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Ghosts of Hollywood [THE DECAY OF FICTION]

From the Chicago Reader (May 30, 2003). — J.R.

The Decay of Fiction

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Pat O’Neill.

Truly original art tends to defy generic categories, and Pat O’Neill’s 35-millimeter, 73-minute The Decay of Fiction (2002), which Chicago Filmmakers is presenting this Saturday night at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, is no exception. Inarguably an experimental work, it also reeks of classic Hollywood. The credits list O’Neill as producer, director, and editor and George Lockwood as cinematographer and sound designer, but no one is credited as the screenwriter — even though the film contains as much dialogue as any commercial feature, most of it apparently original. Forty-five cast members are cited alphabetically in those same credits, with no indication of who plays the most significant roles. Eight years in the making, the film partakes equally of the past (roughly the 1920s through the 1960s) and a disquieting version of the present.

It was filmed in and around LA’s Ambassador Hotel, which closed in 1989 and was slated for demolition at the time the film went into production in 1994 (although it was still standing when the film premiered last fall). The Decay of Fiction is both a color documentary about that crumbling edifice (where the first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929, and where Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968) and a sonata of ghostly memories that permeate its various spaces — the latter taking the form of sound and imagery associated with black-and-white Hollywood movies.

As far as I can make out from the sketchy information available in the press book, most of the images, dialogue, and sound effects are masterful pastiches of snatches from typical Hollywood features (especially noirs and melodramas) while most of the music was lifted from old sound tracks. Most of the black-and-white characters and props seen among the hotel’s ruins are transparent, and the majority of the sounds, including the dialogue and music, are pitched at the periphery of normal perception, so that even when they connote dramatic or violent action, they seem to be on the verge of evaporating.

A treasure chest of narrative fragments, The Decay of Fiction lacks the itinerary and “instructions for use” that automatically comes with a linear story. The shards of its many implied plotlines are the fruit of O’Neill’s all-encompassing sense of form, which for better or worse is conceptual rather than technical or material. His overall concept is cogently expressed in the synopsis he provides in the film’s press materials, so I’ve decided to quote it in full (though it should be kept in mind that O’Neill’s description of the film is necessarily interpretive rather than objective).

“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 Coconut 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 various 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 tile and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction once again.” [The hotel’s demolition is suggested with sound effects rather than seen over the final credits.]

“I scribbled the words ‘The Decay of Fiction’ on the back of a notebook almost 40 years ago, tore it off and framed it 15 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, whose 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 dialogue, 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.

“I am interested in exploring the boundaries of believability. The narrative tradition insists that, no matter how fantastic the story, its surface must be seamless. By contrast, I call attention to the artifice, all the staged aspects, and allow the well-worn stories to slip over and through one another. The film’s intention could be described as wanting to take stories off the screen and into the imagination. I like to work within the gaps between reality and story, to look at what is going on around the story, its context, and to make that a part of my conversation with the audience.”

An expert technician, O’Neill has worked on the special effects of such Hollywood features as Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), Superman IV (1987), and The Game (1997), so his ambivalent relationship to the film industry — and to industrialization in general — is more than just theoretical. His best-known previous feature, Water and Power (1989), used time-lapse photography and optical printing (both techniques also central to The Decay of Fiction) to analyze the way water consumption in Los Angeles has despoiled the surrounding countryside. The evanescence of human presence in relation to physical landmarks is no less a major theme of both films. As Fred Camper wrote of Water and Power in these pages, “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.”

The film’s images of the past and the present are formally distinct from one another: most of the former are transparent, steady, and in black and white; most of the latter are solid, jerky time-lapse sequences in color. But there’s little else that’s constant or predictable about O’Neill’s high-end improvisations. The Decay of Fiction ultimately resembles a literary work insofar as its conceptual basis is so fully grounded in metaphor, as O’Neill himself notes. In this respect, it doesn’t quite live up to the high standards of either of the two films it evokes most often, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and The Shining (1980), both of which are also set in spacious luxury hotels inhabited by ghostly memories and hallucinatory visions. (Though it hasn’t frequently been acknowledged by critics, Stanley Kubrick’s horror film is deeply indebted to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais’ experimental art feature. The Decay of Fiction seems equally influenced by Last Year at Marienbad’s nostalgic and creepy poetry and its expert counterfeiting of various forms of Hollywood glamour and intrigue.) Maybe it’s the absence of narrative that makes the sum of O’Neill’s film less brilliant than its parts — despite the meditative possibilities that its nonlinearity offers. But if it’s a work that ultimately fails, it fails on a much higher level than that upon which many lesser works succeed. It seeps into one’s bones with a chilling conviction and leaves behind a poignant aftertaste.

Watch with Mother [on Carl Dreyer]

From The Guardian (May 30, 2003). –J.R.

For roughly two decades, my three favourite dramatic features have all been the work of the same man — and my favourite among these depends almost entirely on which one I’ve seen most recently. I came to know and love them in reverse order: first the incandescent and subtly erotic Gertrud (1964), discovered in my early 20s shortly after it premiered; then the gut-wrenching Ordet (1955), which I initially hated when I first saw it in my teens, misconstruing its climactic miracle as a tool of religious propaganda; and finally the voluptuous and mysterious Day of Wrath (1943), which I didn’t appreciate or understand until my 40s, when I finally saw it in a decent 35mm print.

Like all the greatest artists, Carl Theodor Dreyer demands to be taken as a figure whose work continues to grow and change, quite irrespective of the fact that he died in 1968 at the age of 79, with many of his most cherished projects (most notably, a film about Jesus) unrealised. Fresh insights about his life and career keep coming to light: not only through biographical research; the emergence of new prints (such as the remarkable 1981 rediscovery of the original 1927 version of The Passion of Joan of Arc in an Oslo mental hospital); but also through the uncanny fact that his films seem to grow more multilayered, ambiguous, and complex over time. Though I’ve never been fortunate enough to attend a Dreyer retrospective, and envy those who’ll soon be able to, I’ve managed to see most of his films several times, and have found that his work seems to become more modern and contemporary with every passing year.

Even after Vampyr (1932), his other best-known film, is added to the four masterpieces cited above, you are still some distance from defining the breadth and range of his work. Who would guess from the various kinds of gloom contained in those films, or the tragic overtones characterising all of them apart from Vampyr, that three of his greatest silent films are basically comedies about the war between the sexes? In their very different ways, The Parson’s Widow (1920) and Master of the House (1925; see below) both involve the humbling of chauvinist husbands by their wives, while the recently restored Once Upon a Time (1922), which starts off as a Lubitsch-style palace farce before turning into a rustic melodrama, runs variations on The Taming of the Shrew. (Only half of the latter survives.)

Yet obstacles in recognising the full measure of Dreyer remain, for ideological as well as practical reasons. An obsessional artist who was an enemy of all institutions, cinematic as well as social, and whose principal theme was intolerance, he invariably gets delivered to us today by institutions — most recently the National Film Theatre, which starts a Dreyer retrospective this month — that can’t always be counted on to represent him in all his complexity. This problem is especially acute in English-speaking countries, where the late Maurice Drouzy’s essential 1982 Dreyer biography, available only in Danish and French, has yet to be translated.

Without this crucial resource - as well as additional discoveries by Drouzy that postdate his biography — various false impressions tend to get recycled and perpetuated. The first biographical sentence of the NFT’s notes contains only one slight error, but this hoary chestnut has already misled several generations of Anglo-American viewers: “Born illegitimately in Copenhagen in 1889 to a poor and abused mother who died painfully two years later, Dreyer endured an arid childhood within a strict Lutheran adoptive family.”

The inaccurate word is “strict”. In fact, Dreyer’s adoptive parents, Carl and Marie Dreyer — a freethinking leftist typesetter and a wife who already had an illegitimate daughter by another man — never set foot inside a church unless they had to, and their adopted son was a non-believer who attended occasional services at a French reform church, but only in order to teach himself the language. Ib Monty — director of the Danish Film Archive and one of the film-maker’s few friends — once told me that Dreyer wasn’t especially religious, despite his frequent recourse to religious themes, and this observation immediately shot down at least half the received notions I had about him at the time. Challenges to belief as well as to disbelief, faith as well as lack of faith, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, and Ordet all take place in a highly sensuous material world where the mysteries of human personality supersede and arguably overwhelm most questions about the supernatural.

What made Dreyer’s childhood emotionally arid by most accounts was lack of familial affection, partly motivated by his real mother, Josefina Nilsson, a Swedish maidservant, having failed to leave the Dreyers any money for child support. Her accidental and hideously painful death came from sulphur poisoning — swallowing the ends of a box and a half of matches in order to abort a second illegitimate child. Dreyer — who didn’t learn about her fate until he travelled to Sweden, shortly before he turned 19, to discover whatever he could about her — grew up idealising her while despising his adopted mother .

An intensely private person, Dreyer has remained elusive largely because he was so successful in covering his tracks, so that other discoveries about his troubled life — such as Drouzy’s report on his brief phase as a homosexual in the early 1930s, culminating in a nervous breakdown — surfaced over a decade after the publication of his biography.

Quite plausibly (albeit somewhat obsessively in his own right), Drouzy has divided the major women figures in Dreyer’s work between good mothers (most of them suffering saints) and bad mothers (most of them perverted by different forms of intolerance) — with the possible exceptions of the title heroine of Gertrud, who embodies both types simultaneously, and Anne in Day of Wrath, who might be said to undergo a complex social transformation in 17th-century Denmark from guilty saint to innocent witch. (Made during the German occupation, Day of Wrath can be read as a definitive account of 20th-century witch-hunts — which helps to explain why it almost certainly served as a major influence on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.)

No less significantly, Inger in Ordet dies in childbirth, the saintly Joan of Arc is burnt as a witch, and all these women, along with the lesbian sisters in Vampyr, are entirely carnal beings. (After Inger dies, her father-in-law declares, “She is dead… She is no longer here. She is in heaven,” and his son replies, “Yes, but I loved her body too.”)

According to Drouzy, the key inspiration for Gertrud, based on a play by Hjalmar Söderberg, was Dreyer’s discovery at 73 that Maria von Platen, Gertrud’s real-life counterpart, spent the last years of her life in a house only 10 miles from the site of his own conception. Some of the interiors of this house were meticulously reconstructed for the film’s final scene, an epilogue that Dreyer added to the play.

A comparable kind of personal fixation about origins as well as destinies can be seen coursing through Dreyer’s entire oeuvre, arguably accounting for its slow-burning intensity and many of its formal and stylistic eccentricities as well as its thematic constants. His intransigence about maintaining absolute control over his work largely accounts for why he made so few sound pictures, and the one occasion when he lost that control — over the casting of his two-actor chamber drama Two People (1945) — proved so disastrous that he often refused to acknowledge the film’s existence.

Yet apart from that misstep, it’s hard to think of many film-makers who sustained as high a level, reinventing himself with every feature while obstinately remaining the same. From the lyricism and folksy humour of The Parson’s Widow to the expressionism and bisexuality of Michael (1924), to the feminism of Master of the House, to the stark and spare tragedy of The Passion of Joan of Arc, made respectively in Norway, Germany, Denmark, and France, Dreyer’s silent pictures are remarkable for their mastery of decor, lighting, camera movement, and editing. Concentrate on the way he constructs the space of an interior or orchestrates a sensual camera movement that he invented himself — the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction — and you perceive how each Dreyer film almost brutally reconstructs the universe rather than accepting it as a familiar given. Nothing can be taken for granted in these works — except their passion.

Cremaster 5

The third installment sequentially (1997) of writer-director Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle is just as lethargic and self-satisfied as the others I’ve seen, though less monotonous rhythmically. An opera set in late-19th-century Budapest, with extended portions of the action taking place underwater, it stars Ursula Andress in the only singing role (though her voice is dubbed by Adrienne Csengery) and Barney in three parts that seem to sum up his self-image (Diva, Magician, Giant). This avant-garde pageant is characteristically mythoprosaic (to coin a term), though it does make the most of its Hungarian locations. If it were less doggedly florid and had any sort of humorcamp or otherwiseit might qualify as a big-budget remake of an early Werner Schroeter opus. The music is by Jonathan Bepler. 55 min. (JR)

Cremaster 4

With or without a comprehensible story, crosscutting is one of the least interesting forms of editing, and Matthew Barney addresses the problem much as Robert Altman does when he’s on autopilotby pretending it doesn’t exist. This lumbering avant-garde spectacular (1994) stars Barney as the Loughton Candidate, a tap dancing and crawling satyr juxtaposed with two motorcycle teams racing across the Isle of Man. The film invites us to consider the multiple meanings of its elaborate surrealist imagerymuch of it viewed from Barney’s favorite camera position, the celestial overhead shotbut all I could think about was hype and money. The colors are characteristically lurid. 42 min. (JR)

Cremaster 1

Sculptor, writer-director, and former football player Matthew Barney returns to Bronco Stadium in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, to stage a Busby Berkeley-style dance routine while two Goodyear blimps float overhead. Inside each blimp are four air hostesses and an elaborately set banquet table, and under each table lies a winsome figure known as Goodyear (Marti Domination), whose idly created configurations of green or purple grapes are duplicated by the dancing girls below. This slick spectacle (1995), packed with metaphors relating to procreative biology, tries very hard to impress us with its production values, but I was bored by its programmatic literalism and mechanical crosscutting. 41 min. (JR)