At the start of the 1960s, before digital software made techniques of moving image manipulation widespread and accessible, Pat O’Neill emerged on the Californian scene with his visionary experimentations with film, the montage of found materials and optical printing. Pre-empting the development of special effects in Hollywood studios by a few years, he gave rise to an original corpus of anti-narrative films, accompanied by distorted and estranging electronic music, stressing their perceptive ambiguities. For his effects, he would make use most of all of an optical printer, allowing him to return to the images once filmed and to manipulate them directly on the celluloid, producing double exposures and overexposures of blocks of colour which would wear down and hide the original contents. [...]
