases, its interaction with the background changes, and both the object and its surrounding field appear to change in a number of different ways.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $35
Originally presented as a continuous-loop installation. The film is a series of broken fields of movement made by the random interactions of some forty or so movie fragments in superimposition. All are permutations of the same original materials. Interspersed among these are fragments of the "original" films seen unaltered. The film is both complex and monotonous, finely detailed and yet resistant to interpretation. A state of relaxation, even boredom, may allow the experience of images which are more imaginary than actual. These are by necessity very short-lived, and seem to be the product of individual pattern-recognition habits.
These pieces are entirely about the experience of watching the screen.
They are not very long, but they are dense.
It would be a mistake to say that you have to pay very close attention, lest you miss something.
1982, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $80
Its title comes from the Los Angeles water district. Much of the film was shot in the Owens Valley and in an old office building in downtown LA and is metaphorically about the exchange of energy between two places. It is also about water, in all of its states, and about cyclical motion: the planets, the tides, the implied rotation of the camera on its axis, and the repetitive actions of the performers. There are also quotations from older movies and their soundtracks: at times their landscapes become continuous with those of the present. Human habitation in this wilderness is tenuous and risky.
"... reveals a modern city as layer over layer of experience, and makes no pretense of reducing Los Angeles to anything like a single, coherent understanding. In WATER AND POWER, LA is not merely an elaborate reality; it is a nearly overwhelming surreality." - Scott McDonald, Wide Angle
"The 'reality' animated by the film is LA; its topography and social ambiance, its myths of creation and embedding of a dream. It is surely the greatest of contemporary 'city symphonies.'" - Paul Arthur, Moving Picture
"The continuous shifts and surprises that lie at the heart of the film's form make a kind of grand metaphor for the never-ending change that underlies nature, civilization and the multiply symbiotic interchanges between them." - Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
Exhibition: NY Film Festival; Berlin Film Festival; Image Forum, Tokyo; Telluride Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Helsinki Film Festival; Bombay Film Festival and others.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 54m, $270; 35mm, $270
TROUBLE IN THE IMAGE is a collection of visual and auditory ideas, many of which seem to radiate a sense of internal conflict, irony and rage. The film has no continuing characters, but is made up of dozens of performances dislodged from other contexts. These are often relocated into contemporary industrial landscapes, or interrupted by the chopping, shredding, or flattening of special-effects technology turned against itself. All is not lost, however. The reward is to be found in immersion within a space of complex and intricate formal relationships, where subject matter is almost irrelevant. The film was accumulated over a seventeen-year period by a filmmaker who continues to insist that film can be an art form independent of storytelling.
Exhibition: Rotterdam Film Festival; Pesaro Film Festival; Osnabrü Media Arts Festival; Austrian Film Museum; Anthology Film Archives.
1996, 16mm, color/so, 38m, $115; 35mm, stereo sound, $190
The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again. I scribbled the words The Decay of Fiction on the back of a notebook almost forty years ago, tore it off and framed it fifteen years later, and have wanted ever since to make a film to fit its ready-made description. To me it refers to the common condition of stories partly remembered, films partly seen, texts at the margins of memory, disappearing like a book left outside on the ground to decompose back into the earth. The film takes place in a building about to be destroyed, those walls contain (by dint of association) a huge burden of memory: cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. To make the film was to trap a few of its characters and some of their dialog, casting them together within the confines of the site. The structure and its stories are decaying together, and each seems to be a metaphor for the other.
USA 2002, 35mm, 74:00
Director, editor, production: Pat O'Neill
Producer: Rebecca Hartzell
Camera, sounddesign: George Lockwood
Production-assistant: Nancy Oppenheim
Best Boy: Doug Cragoe;
Gaffer, key grip: Amy Halpern
Wardrobe: Violetta Elfimova
Makeup: Tereza Nelson, Tamara Margarian
Video-assistants: Eric Furie, Mark Michael
Camera, Rotoskopanimation: Kate McCabe
Muse: Beverly O'Neill
Actors: Wendi Winburn, William Lewis, Julio Leopold, Amber Lopez,
Jack Conley, John Rawling, Patricia Thielemann, Dan Bell, Kane
Crawford, Damon Colazzo, Jacqueline Humbert, Judy Lieff.
2002, 35mm color/so, 74m Rental: $325
VHS, $60 each tape or all five tapes for $250, home
$250 for each tape, institutions
VHS compilation
VHS compilation
VHS compilation
VHS
VHS