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FILM COMMENT
November/December 2002
A STITCH IN TIME: NYFF AVANT-GARDE
by Nicole Armour
above: The Decay of Fiction
In Pat O'Neill's bravura The Decay of Fiction, fragmentary, interwoven narratives are situated in Los Angeles' deserted Ambassador Hotel. A former locus of Hollywood's Golden Age and the site of Robert Kennedy's assassination (and in the past 30 years, many low-budget movie shoots), the hotel now awaits demolition. O'Neill documents the building's empty, rotting interiors with time-lapse photography and motion-control camera techniques, and entire days seem to pass in seconds. Over this footage, he layers black-and-white sequences of actors in period costume and combines sound clips from Forties and Fifties noirs with his own scripted dialogue. The translucent figures who move through the hotel's spaces seem to bleed from the very walls, and the film assumes an increasingly horrific tone as its multiple scenarios expand to encompass sexual intrigue, betrayal, and murder, with demonic figures emerging at intervals, as if to celebrate the corruption on display. O'Neill's effort to imagine and resurrect a world that might be sustained within the Ambassador's once glamorous suites and hallways is a direct response to L.A. culture's tendency to demolish buildings once they fall out of step with popular taste. And by layering documentary and fiction, the film also addresses the discrepancy between Hollywood's version of reality and life as it's actually lived. What remains unresolved is how O'Neill feels about the Ambassador: is it merely an empty shell, just another movie set, or does it embody the underside of human nature as he envisions it?
Echoing The Decay of Fiction, Michelle Smith's elastic and monumental Regarding Penelope's Wake is a litany of layered, incised, and reiterated found images whose juxtapositions convey humanity's animalism. The circumstances of her film's creation ennoble its depiction of our primal drives. Smith abandoned filmmaking for eight years to sell antiques, a trade that appears to have served her well - she has a collector's eye. She took over 18 months to edit her material, which was mined from flea markets and acquired over the Internet. Silent and unfolding over two hours, Regarding Penelope's Wake exists only as an unprojectable workprint - it was screened on video. Due to its length and the intensive manipulation and layering of its footage, the film is as much a sculptural object as a performance or experience. Its physical existence elucidates the action it portrays - the dedication behind its completion suggests that personal expression is as fundamental a need as eating, shitting, and fucking. Smith specifically aligns her approach with weaving a textile, which brings us back to Harry Smith's quilts. Many of her techniques are found-footage filmmaking clichˇs (countdown leader, hand painting), but she adapts this pre-existing language to convey something about her life during the period in which she was making the film. At the same time, the material's associations are subtle enough to leave room for viewers to make their own connections. It's this characteristic that makes Regarding Penelope's Wake a gift to its audience. Michelle Smith spent years recovering forgotten junk so that she could hold up a mirror and allow us to see ourselves.
Nicole Armour is a Contributing Editor to Film Comment.
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