Pat O'Neill

An experimental film in the truest sense, The Decay of Fiction makes use of two traditional cinematic practices in juxtaposition. The film is first a journey through a historic hotel in Los Angeles, empty and awaiting demolition. Within these spaces will be set a series of dramatic encounters with characters who might all have been present in this building at the same time. (Anthology Film Archives)

Winner of a Sundance Grand Jury prize, Pat O'Neill's influential experimental work is in his own words "a landscape film that became animated by the beginnings of human stories." In this "city symphony," O'Neill juxtaposes images of downtown Los Angeles with scenes from the Owens Valley, Los Angeles' source of water. This was a brilliant examination of water in all its forms and the one-sided sharing of energy between the two places, representing nature and civilization. (Library of Congress)

A film that looks at certain aspects of the geography of California as the ground for cinematic disruption and restatement. The Boundaries in question turn out to be frame lines, the divisions between two images, one above the other on a strip of 35mm film. The projector gate is adjustable up or down in order to produce a single uninterrupted image: in this film the frame line is integrated into the compositional language of the piece.

This Film started out to be about the motion and sound of the oil derricks that once lined the beach in Venice, California. (Pat O'Neill)

When a giant trowel is plunged into the floor of Monument Valley, it's as though John Ford had hired Claes Oldenburg to dress his set. The film, O'Neill's most ambitious to date, with a dreamy, narrative subtext underlying its sensuous surface, is framed by abstract animations which denote scratches or scraped-off emulsion in much the same way that Roy Lichtenstein offered a benday-dot brushstroke as a painterly gesture (The Village Voice)

Experimental stuff

A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, "false tones" caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as "containers" for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in Easyout and Down Wind. (Canyon Cinema Catalogue)

The beginning shows three different images on top of eachother that seem to have nothing in common. In the background stalks of wheat dance in the wind feverishly as if a storm is coming. Another frame offers the washed-out image of two men talking and gesturing. They could be reliving their college football years. Or they could be offering instructions on how to maneuver through rush-hour traffic. Above them a hand rubs its fingers together, pondering the texture of some invisible substance.

A thoughtful treatment of some of the problems we (mankind) have been having in dealing with our fellow species, animal and vegetable. Actually an undercover “structural” film, this one seems at first to be some sort of berserk travelogue. I spent years going to travelogues as a child, and still have a great fondness for visiting natural history museums in strange cities. (Letterboxd)

"Foregrounds" is an experimental film made by Pat O'Neill in 1979.