His tools to help him see beauty began yielding only ugliness and Hopper slipped “out of the blue and into the black”. Off the heals of the profoundly disappointing reception of The (ironically titled) Last Movie, Hopper entered a period of hard blues, when after being deprived of his voice, he was left to deal with the Dionysian excesses that fanned his aesthetic flame. As Easy Riders, Raging Bulls teaches (though I feel compelled to quote Peter Bogdanovich: “Easy Riders, Raging Bullshit”), the comedown of American New Wave cinema was a depressing truth, and The Last Movie is today regarded less as the masterpiece Hopper believed he was making, than it was the first hard nail in the coffin of a beautiful movement. If one were to make a documentary on all the years of hard living that followed in Hopper’s life, a good title might be “An American Reality Check”. To watch The American Dreamer today is to watch a making-of doc coloured by all that came after the dissolution of an artist’s american dream. Divorced from the context of history, it’s a beautiful thing. Watching footage of Dennis Hopper directing his sophomoric follow up to one of the most important films of the 20th century is like watching an American Fellini, the holy clown who dares to dream big at all costs, sacrificing everything in the name of the vision. In its day, the film depicted only what it captured an American artist given free reign to manifest and cinematically realize his dream in the most indulgently exploratory fashion possible. Blu-ray/DVD Combo | Region Free | 1.Watching the documentary, The American Dreamer, in the year of its completion, 1971, would’ve made for a very different experience than watching it today.Major support to preserve, digitize, and present this film and the entire Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.ĭirectors: L.M. Fortuitously timed, fantastically made, and virtually unseen, The American Dreamer is the great '70s film documentary you always wished existed.Įtiquette Pictures, in partnership with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, brings this forgotten masterpiece to home video for the very first time in a new, director approved 2k restoration, painstakingly reconstructed from four 16mm prints housed in the Walker Art Center's Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Shifting between being an insightful document of a complex artist in the midst of his creative process and a self-reflective exploration and explosion of verite filmmaking tropes, The American Dreamer is a mesmerizing journey into the private world of one of Hollywood's most hypnotic directors/stars. Kit Carson, The American Dreamer is a multi-faceted document of the life and mind of one of the 20th century's great cinematic voices at the peak of his artistic and commercial success. Captured by co-directors Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Hopper's follow-up work, The Last Movie, a deeply personal, but ultimately disastrous, meditation on the meaning of cinema, found Hopper drifting further and further into foolishness. The wild, unexpected success of Easy Rider ushered in what is now seen as one of the most significant turning points in film history, making pathologically rebellious Dennis Hopper an unlikely King Of Hollywood for a day. We will sell out the remaining stock that we have on hand and we will not repress further units. Please note: Etiquette Pictures releases are being discontinued.
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