Bill Viola Movies

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

"I Do Not Know What It Is that I Am Like" juxtaposes images of animals, both wild and domestic, and natural environments with human activity as it...

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

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

“Transfiguration refers to a rare process whereby both the substance and essence of an entity is reconfigured. In physical terms, a...

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,...

Writes Viola: "Sodium Vapor was recorded over a period of several weeks in the hours between one and five in the morning on the streets of an...

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

In Basin of Tears, two videos are projected side by side on two adjacent screens mounted to the wall. This video diptych creates an incredible...

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

The sculptural video installation consists of nine scrims suspended parallel to one another. Projectors at either end of the row of scrims show...

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...

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

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

Red Tape -- Collected Works Bill Viola 1975, 30 min, color, sound Playing Soul Music to My Freckles 1975, 2:46 min, color, sound A Non-Dairy...

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

The Space Between the Teeth is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long...

Offering a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the work documents a succession of people slowly emerging out of darkness...