Pat O'Neill

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs.

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs.

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs made between 1965 & 1975 approx.

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs made between 1965 & 1975 approx.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

Short film portrait using narration and artworks by Pat O’Neill and edited by Martha Colburn.

New film by Pat O'Neill

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

"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

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, beautiful 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. “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” (Pat O’Neill).

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.

Pat O'Neill, one of the most interesting filmmakers in America today, offers a dazzling reflection on the conflict between nature and man in Los Angeles, or the desertification of the city's surroundings due to its enormous water consumption. More interestingly, it is also a film in the age-old tradition of city symphonies: a film about LA's foundation myths and the dreams it embodies, about its history and (grim) future, its topography and ethnography. O'Neill uses footage from several classic films to recreate the several layers of meaning emanating from the city, juxtaposing images and fantasies and hardly ever allowing one picture to go untouched. George Lockwood's swarming soundtrack is likewise composed of conflicting languages, an elaborate work of plunderphonics in which snippets of sound stolen from movies collide with electronic soundscapes, contemporary chamber music, improv, and what not.

A film by Pat O'Neill

Considers one possible conceptual model for human existence

Considers one possible conceptual model for human existence

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.

A film by Pat O'Neill

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

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

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.

LAST OF THE PERSIMMONS opens with a black-and-white image of a main inflating helium balloons in the shape of rabbits. Onto this image Mr. O'Neill places two mirror images an old Fleischer-style cartoon elephant comically licking its mouth as if in anticipation of yet another layered image, that of a ripe persimmon. —Manohla Dargis, "In the Studio's Shadow, An Avant-Garde Eye," The New York Times, 11/8/2004

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.

Documents the life and works of filmmaker Pat O'Neill, showing the making of a select group of films and discussion of these films by O'Neill.

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 rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as "containers" for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in EASYOUT and DOWN WIND.

A film by Pat O'Neill

7362 is concerned with dividing and joining together. It begins with two black circles against a white background, knocking together and gradually moving further apart. The circles fade out, and return as white circles against black inside a square. Images similar to Rorschach blots appear. Gradually the viewer realizes that the images were not originally abstract, but were human forms (dancers, gymnasts, etc.), bridges, and others that have been split down the center of the frame, with their mirror images printed on either side of the split. Red, green, and white tints further abstract the images from their original foundations in the natural world, making dancers appear to be amoebas or dividing cells. The accompanying sound track is a mixture of electronic music and musique concrète ("real" recorded sounds manipulated to sound abstract).

Les Blank's first documentary cinematography job shooting Drag Racers in Long Beach, CA, driving everything from hopped up "Mercs" to Supercharged "Rail Dragsters". These cars could accelerate to over 220 miles/hour in a mile. The film follows the life of Rick "The Iceman" Stewart as he attempts to grab the world's record. Original score by Canned Heat Blues Band.

"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

"Muscle Beach is a fascinating location for people-watching in the L.A. area, and in 1963, the strangeness of its sights was much more pronounced than today. Pat O’Neill’s first film (made with Robert Abel) progresses from humorous, curious observation to energetic, graphical interaction with the sights and sounds of Santa Monica’s famed beach." —Mark Toscano