Pat O’Neill – The Decay of Fiction (2002)

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