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Works on Film 1978-1995 |
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A more exhilarating discovery is Trouble In The Image, the latest effort by California filmmaker Pat O'Neill (Water and Power). Unpinnable on any conventional thematic or narrative plane, the 38-minute "epic" works as pure sensory dazzlement - its mix of layered "found" images and old-movie audio is endlessly stimulating, with eye-poppin' coloration that makes a good case for using the 35mm format.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian |
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Take the irresistable item called Trouble In The Image, for example. Produced by California filmmaker Pat O'Neill over several years - its subtitle, Works on Film 1978-1995, indicates the time period - it's a rollicking mixture of nostalgic images, tantalizing plot fragments, and visual effects that would do a Hollywood fantasy proud. While it tells no conventional story, its energetic bits and pieces fall into an unpredictable collage that comments ironically on how the modern-day West has veered off the track fostered by feel-good frontier myths. It's fun, it's thoughtful, and it's made to order for big screen viewing.
David Sterritt |
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Like having all the TV channels on at once, Pat O'Neill's Trouble In The Image (1996) suggests dynamic graffitti or rap-music sampling of sound and image to create a new whole. One of the longest and more visually layered assemblages on the program, Trouble's frenzied blur of imagery appropriates cultural detritus like old black and white movies, crappy TV cop shows, educational film strips and instructional film loops, juxtaposing cultural signs much like '80's artist David Salle's paintings mix up divergent imagery.
On one level a pure - often eerie and disturbingly poetic - treatise on movement, of trees fluttering in the wind, horses moving en masse, explosions and flocks of birds peppering the sky, Trouble is also a provocative, slippery theoretical meditation on popular imagery. Rather than the individual unconscious explored by the surrealists, O'Neill's film, with its jumbled imagery, suggests a cultural, collective unconscious dominated by movies and TV and assembled into a filmic dream. Trouble proposes that whether the entertaining cheesy Westerns or educational films on nuclear energy, all imagery is essentially the same: propaganda for a specific, American way of life.
Felicia Feaster |
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Another key work is major Southern California experimentalist Pat O'Neill's Trouble In The Image: Works on Film 1978-1995. It is a witty collage of reprocessed found images and sounds incorporating some lively animation, which have been organized into a series of fragmented glimpses of individuals caught up in anger and conflict. O'Neill describes his work as "special-effects technology turned against itself" and insists that film "can be an art form independent of storytelling."
Kevin Thomas |
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The only film in White Light/White Heat with the kinetic energy of the Velvet Underground song that gives the program its name is Pat O'Neill's Trouble In The Image: Works on Film 1978-1995, (1996). O'Neill stacks pieces of stock footage on top of each other to create a series of remarkable visual collages, set to a soundtrack composed of excerpts from vintage personal-hygiene and educational films. Time lapse photography and rotoscoped animation render the images even more beautiful and disturbing. Reminiscent of both Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, it's the sole work in the bunch in which the experiment fully succeeds.
Andrew Johnston |
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