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Return (1975)
Character: N/A
Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves toward the camera/viewer, pausing every few steps to ring a bell, at which point he is momentarily thrust back to his starting place, and then advanced again. Finally reaching his destination, he is taken through all of the previous stages in a single instant and returned to the source of his journey.
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The Voyage (2002)
Character: Gatekeeper
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, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him.
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Going Forth By Day (2002)
Character: (segment "The Voyage")
The film is a five-part projection-based installation, which addresses the complexity of human existence through the themes of individuality, society, death and rebirth. Each video is projected directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, just as paint from a fresco adheres to the surface of a plaster wall.
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Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1983)
Character: N/A
This haunting installment contains a solitary wood chair with headphones attached, facing a television monitor. A man (the artist himself), looking visibly fatigued, appears on the screen, sitting in his own chair. Here, the artist compels viewers into an intimate relationship: they sit at eye level with him, listening to the sound of his breathing through the headphones. —Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa.
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Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart (2003)
Character: Self
Hailed as the "Rembrandt of the Video Age," renowned American artist Bill Viola became the first contemporary artist ever to be featured in a one-man show at London's prestigious National Gallery. This documentary directed by Mark Kidel features rarely seen footage from Viola's own archive and in-depth interviews with the video maverick. Viola talks passionately about his life and the influences that have driven his artwork from the beginning.
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Migration (for Jack Nelson) (1976)
Character: N/A
Migration is an analysis of an image, a metaphorical exercise in perception and representation, illusion and reality, microcosm and macrocosm, nature and consciousness.
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Bill Viola: The Road to St. Paul's (2017)
Character: Self
Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video installations for London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Martyrs and Mary, the first art commissions of their kind to be installed in Britain’s most famous religious space.
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I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986)
Character: Himself
"I Do Not Know What It Is that I Am Like" juxtaposes images of animals, both wild and domestic, and natural environments with human activity as it takes place in an apartment, and during a fire walking ceremony in Fiji. Documentary-style footage is combined with staged events. Despite the piece's lack of a traditional narrative, it bears some relationship to nature works. The segment features material from "Il Corpo Scuro (The dark body)" - animals and natural environments are seen up close and at a distance.
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The Reflecting Pool (1979)
Character: Performer
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 piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an artificial pool. As the noise of an aeroplane slowly passes and fades overhead, Viola approaches the edge of the pool, whereby he removes his shoes, squats down yelling and then prepares to make a powerful jump.
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What Is Cinema? (2013)
Character: Self
Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.
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