LAFF: Pat O'Neill - Feb. 3, 2008 - Part 1

February 3, 2008.
Pat O'Neill Q&A - Part 1
Moderator: Adam Hyman
Location: The Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre.

Pat ONeill is Los Angeless true avant-garde master, creating beautiful, moody films with floating mattes, variable film speeds, ghostly layering, wry wit, and masterful soundtracks, all working together to form a fractured almost-narrative, a reflection on the lost spaces and times of our city. Among the films that we saw, Horizontal Boundaries, which ONeill has stated might be his last film.

In ONeills films, boundaries fade; narratives collapse, and layers of images draw the viewer simultaneously towards and away from linear meaning. Since the early 1960s, eminent Los Angeles based artist and filmmaker Pat ONeill has combined a mastery of optical effects with found footage, experimental montage and compositing techniques to create seamless streams of moving images.

Films screened:
Coreopsis (1998, 35mm, 9 min.)
Trouble in the Image (1996, 35mm, color, 38 min.)
Horizontal Boundaries (2005, 35mm, color, 23 min.)
More on Trouble in the Image (1996, 35mm, color, 38 min.)
More on Horizontal Boundaries (2005, 35mm, 23 min)

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About Pat ONeill
Pat O'Neill [born 1939, Los Angeles] received a Master of Arts degree in graphic design and photography from UCLA. He produced his first short film in 1963 in collaboration with computer-graphics pioneer Robert Abel. During the '60s and '70s he taught photography at UCLA, while experimenting with and refining the limited means for combining images that were available at the time [the optical printer, first in 16mm and then in 35mm]. In the early 1970s he was founding Assistant Dean for Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts, and since 1975 has operated his highly regarded special-effects and optical printing company, Lookout Mountain Films. Recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, he received the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1993. Aesthetic concerns he shares with a generation of California artists led him from sculpture to experiments with continuous-projection film installations which were exhibited in galleries and incorporated into rock-concert light shows. A respected member of the experimental film scene, he pioneered the sort of free-flowing, manipulated live-action imagery in which we are now all immersed.

O'Neill's first feature, "Water and Power," was a Sundance Grand Jury winner in 1990 and was hailed as a touchstone for filmmaking in the future. The film became an instant classic, and was shown at the New York Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Telluride, London, Los Angeles and many others. "Trouble in the Image" followed in 1995 and has also been widely screened throughout the world. Several of the fourteen avant-garde 16mm short films he produced between 1963 and 1982 are also considered classics and all are in international distribution and in the collections of major museums, from the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris to the Austrian Film Archive in Vienna.

2009.
All Rights Reserved.
http://www.lafilmforum.org

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People & Blogs

[clubtablist]

can any one please tell me how he did that amazing time lapse thing in water and power with the guy sitting on a chair moving his head quickly at 12 : 00

thats soooo damn nice and gritty

[nirvana2187]

wish i had been there! Mr. O'Neill is great!