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Poster for Ancient of Days
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Released
1982 · FILM

Ancient of Days

Directed by
Written by
Runtime
12 min
DocumentaryShort

Synopsis

Ancient of Days is a series of "canons and fugues for video" that represents Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were used to construct illustrations of temporal symmetry, duality, and transposition—time-based equivalents of musical compositional principles such as counterpoint and serialism. Notable temporal interventions include an 180-degree pan looking downward on a New York City street that transitions from day to night, and an image of Mount Rainier in which the foreground and background unfold in different time planes, presenting symbolic transformations of natural and urban landscapes.

Credits

Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 1

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Bill Viola

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