Bill Viola Movies

A man sinks down rapidly into the watery depths, but his inevitable and extended ascension's entire sequence, which was only a few seconds in real...

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

Playing Soul Music to My Freckles is a minimalist performance in which a bare loudspeaker, playing an Aretha Franklin song, is seen on the artist's...

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 title of The Morning After the Night of Power refers to a passage of the Koran in which angels descend from the heavens to impart the divine...

A documentary short in Chott el-Djerid.

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

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...

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...

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...

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers is a collection of works that address the desire to transcend the perceptual and cognitive structures of...

Seven vertically mounted screens show seven fully clothed submerged people of different ages, genders and ethnicities floating beneath the surface of...

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

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...

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

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

Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination,...

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

"Reverse Television" was created in the mid-1980's by video artist Bill Viola. The 30-second portraits were about portraiture and the idea of a...