PLASTIC REALITIES: FILMS BY SUZAN PITT AND PAT O’NEILL

Artistic contemporaries and longtime friends, Suzan Pitt and Pat O’Neill have each created large and diverse bodies of work in a wide variety of mediums, though none perhaps more visibly than in film.  The Academy was proud to host these two visionary artists in person with a program of their radical and visually stunning short films, newly preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Working in very distinct modes, both Pitt and O’Neill have been vastly influential and acclaimed in the cinematic arts, each producing a body of work known for its visual complexity, richness, and unconventionality.  Pitt’s characteristically vivid, laboriously handmade animated films sweep the viewer into ecstatic and disturbing alternative worlds.  Often working with elaborate optical printing and other compositing techniques, O’Neill is an unparalleled collagist, bringing together unrelated images, both found and original, in complex, multilayered compositions.

Joy Street and Trouble in the Image were preserved in 2015-16 from their respective 35mm original camera negatives.  These projects are the latest in a series of several preservations the Archive has completed of the work of both Suzan Pitt and Pat O’Neill. 

Pinball (2013), Suzan Pitt, 7 min, digital, color, sound.

Painter & Ball 4-14 (2011), Pat O’Neill, 10 min, digital, color, sound

Joy Street (1995) - Film by Suzan Pitt.  24 minutes.  35mm, 1.37, color, sound.

Trouble in the Image (1996) - Film by Pat O’Neill. 38 minutes.  35mm, 1.37, color, sound.

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