Pat ONeill

”This rarely screened 1989 masterpiece by Pat O’Neill is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on the dystopic desert created by Los Angeles’s vast water consumption. O’Neill conceived the film partly as an answer to Godfrey Reggio’s mind-numbing Koyaanisqatsi (1983), a hypnotic inventory of touristy landscapes showing a world out of balance. In contrast O’Neill creates images full of internal contradictions, using optical printing to collage different locales and suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. One slow dissolve between the Owens Valley desert and Los Angeles at night suggests a direct cause and effect: the city flourished only by despoiling the land. Using time lapse to make weather changes visible, O’Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale.” – Fred Camper, The Chicago ReaderRead More »

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Trouble in the Image is a collection of visual and auditory ideas, many of which seem to radiate a sense of internal conflict, irony and rage. The film has no continuing characters, but 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. All is not lost, however. The reward is to be found in immersion within a space of complex and intricate formal relationships, where subject matter is almost irrelevant. The film was accumulated over a seventeen-year period by a filmmaker who continues to insist that film can be an art form independent of storytelling.
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