USA,
2002, 73 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
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Pat O’Neill
- prod
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Rebecca Hartzell, Pat O’Neill
- cam
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George Lockwood
- editor
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Pat O’Neill
- cast
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Wendi Winburn, William Lewis, Julio Leopold, Amber Lopez, Jack Conley
- source
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1205 N Garfield Ave., Pasadena, CA 91104. EMAIL: lookoutfilm@earthlink.net.
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COMMENTS
Pat O’Neill received the Persistence of Vision Award in 2003.
OTHER
Pat O’Neill continues to expand his surrealist collages of the California landscape and the traces of the Hollywood films made there. His most recent masterpiece, The Decay of Fiction, focuses on the Ambassador, a Los Angeles hotel that featured conspicuously in the city’s fabled past until earthquake damage closed it down. It is constructed as a geometric ballet of time-lapse long takes though the gardens, corridors and rooms of the decaying hotel. O’Neill also introduces a distended filigree of narrative vignettes, fragments from the lives of the hotel’s guests that appear in superimposition. Transparent and insubstantial, they are a brilliant filmic realization of the hotel’s memories, the ghosts of its long-departed guests. But if they once resided in the hotel, their real home was film noir, and the narratives in which they flicker into life all resonate with the conventions of the industry’s most sustained engagement with the city. These refugees from the movies are not, however, the hotel’s only inhabitants. Their shady deals and assignations are increasingly interrupted by other creatures: monsters from the Ambassador’s (or the filmmaker’s) id that rise and commandeer it, as the hotel’s most dreadful event—the murder of Robert Kennedy—traumatized it.
—David E. James
FACTOID #210
When Ginger Rogers appeared for a tribute at the SFIFF in 1984 (’sporting hair with the color and richness of whipped butter,’ wrote the Examiner), she shocked the packed Castro Theatre crowd at her 1984 tribute when she griped, ’The filthy mouths we’re hearing in films today’I won’t pay to see these movies. I’d rather stay home and make jam.’
