Bill Viola's extraordinary new piece 'The Passing' is arguably the most important video art work of the last few years. Startling, lyrical, profound, and powerfully, authentically moving, it is also the most perfect expression so far of Viola's singular artistic vision. A haunting visual fugue, made up of spectral optical phenomena and impressions from the edges of consciousness, The Passing spirals, to striking effect, round a simple leitmotif - that of Viola, the restless sleeper, undergoing what one might call a 'dark night of the soul': his unquiet slumbers interrupted by surging, primal memories; and, then, when brought sharply awake, by intimations of mortality. This bleary nighttime perspective provides the perfect setting for Viola's trademark trance-like transformations, which continually blur the line between dream and reality, between the self and the surrounding world. In the to-and-fro between waking and sleep, punctuated only by distant night sounds and the rise-and-fall of Viola's breathing, the camera passes like a ghost (from the depths of the sleeper's psyche to the shadowy interior of the house, to the empty streets outside and the desert landscape beyond), leaving a vivid trail of associations in its wake. These encompass Viola's near drowning as a ten-year-old, the birth of his (second) son and various shots of his elderly mother, whose death provokes the tape's somber rumination on the (inevitable) passing of time. Viola's breathtaking black-and-white images are more than a match for his themes: using high-grain slow-motion video to establish an evocative dream-like texture and a special light-sensitive camera to (brilliantly) illumine the darkness of the world outside. Some of his set-piece tableaux (particularly the astonishing sequences where Viola takes his trompe l'oeil effects underwater) have a spellbinding surrealist quality that stays in the mind's eye long after the passing moment has faded. Rarely, if ever, has video been so visionary in its mood, so poetic in its language and so powerful in its emotional impact.
http://www.fvumbrella.com/html/seeinginthedark.html
The Passing hauntingly travels the terrains of the conscious, the subconscious, and the desert landscapes of the Southwest, melding sleep, dreams and the drama of waking life into a stunning masterpiece. Viola, placed at the center of this personal exploration of altered time and space, represents his mortality in such forms as a glistening newborn baby, his deceased mother, and the artist himself, floating, submerged under water. Starkly yet poignantly rendered in black and white, The Passing re-enforces the notion of a permeable conduit between reality and surreality. An irrepressible soundtrack of Viola’s labored breathing in sleeping and wakefulness serves to pull the viewer through an otherworldly topography. Amy Taubin of the Village Voice hails The Passing as "awesomely beautiful" and deems Bill Viola "a world-class video artist." She writes, "Some of the images ... burst out of the darkness, shimmer and fade as radiant and ephemeral as shooting stars."
http://www.konstframjandet.org/passing.html
This is the best Viola I've seen so far, recommended
.VIDEO: [DIVX-Ffmpeg] 704x480 24bpp 23,976 fps 1094,1 kbps (133,6 kbyte/s)
AUDIO: [MP3]48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 4000->192000 (32,0 kbit)
Note: I've not rescaled the movie to preserve quality, so if your player doesn't do it for you, set the aspect to 4:3 manually.
Some interlaced frames here and there, sorry.
THE LINK:
Bill Viola - The Passing (1991 - 54 min).avi 
)
