Water and Power (35mm)

Presented by Mount Analogue ○ Art + Cinema

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, Water and Power, presented in its original 35mm format, is artist and filmmaker Pat O'Neill's masterwork that explores the complex relationship between water and the city of Los Angeles.

A work of incredible technical virtuosity, O'Neill uses a variety of techniques such as stop-motion and time-lapse photography, superimpositions, and precise motion-controlled tracking and panning shots. Taking its title from the utility company that administers the water in the region, Water and Power was filmed in California, primarily in Owens Valley, a significant source of LA's water supply, and in downtown Los Angeles. O'Neill describes the film as "metaphorically about the exchange of energy between two places. It is also about water, in all of its states, and about cyclical motion: the planets, the tides, the implied rotation of the camera on its axis, and the repetitive actions of the performers. There are also quotations from older movies and their soundtracks: at times their landscapes become continuous with those of the present. Human habitation in this wilderness is tenuous and risky."

"... reveals a modern city as layer over layer of experience, and makes no pretense of reducing Los Angeles to anything like a single, coherent understanding. In Water and Power, LA is not merely an elaborate reality; it is a nearly overwhelming surreality." —Scott McDonald, Wide Angle

"The 'reality' animated by the film is LA; its topography and social ambiance, its myths of creation and embedding of a dream. It is surely the greatest of contemporary 'city symphonies.'"—Paul Arthur, Moving Picture

"The continuous shifts and surprises that lie at the heart of the film's form make a kind of grand metaphor for the never-ending change that underlies nature, civilization and the multiply symbiotic interchanges between them." —Fred Camper, Chicago Reader