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.

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.

"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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pat O'Neill in 2007.

2024, digital video, color, sound, 5

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.

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.

"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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pat O'Neill in 2007.

2024, digital video, color, sound, 5

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.

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.

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

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.

16mm film installation.

A reflection between nature and man in Los Angeles about the city's surroundings' desertification due to enormous water consumption.

A reflection between nature and man in Los Angeles about the city's surroundings' desertification due to enormous water consumption.

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

"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

Short film by Pat O'Neill.

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

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.

"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

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.")

A film by Pat O'Neill

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

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.

"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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pat O'Neill in 2007.

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

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

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.

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

2010 --- Digital Video --- 4 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound: Califone

Pat O'Neill narrates his photographs.

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

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

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).

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.

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

O'Neill's subtle and ethereal footage juxtaposes images drawn from the Prelinger Archives as well as clips from education films from the 1940s and 1950s.

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 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. O'Neill: “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”. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

2009 --- Digital Video --- 6 minutes --- Color --- Sound Sound: Califone

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.

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

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

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