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Decay of Fiction, The

Pat O'Neill
USA 2002, 74:00

EMAF 2003
Tour: nein
im Verleih: ja / in distribution: yes
distribution@emaf.de // Tel: 00 49 / (0)541 / 2 16 58

Credits:
/ USA 2002, 35mm, 74:00 // Director, editor, production: Pat O'Neill // Producer: Rebecca Hartzell // Camera, sounddesign: George Lockwood // Production-assistant: Nancy Oppenheim // Best Boy: Doug Cragoe; // Gaffer, key grip: Amy Halpern // Wardrobe: Violetta Elfimova // Makeup: Tereza Nelson, Tamara Margarian // Video-assistants: Eric Furie, Mark Michael // Camera, Rotoskopanimation: Kate McCabe // Muse: Beverly O'Neill // Actors: Wendi Winburn, William Lewis, Julio Leopold, Amber Lopez, Jack Conley, John Rawling, Patricia Thielemann, Dan Bell, Kane Crawford, Damon Colazzo, Jacqueline Humbert, Judy Lieff.

Beschreibung:
THE DECAY OF FICTION von Pat O'Neill The Decay of Fiction ist eine Kreuzung zwischen Wirklichkeit und Halluzination in einem verlassenen Luxushotel. Das Hotel liegt in Hollywood. Die Wände des Ambassador sind gerissen und blättern ab, der Rasen ist braun und Schimmel wächst auf den feuchten Teppichen des Cocoanut Grove. Das Schwimmbad ist leer und der Ballsaal, in dem BOBBY KENNEDY starb, ist verriegelt und die Fensterläden sind geschlossen. Eine große, elegante Blondine steht deutlich sichtbar auf der Terrasse ihres Bungalows und betrachtet rauchend den Sonnenaufgang. Stimmen und Geräusche wehen über den Rasen. Ein Trupp unheimlicher Männer kommt an und fragt nach Jack. Jack erwartet Ärger, aber nicht diese Art von Ärger. Louise, ein Gast, wiederholt einen Alptraum, in dem sie Pauline ertränkt, damit sie Dean heiraten kann. Die Sonne geht unter und geht wieder auf. Überall tauchen zwei Detektive auf, die nach kommunistischer Literatur suchen und sich sinnlose Geschichten über Unterweltintrigen erzählen. In der Küche und hinter der Kulisse geht die tägliche Routine weiter, Individualität schwindet und Arbeiter verschmelzen mit ihrer Arbeit. Der Winter vergeht und ein weiterer Sommer. Und schließlich ist Halloween, ein Kostümball findet statt, der das Leben Rhondas, der schwer fassbaren Sopranistin, fordert. Und dann fällt das Gebäude in einem Poltern von spanischen Ziegeln und Beton zusammen und die Realität wird endlich wieder Fiktion. Vor fast vierzig Jahren kritzelte ich die Worte The Decay of Fiction auf die Rückseite eines Notizbuches, riss sie heraus und griff sie fünfzehn Jahre später wieder auf, immer mit dem Gedanken einen Film aus dieser fertigen Beschreibung zu machen. Für mich beziehen sie sich auf den normalen Zustand des ›Geschichten halb Erinnerns‹, des ›Filme halb Sehens‹, Texte am Rande der Erinnerung, die verschwinden wie ein Buch, das auf dem Erdboden liegt und sich in die Erde zersetzt. Der Film spielt in einem Gebäude, das zerstört werden soll, dessen Wände eine große Last an Erinnerungen enthalten: kulturell und persönlich, bewusst und unbewusst. Den Film machen zu können bedeutete, ein paar seiner Persönlichkeiten und ihrer Gespräche, auf diesen engen Raum zusammengewürfelt, einfangen zu müssen. Das Gebäude und seine Geschichten vergehen gemeinsam und das Eine scheint jeweils eine Metapher des Anderen zu sein.

Description:
THE DECAY OF FICTION by Pat O'Neill Distribution for Europe The Internationale Experimentalfilm Workshop e.V. is now distributing the 35mm print of Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction. The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again. I scribbled the words The Decay of Fiction on the back of a notebook almost forty years ago, tore it off and framed it fifteen years later, and have wanted ever since to make a film to fit its ready-made description. To me it refers to the common condition of stories partly remembered, films partly seen, texts at the margins of memory, disappearing like a book left outside on the ground to decompose back into the earth. The film takes place in a building about to be destroyed, those walls contain (by dint of association) a huge burden of memory: cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. To make the film was to trap a few of its characters and some of their dialog, casting them together within the confines of the site. The structure and its stories are decaying together, and each seems to be a metaphor for the other. PAT O'NEILL moves in two worlds: he and his visual effects company, Lookout Mountain Films, have achieved some of the best-known effects for Hollywood films since the 1970s, from ›Return of the Jedi‹ through ›The Game.‹ He has also been a member of the experimental film scene that was so vibrant in the '60s and '70s, where he pioneered the sort of free-flowing, manipulated live-action imagery that is now all around us. Born 1939 in Los Angeles, PAT O'NEILL received a Master of Arts degree in graphic design and photography from UCLA, where his mentor was photographer Robert Heineken. He produced his first short film in 1963 in collaboration with computer-graphics innovator Robert Abel. During the '60s and '70s he taught photography at UCLA, while experimenting with and refining the limited means for combining images that were available at the time (the optical printer, first in 16mm and then in 35mm). Aesthetic concerns he shares with a generation of California artists led him from sculpture to experiments with continuous-projection film installations which were exhibited in galleries and incorporated into rock-concert light shows. O'NEILL'S contemporaries in the experimental-film movement include Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and the late Hollis Frampton and Ed Emshwiller, and he cites as an influence Michael Snow. He was founding Assistant Dean for Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts 1970-1975, and since 1975 has operated his highly regarded special-effects and optical printing company. He has always supported the making and showing of experimental film, and works with many filmmakers on their projects. He and his wife Beverly - who is also active in the Los Angeles film community-were co-founders of an early Los Angeles film cooperative. Concurrent with production of ›The Decay of Fiction‹, he is directing an interactive DVD which is companion and supplement to the film. ›Tracing The Decay of Fiction: Encounters With A Film By Pat O'Neill‹ is a collaboration with the Labyrinth Project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC). While photomechanical technology has largely been replaced, ›The Decay of Fiction‹ was realized in this traditional way. Even in O'Neills's beloved photographic darkroom, the enlarger has been supplanted by the G3 he uses to produce large-format fine art digital prints of his image-based artwork.

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