Pat O'Neill

During the winter of 1975 in Hawaii, surfing was shaken to its core. A group of young surfers from Australia and South Africa sacrificed everything and put it all on the line to create a sport, a culture, and an industry that is today worth billions of dollars and has captured the imagination of the world. With a radical new approach and a brash colonial attitude, these surfers crashed headlong into a culture that was not ready for revolution. Surfing was never to be the same again.

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.

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs.

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

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

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.

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 last event features Patrick O'Neill in his first screen role along with a docile Siamese, busy ants and a palsied hand.

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. Several fogs, a strange puddle, and a female Husky induced to howl by humans. (This film is perhaps best seen after one of the others, like a "chaser.")

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.

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.

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.

16mm color short from Pat O'Neill, music video for The United States of America

"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

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

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.

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs.

A look back at the hotel where The Decay of Fiction (2002) was filmed, at the time of its demolition.

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

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

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

A film by Pat O'Neill

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.

2017 --- Digital Video --- 5 minutes --- Color --- Sound

2016 --- Digital Video --- 1 minute --- Color --- Sound

16mm film installation.

A short piece of commercial work done by three legendary L.A. artists. This piece was shown on loop projectors in Sears stores to promote an exciting and new young ladies' clothing line. 16mm print preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

2016 --- Digital Video --- 28 minutes --- Color --- Sound

2008 --- Digital Video --- 7 minutes --- Color --- Sound

2024, digital video, color, sound, 5

"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 of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O'Neill begins to animate 'scratches' over the image, one's eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Ojo Caliente (hot eye) depicts a site in a reddish sandstone desert; the remains of a settlement apparently dedicated to the manufacture of solid objects. Cones of various sizes and shades are scattered about the entrance of a shallow cave. Whoever made them is never seen, but something seems to be going on underground! An amazingly tiny video.

Short film by Pat O'Neill.