The Decay of Fiction is a 2002 American 35mm part color and part black-and-white experimental film noir project directed by independent filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill. The film, initially conceived as a documentary, was produced by O’Neill and Rebecca Hartzell for Lookout Mountain Films. Filming took place in Los Angeles. The film is set at the site of the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It has no identifiable plot and features no recurring characters.

Synopsis:
According to O’Neill, the film is an “intersection of fact and hallucination”. It is set inside the decaying halls of the closed Ambassador Hotel, former home to the Cocoanut Grove restaurant and the first Academy Awards ceremonies. The film superimposes reenactments of classic Hollywood films onto shots of the dilapidated establishment, with ghostly gangsters and their gun molls interacting with icy blondes and wisecracking bartenders in carefully deconstructed snatches of dialogue. O’Neill’s time-lapse photography lends the film an ethereal effect that serves an intentionally distancing purpose. In this study of the historic Hollywood edifice, there is no discernible plot and there are no recurring characters. The film construction has the appearance of snippets taken from lost films of the 1940s; it uses surreal vignettes of nude men and women, stop-motion animated mannequin torsos, flickering film projections and dim light bulbs to create what devolves in a sense of nightmares, giving a result that feels more like an art installation than the expected film.

The Decay of Fiction (2002).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 15mn
Size: 	1.19 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x554 ~> 1024x554
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 Kbps
BPP: 	0.209
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/DA26F6195D0BB76/The_Decay_of_Fiction_(2002).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Pat O’Neill – The Decay of Fiction (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“FOREGROUNDS, like SAUGUS SERIES, is devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities. The most visceral of these prints a rotating boulder, occupying half of the screen, over a slow lateral pan across the desert (painted by Neon Park). A faint superimposition of leaves on top of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O’Neill begins to animate ‘scratches’ over the image, one’s eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Pat-Oneill_Foregrounds_1979.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	13 min 33 s
Size: 	488 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	
BPP: 	
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC

https://nitro.download/view/5DFF2BEB0526E0C/Pat-Oneill_Foregrounds_1979.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

Sourced from Canyon Cinema’s new digitizations of Pat’s work. Please rent their ondemand videos if you can.

The post Pat O’Neill – Foregrounds (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

”This rarely screened 1989 masterpiece by Pat O’Neill is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on the dystopic desert created by Los Angeles’s vast water consumption. O’Neill conceived the film partly as an answer to Godfrey Reggio’s mind-numbing Koyaanisqatsi (1983), a hypnotic inventory of touristy landscapes showing a world out of balance. In contrast O’Neill creates images full of internal contradictions, using optical printing to collage different locales and suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. One slow dissolve between the Owens Valley desert and Los Angeles at night suggests a direct cause and effect: the city flourished only by despoiling the land. Using time lapse to make weather changes visible, O’Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale.” – Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader

1.44GB | 55m 04s | 1440×1080 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/6D60D56F38B97B1/Water.and.Power.1989.1080p.MAYS.WEBRip.AAC2.0.x264-ZineSouce.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Pat O’Neill – Water and Power (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Trouble in the Image is a collection of visual and auditory ideas, many of which seem to radiate a sense of internal conflict, irony and rage. The film has no continuing characters, but is made up of dozens of performances dislodged from other contexts. These are often relocated into contemporary industrial landscapes, or interrupted by the chopping, shredding, or flattening of special-effects technology turned against itself. All is not lost, however. The reward is to be found in immersion within a space of complex and intricate formal relationships, where subject matter is almost irrelevant. The film was accumulated over a seventeen-year period by a filmmaker who continues to insist that film can be an art form independent of storytelling.

613MB | 37 min 59 s | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/A5DED4CDE0CF384/Trouble_in_the_Image_(Pat_O’Neill_1996).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Pat O’Neill – Trouble In The Image (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Horizontal Boundaries takes on Los Angeles as an uncertain subject, a displaced location in space and time. Shot in and around the city and other locations in California with “the intent to produce “synthetic” depictions of locations made up of multiple and disparate parts,” O’Neill combines the visual effects with a visceral soundtrack that demands the total attention of the viewer. As O’Neill writes, the goal is to “present an image that is both clearly understood and obviously altered. Altering the imagery from its original photographic state raises inevitable questions concerning its reception: What are we to believe? How is a representation changed by proximity with another? How does contradiction, itself, represent our experience?” And goes on to point out that, “My films share some of the concerns of other experimental filmmakers worldwide: defining parameters for the representation of space and time, exploiting personal experience as metaphor, using archival materials in a restated context.” – Cherry and Martin

351MB | 23 min 17 s | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/071E2D47FFD0010/Horizontal_Boundaries_(Pat_O’Neill_2008).mkv

https://tezfiles.com/file/c897f96827643/Horizontal_Boundaries_%28Pat_O%27Neill_2008%29.mp4

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Pat O’Neill – Horizontal Boundaries (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Screen (Pat O’Neill, 1969, digital (originally 16mm), color, silent, 4min.)
A less-well known work by O’Neill, originally intended as an installation.
Consider supporting the filmmaker.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/10FDE4AA86B36D6/Pat_O%27Neill_-_Screen_%281969%29.mkv

Language:Silent

The post Pat O’Neill – Screen (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.