Heaven’s Gate

Heaven’s Gate is the fourth work in Brambilla’s Megaplex series, a vertically scrolling video collage that ascends through seven levels modeled on Dante’s Purgatory, reframed through the language of Hollywood spectacle. The continuous loop presents a densely layered panorama composed of imagery sourced from over 800 films, creating an immersive environment where archetypes, narratives, and eras collide.

The title references Michael Cimino’s 1980 film Heaven’s Gate, a production synonymous with cinematic ambition and excess. Brambilla’s reuse of the name draws a parallel between Cimino’s failed utopian vision and the cyclical dynamics of image-making and consumption within the entertainment industry.

Within the work, genre and chronology dissolve into a hyper-saturated vertical cascade, exploring the mechanisms by which cinema constructs collective memory and myth. Figures drift upward across domains of melodrama, fantasy, war, and apocalypse, recontextualized as part of a singular, recursive system of visual culture.

Heaven’s Gate has been presented in a range of formats, including as a monumental video wall at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, as a 360-degree architectural wrap on the exterior of the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, and as a 12K immersive projection at Outernet Arts in London.


“In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety. Heaven’s Gate likewise unravels into a dreamlike spectacle of virtual chaos. The work produces an overpowering labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous spreading visual maze seems to encompass the past and the future. In some way it involves stars.”

‘Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths’ essay by Daniel Birnbaum

High-definition 3D video, loop. Color, sound.