Pat O’Neill’s THE DECAY OF FICTION and 7362 – Pat O'Neill in Person!

“The technical feat of double exposing real time images over long exposure timelapse and lining up the perspectives alone makes this a masterpiece…Shot in the classic Hollywood style, the movie follows various mysterious characters as they move through the haunted halls of the hotel, exploring along the way the secrets that are held within.” - Variety on The Decay of Fiction

The Philosophical Research Society is proud to welcome a Los Angeles avant-garde legend, renowned for his surrealist collages of the California landscape – experimental film pioneer and artist Pat O’Neill!

Pat will join us, in person, for a screening of two works which span his brilliant career: the haunting and mesmerizing feature THE DECAY OF FICTION (2002) and the jaw-dropping psychedelic short 7362 (1967). Very rarely screened, THE DECAY OF FICTION is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, exploring the haunted history of the now long-gone Los Angeles landmark The Ambassador Hotel. Filmed shortly before the iconic building’s demolition, O’Neill’s camera wanders its dilapidated halls while echoes of its past are played out by ghostly actors, stitching fragments of both everyday mundanity and lurid storylines while capturing the bizarre history of intrigue housed within The Ambassador’s walls. This very special evening will kick off with O’Neill’s explosively kaleidoscopic cinematic eye-trip that is 7362. Featuring sound design by Joseph Byrd of legendary avant-garde psych pop band The United States of America, the pioneering 7362 is carved into the Mt. Rushmore of psychedelic, experimental films. 

Pat O’Neill on 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."

On 7362:

This film started out to be about the motion and sound of the oil derricks that once lined the beach in Venice, California. The derricks, which had been built during the oil boom of the 1920's, were made of wood and rusted iron, and were largely open and unattended. I was attracted to these towers by their moaning sounds, their heady aromas, and the consolation of the endless rising and falling of the pump heads. Somehow it seemed like prayer. The film came to contain a human body, and then moving objects which I filmed in my studio: rotating and oscillating shapes whose outlines would merge with one another. But in a way the piece was really about re-photography – about making something out of ordinary parts using mechanical technology to reveal a glimpse of something uncanny.

Thirty-some years later, it seems to be about orgasms. Joseph Byrd, later of the United States of America (a band) made sounds on the fly from a primitive synthesizer. Burton Gershfield stopped by with a gallon each of yellow, cyan, and magenta developers from Technicolor, which were used to develop black and white, emulsion 7362.

7362, dir. Pat O'Neill, 1967, 10m, digital.

The Decay of Fiction, dir. Pat O'Neill, 2002, 1h 14m, digital.

Tickets: $10 (In Person Event Only)

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