The Last Movie
The Last Movie is in Peru turned American film drama from the year 1971 . Directed by Dennis Hopper , who also played the lead and co-wrote the plot with screenwriter Stewart Stern .
action
A Hollywood film crew is shooting a western about the life of Billy the Kid in a remote village in Peru . Also present on the film set is the stuntman and horse rider Kansas , who comes from the state of the same name and is relatively new to the film business. When a stuntman falls from a church while filming, Kansas feels disaffected with the movie business. He begins a relationship with Maria, the whore in the village. When the film crew leaves the village after filming is over, Kansas is the only one who decides to stay on site and build a life with Maria far away from consumerism .
However, the idyll in the village is disturbed when some of the locals, led by the self-proclaimed director Thomas Mercado, start their own film shoot. The locals, apparently confused by the shooting and completely ignorant of the medium of film, assemble a kind of film camera made of wood. They don't seem to understand that everything is acted out in front of the camera, so they use real violence in their filming. The local Catholic priest asks Kansas to help locals understand the artificiality of the film, but the Kansas gringo is not taken seriously.
Kansas moves to the next bigger city with Maria, but they have little money. In a bar, he and his friend, gold prospector Neville Robey, meet Mrs. Anderson and her daughter, two attractive American women. Mr. Anderson has made some prosperity from owning a broom factory, but his family is bored in the Peruvian village far from American culture. Together with the Andersons, Kansas and Neville visit a brothel. To the jealousy of Maria, Kansas kisses Mrs. Anderson and praises her expensive coat. Maria later asks Kansas to give her an expensive coat as well. Mrs. Anderson gives Kansas her old coat for Maria, but Kansas has to kneel in front of Mrs. Anderson and cheat on his girlfriend again. Meanwhile, Kansas and Neville search for a gold mine with the help of an investment from Mr. Anderson. They do find gold, but investors believe the site is so remote that it is difficult to develop. Kansas and Neville are resigned to the fact that they are likely to remain poor for the rest of their lives.
Back in the village of the locals, Kansas is shot by them for trying to dismantle the scenery. Locals urge Kansas to hang around for the movie. Kansas is getting involved. In the last scenes you can see various experimental montages. It remains unclear whether the locals realize that shooting a western doesn't really shoot you, and whether or not Kansas survives filming.
background
After a great success with his first film Easy Rider in 1969, Dennis Hopper received a $ 1 million budget and complete artistic freedom from Universal Studios, directed by Lew Wasserman . Hopper had the idea for The Last Movie long before Easy Rider : in the mid-1960s, he played a role in the John Wayne West The Four Sons of Katie Elder , which was filmed in the Mexican hinterland. While filming, he had wondered how local residents would interact with the film sets after the film crew finished shooting. However, since the topic was viewed as not very promising commercially, Hopper only found sponsors for the project after his success with Easy Rider .
The shooting took place in 1970 under the working title Chinchero in Peru. For many of the supporting roles that represent the film crew and cast, well-known Hollywood friends were won by Hopper who played more or less fictionalized versions of themselves. These include the famous Hollywood director Samuel Fuller , the country singer Kris Kristofferson in his film debut and Peter Fonda , Dennis Hopper's co-star from Easy Rider . Hopper worked on the film for months at his country estate in New Mexico in late 1970 , but made no headway - probably also affected by alcohol and drug problems. According to various reports, Hopper is said to have invited the Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky . Hopper presented Jodorowsky with an edited version with a clear narrative style, which Jodorowsky criticized as a typically conventional Hollywood film. Hopper then edited a second cut of his film in a much more experimental way. The documentary film The American Dreamer (1971), directed by Lawrence Schiller and LM Kit Carson , also reports on Hopper's editing work on The Last Movie .
Hopper was very influenced by the Nouvelle Vague in his film , which is reflected in the experimental narrative and the dreamlike sequences. Several times in the film there are short fade-ins with the inscription "Scene Missing" and in some places he relies on lens flares . The Last Movie is perhaps the first film to consciously use lens flares, which have long been seen as a film error, as a stylistic device.
Awards
The Last Movie won the Critics' Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1971.
Reviews
Despite its success at the Venice Film Festival, The Last Movie was a failure in the US with both critics and audiences. It wasn't until 1980 that Hopper directed another film with Out of the Blue . Roger Ebert wrote in his review in 1971, for example, that the film was a "wasteland made of cinematic ruins". “Hip directors” like Hopper could interpret many levels into their work, but his film seems incoherent, undisciplined and like a failure.
Over the decades, however, the film has gained attention again and received mostly positive reviews when it was released on Blu-ray and the restoration in 4K in 2018. Patrick Holzapfel wrote for the film service : “A wildly nested film, interspersed with a multitude of experimental ideas, about the myth of film; at the same time an angry reckoning with the Hollywood system. ”Even today the film is“ a radical foreign body, an outsider, a rebel ”. Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian in 2018 that Hopper's film was a "brilliant, intoxicating adventure of ideas".
Web links
- The Last Movie in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Release for The Last Movie . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 183555 / K).
- ↑ Peter Bradshaw: The Last Movie review - fascinating, flawed adventure in ideas . In: The Guardian . December 14, 2018, ISSN 0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed June 26, 2019]).
- ^ Nicholas Godfrey: The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood . Rutgers University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-8135-8916-9 ( google.de [accessed June 26, 2019]).
- ↑ Peter Biskind: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4088-8215-3 ( google.de [accessed June 26, 2019]).
- ^ Neil Campbell: Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West . U of Nebraska Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8032-3476-5 ( google.de [accessed June 26, 2019]).
- ↑ The American Dreamer at the Internet Movie Database. Retrieved June 26, 2019 .
- ↑ Peter Bradshaw: The Last Movie review - fascinating, flawed adventure in ideas . In: The Guardian . December 14, 2018, ISSN 0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed June 26, 2019]).
- ^ Venice Film Festival (1971). Retrieved June 26, 2019 .
- ^ Roger Ebert: The Last Movie / Chincero Movie Review (1971) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved June 26, 2019 .
- ↑ Patrick Holzapfel: The Last Movie. In: filmdienst.de. Retrieved June 26, 2019 .
- ↑ Peter Bradshaw: The Last Movie review - fascinating, flawed adventure in ideas . In: The Guardian . December 14, 2018, ISSN 0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed June 26, 2019]).