Pat O'Neill

2016 --- Digital Video --- 28 minutes --- Color --- Sound

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2016 --- Digital Video --- 1 minute --- Color --- Silent

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A tour de force of digital art, Where the Chocolate Mountains (2015, 55 min.) is a major new opus from Pat O’Neill, one of the all-time guiding lights of the Los Angeles avant-garde, whose pioneering use of the optical printer marked a creative breakthrough in composite image-making in cinema. Continuing in the vein of his renowned 35mm epics Water and Power (1989), Trouble in the Image (1996) and Decay of Fiction (2002), the founding CalArts faculty member combines haunting cinematography of the Chocolate Mountains along the border between California and Arizona—long used as a bombing range by the military—with footage shot in L.A., Mexico and Prague, intimate self-portraits, and recurring graphic motifs to create irrepressible, stunningly detailed streams of multilayered sight and sound.

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O'Neill's subtle and ethereal footage juxtaposes images drawn from the Prelinger Archives as well as clips from education films from the 1940s and 1950s.

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Ojo Caliente (hot eye) depicts a site in a reddish sandstone desert; the remains of a settlement apparently dedicated to the manufacture of solid objects. Cones of various sizes and shades are scattered about the entrance of a shallow cave. Whoever made them is never seen, but something seems to be going on underground! An amazingly tiny video.

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Painter and Ball 4-14 is a composite of several simultaneous intentions. The first is a record of the passage of days and seasons: the second is a similar recording made by another artist some thirty years previously: the third, an animation of a headless and limbless homunculus.

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2009 --- Digital Video --- 30 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound Mix: George Lockwood

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2009 --- Digital Video --- 19 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound Mix: George Lockwood

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2009 --- Digital Video --- 10 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound Mix: George Lockwood

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2010 --- Digital Video --- 4 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound: Califone

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2009 --- Digital Video --- 6 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound: Califone

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The title Horizontal Boundaries refers to frame lines- the boundaries between one image and the next on a roll of motion picture film. These lines, usually hidden by the projector gate, are revealed as subject matter and as a means of dividing the screen into as many as four very wide images, stacked one above the other. They represent many places, and a few people. My intent was to find ways to allow the images to interact in ways not usually possible. The track includes some Irish fiddle solos and intense recycled dialog.

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A look back at the hotel where The Decay of Fiction (2002) was filmed, at the time of its demolition.

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2008 --- Digital Video --- 7 minutes --- Color --- Sound

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The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles serves as the backdrop of Pat O’Neill’s artfully-crafted film. Shot in the classic Hollywood style, the movie follows various mysterious characters as they move through the haunted halls of the hotel, exploring along the way the secrets that are held within.

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"O'Neill found an envelope labeled 'Helen's Coreopsis' with seeds from a 1935 visit his mother had made to her sister in Nebraska. His film COREOPSIS was made by scratching into developed and discarded pieces of film stock revealing pink, yellow and clear layers. This remnant of his memory of her is performed and inscribed in these excised layers." - Erika Suderburg

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O’Neill applied film developer to film stock using a squirt gun, then rearranged the results into rhythmic repetitions.

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Optical printing pioneer Pat O’Neill uses “his skills in special effects production to extrapolate metaphysical meaning from the ordinariness of industrialized culture” (Scott Stark). In O’Neill’s playful film, “trouble in the image” may take the form of a disturbing moment in a narrative, how-to instructions for creating an image, or pictures that break apart and lose their literal meaning. O'Neill: “The film [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. The reward is to be found in immersion within a space of complex and intricate formal relationships”. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

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A reflection between nature and man in Los Angeles about the city's surroundings' desertification due to enormous water consumption.

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A film by Pat O'Neill

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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.")

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"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

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As a number of critics have pointed out, the title of O'Neill's film Let's Make a Sandwich refers not only to one of the pieces of found footage that make up the film, but to the process of its making, to the layers and sandwiching of the image. That parallel physical surface and his artisanal production of it might link all of O'Neill's work across media and position it as well toward the graphic-the flattening contour line of the cut out-and to collage, both in its cut and its combination as its dominant term.

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Experimental film with desert scenes in which optical printing is used to achieve unusual effects.

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Short film of 7 sections with each one using a different experimental film technique.

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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.

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