Bill Viola Movies

Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves...

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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...

A small crowd of people are gathered in wait when they are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water.

Viola experimental short

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...

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

A documentary short in Chott el-Djerid.

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

Junkyard Levitation is a visual pun on the concept of "mind over matter," as a man attempts to levitate while lying prone in a junkyard. Writes...

Viola describes A Non-Dairy Creamer as "the eradication of the individual by self-consumption." The artist's face, visible only as a reflected image...

The three panels of Bill Viola’s triptych show video footage of birth (on the left), death (on the right) and a metaphorical journey between...

Silent Life records the first hours and days of life through a series of portraits of newborn babies in a hospital nursery. The alienating hospital...

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