Bill Viola Movies

Two figures are captured in slow motion, walking closely together, across a stretch of the Mojave Desert towards the camera, with no end in sight.

This work represents the inevitable separation of father and son as they take separate paths in their life's journey. Two men arrive in the desert...

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

Internationally acclaimed and award-winning video installation artist Bill Viola juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother's death with images of...

In this work's left panel, The Crossing (1996), a walking male figure is consumed by fire on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the...

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

The title of Truth Through Mass Individuation references Carl Jung. An isolated figure is seen performing successively more aggressive actions...

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....

Video/sound installation featuring two channels of color video projections from opposite walls of a large, darkened gallery; custom video switching...

The hands of three generations are seen in this work – a young boy, father, mother and grandmother. Slowly and deliberately, the four pairs of...

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of...

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in...

A classic edifice and its surrounding population succumb to a vast flood of water. It is the third video in the five-part digital-image cycle of the...

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...

Anima, which means “soul” in Latin and is the root of the word animation, is from a series of works inspired by Renaissance paintings of...

Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The...

Part of Bill Viola's "Transfigurations" series, this work shows a mother and her daughters enacting a transfiguration when they choose to pass...

This diptych opens with the image of two parallel streams of falling water. A female torso moves into the background of the left screen while a male...

Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves...