Early Films by Pat O’Neill
Tuesday, January 20, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

A major figure of LA experimental film, Pat O’Neill originally trained as a sculptor, but gained renown for a series of abstract movies made in the 60s and 70s, initially crafted with self-built printers and war-surplus equipment. These were densely layered photographic animation and collage, with a poetics rooted in the technologies of post-production and the landscapes of Southern California. Few artists have journeyed so memorably across cinema’s z-axis, and for this evening’s presentation we’ll be surveying his earliest efforts, made prior to his landmark Water and Power. Indeed, his optical-mechanical wizardry was so impressive that he was recruited by commercial filmmakers to produce special effects; for those who might think they have never before encountered O’Neill’s work, if you have seen Star Wars, The Terminator, or Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, then you already have.

“The multi–planar composite image, as facilitated by the optical printer, looms over O’Neill’s work in a manner similar to the way camera movement undergirds the films of Michael Snow or the splice functions as epistemological nexus in the first stages of Stan Brakhage’s massive oeuvre,” Paul Arthur observed. “It should be clear that their films are in no sense about their signature technical operations; rather, for each artist a specific aspect of the production process served to epitomize creative exigencies of individual skill, materiality, and aesthetic vision. In this light, O’Neill’s printer is at once a dream space and science laboratory geared to the mutation of extant images. The range of printing options recruited by O’Neill include stationary and traveling mattes, bi–packing, color modulation, looping, image enlargement and reduction, even subtitling… Often considered a streamlined or semi–automated task, printing for O’Neill can be as spontaneous as diary recording and as labor-intensive as cel animation.”

7362, 1967, 16mm, 10 mins

“The film begins in high-contrast black-and-white with two globes bouncing against one another horizontally, set to an electronic score by Joseph Byrd…As though in contrast, the following images are extremely complex in form, scale, texture and motion. Huge masses of mechanical hardware move ponderously on multiple planes in various directions simultaneously. The forms seem at times to be recognizable, at others to be completely nonobjective…Human and machine interact with serial beauty, one form passing into another with delicate precision in a heavenly spectrum of pastel colors.”

- Gene Youngblood

Runs Good, 1970, 16mm, 15 mins

“A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, ‘false tones’ caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as ‘containers’ for other imagery.”

- PO

Saugus Series, 1974, 16mm, 19 mins

“Actually, seven short films, one-and-a-half to six minutes long, united by a common soundtrack. Each is an evolving ‘still life,’ made up of meticulously assembled but spatially contradictory elements. For example, in one part the sun can be seen, by its shadows, to be traveling in one direction in the upper half of the screen, and in the opposite in the lower half.”

- PO

Sidewinder’s Delta, 1977, 16mm, 21 mins

“When a giant trowel is plunged into the floor of Monument Valley, it’s as though John Ford had hired Claes Oldenburg to dress his set. The film, O’Neill’s most ambitious to date, with a dreamy, narrative subtext underlying its sensuous surface, is framed by abstract animations which denote scratches or scraped-off emulsion in much the same way that Roy Lichtenstein offered a benday-dot brushstroke as a painterly gesture.”

- J. Hoberman

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.