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,...

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

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...

A documentary short in Chott el-Djerid.

Viola experimental short

Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video...

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

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,...

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...

Installation on two screens where the two characters burst into tears, gradually lowering their heads until their faces touch the water.

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...

"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...

Information is an exercise in technological reflexivity, an early investigation of the material presence of the electronic medium. From a technical...

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

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

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

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

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...