Final Act

Photo Collage animation │photographed, filmed, edited & animated by Emerson Little

Runtime: 2 minutes, 44 seconds

2023

Artist Statement

In their heyday, Fox movie theatres across the state of California stood as beacons of the motion picture industry, blending the cultures and styles of the communities in which they were built. However, they began to decline and deteriorate over time. No longer visited, and neglected by the human eye, they fell into disrepair.  

Inspired by the uncanny dreamlike atmosphere of theatres depicted in cinema, such as Club Silencio in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and the movie theatre Elisa lives above in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, as well as taking visual inspiration from the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto and 19th-century spirit photography, Final Act explores how a theatre’s past can haunt its present. This experimental video is composed of animated collages made of photographs and video taken inside and outside the Fox theatre in downtown Fullerton, California. The sounds from films my family remembers seeing at the theatre when it was open underscore dilapidated images of the theatre’s present condition.  

This video aims to show the viewer that there’s a layer of unreality to everything, and that at no point should we really trust what we’re seeing. This theatre serves as a mysterious portal between the worlds of old movies and the reality of the decaying theatre, acting as a microcosm of the struggling film industry. Inverted images of the theatre’s isolated interior take on a horrific, dreamlike quality of irrational logic, investing the familiar environment of an old movie theatre with a state of unfamiliarity. Selected audio from children’s films has been layered, warped, and manipulated to deconstruct the artificial reality created in the movies. In real life, the Fox Fullerton is being restored, but in my conception for this video, it’s abandoned and at the end of its existence. The theatre is remembering the movies that played there. It’s in its final act.