Pat O'Neill is known for his surrealist collages of the California landscape and the traces of the Hollywood films made there. In The Decay of Fiction he focuses on the Ambassador, a Los Angeles hotel that featured conspicuously in the city's political and showbiz lore until earthquake damage closed it down. Over a geometric ballet of time-lapse long takes through the gardens, corridors, and rooms of the decaying hotel, O'Neill adds a filigree of narrative vignettes, fragments from the lives of the hotel's guests. Transparent and insubstantial, they are a brilliant filmic realization of the hotel's memories, ghosts of its long-departed residents. But if they once resided in the hotel, their real home was film noir, and the narratives in which they flicker into life all resonate with the conventions of the industry's most sustained engagement with the city.-David E. James, S.F. Int'l Film Festival