An exercise in special effects, using conventional travelling matte techniques on a contact printer. A small box (whose classic dimensions animators using an Oxberry field guide will recognize) moves across the screen revealing certain objets d'interest, hiding others and performing other tricks....
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....
"Bump City is a colour film about the symbolic destruction of Los Angeles. It was never a very finished film, but it was about signs and advertising, redundant communications and manufacturing, waste and monotony." —Pat O'Neill. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pat...
Has to do with a consideration of one possible conceptual model for human existence: that of a primitive form of yardchair, upon which sits The Creator, impassively observing the inexorable flow of His mountains.
"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...
"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...
A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, "false tones" caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen...
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....
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...
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.
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...
