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...

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

A small crowd of people are gathered in wait when they are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water.

Viola experimental short

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history,...

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

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical...

Created by Bill Viola and Kira Perov and opened in May 2014, Martyrs shows four individuals, across four colour vertical plasma screens, being...

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,...

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital...

Two naked, life-sized figures, each around 70 years old, track torches across their aging epidermises as if rooting out the pattern of their pasts....

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...

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...

Silent Life records the first hours and days of life through a series of portraits of newborn babies in a hospital nursery. The alienating hospital...

A series of shots depicting "America" are laid over a classic Gregorian Chant recreated through the distortion of a woman's screams.

Migration is an analysis of an image, a metaphorical exercise in perception and representation, illusion and reality, microcosm and macrocosm, nature...

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