Angel's Gate (1989)

• 58%
• 1989
• Documentary
• Bill Viola

Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The image sequences — fruit falling from a tree, a candle being extinguished, a family having a flash photograph taken — appear as a series of openings or momentary glimpses into nature's essential gestures which, like thoughts, are destined to fade and themselves disintegrate into obscurity and oblivion. Peak moments illuminate the dim confines of memory and forgetting with a kind of universal light, as a baby emerges into the world before our eyes, and the camera-eye moves along a dark concrete tunnel towards the rigid steel bars of a locked gate, where it finally passes through and out into the bright world, liberated by the consuming, saturated white light of its own overexposure.