FESTIVAL ’90 : Screenings Present Pacific Rim Cultures

California Originals: Pat O’Neill’s Water and Power

Sunday, 2 p.m., Warner Grand, 478 W. 6th St., San Pedro; KCET, Sept. 14, 11 p.m.

Handsomely produced--especially for an experimental feature--in lovely 35 millimeter, Pat O’Neill’s hourlong “Water and Power” inevitably conjures up the specter of “Koyaanisqatsi” and other predecessors with its speeded-up images of cascades both pastoral and urban. (If you’ve seen one time-lapse scene of cars dribbling in alternate spurts through a downtown intersection, you’ve probably seen them all.) But O’Neill doesn’t stop at capturing these landscapes; he’s augmented them at spots in the postproduction process, with top-rank, painstaking special effects both visual and aural. Seductive, imaginative and a little baffling, “Water and Power” ups the ante on what can be achieved (and, perhaps, afforded) in non-narrative filmmaking.