?Pat O'Neill makes a living doing special effects for the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but he's also been making his own independent 16-millimeter films since 1963. Fred Camper, Chicago Reader September 15, 1995

Most use optical printing (a kind of image manipulation through frame-by-frame re-photography) to produce unusual imagery, a process O'Neill once described as attempting to represent paradoxical visions--for example, the misperceptions that sometimes appear on waking. In the early 80s he began working improvisational on a longer work, filming with a computer-controlled time-lapse camera and incorporating footage from his other projects and old movies. The result, the 35-millimeter, 57-minute Water and Power (1989), never got even the limited commercial release he'd hoped for--this is only its second Chicago showing--but it's a masterpiece: a moving meditation on Los Angeles, where O'Neill lives, and on the relationship of humans to technology, water, and land. O'Neill's subtle combinations of nature and city time-lapse sequences place the frenetic, apparently random bustling of city crowds in the context of the smooth, almost balletic movements of clouds and sunlight. He never makes the simple judgments (city bad, nature good) that characterized the superficially similar Koyaanisqatsi, but instead depicts our dependence on nature through complex visual poetry. Superimposing a room containing a blank easel and an artist's nude model on fast-motion city images, he puts art making in the context of the rectilinear bustle of city life. A forest of bright lights, moving like living beings, emerges from the opening of an old mine, which the sound track suggests is radioactive; soon we see stars in the night sky, also points of light, but more fixed, eternal. The film becomes an ecstatic skein of contradictions, at once a joyous and mournful symphony on the differences between nature and us. Shown with Susan Pitt's animated Asparagus.?


Kino-Eye Cinema opens its Fall season with a screening of two visually spectacular 35mm works by two of cinema?s most creative artists. Water and Power (35mm, 1989, 57 min) is an experimental film made entirely of a series of visions and stories arising out of filmmaker Pat O?Neill?s native California. Improvisational in technique and edited from a decade?s worth of location filming using a motion controlled time-lapse camera, O?Neill layers stunningly beautiful landscape photography, animation, snippets of silent film, old movie soundtracks and improvisational jazz into an abstract meditation on growth and decay, ebb and flow, the city of Los Angeles and the drained Ownes Valley. Suzan Pitt?s Asparagus (35 mm, 1978, 19 min) is ??visual poem that is an erotic allegory on the creative process, in which a woman views and performs the passages of sensual and artistic discovery. Four years in the making, Asparagus is a cell animated pychodrama-Meshes of the Afternoon recast in the post-lysergic style of Yellow submarine.? ? J. Hoberman, Village Voice. (Thanks to James Bond, Asparagus and Water Power will be shown in their original 35 mm format). Join friends and members of Chicago filmmakers for a party after the screening.