After resurrecting Hollywood from the stench of indulgent grotesque fantasias of the ‘60s that suggested only that everyone in LA had lost touch with reality, the rage and the recalcitrance that epitomized the American directors of the ‘70s swamped the nation with the renewed vigor of a country that was terrified about its own future. By The Deer Hunter’s release in 1978, the pandemonium of the decade had infested the films about the decade as well. The Deer Hunter, along with its even more improbable, free-wheeling follow-up Heaven’s Gate and Francis Ford Coppola’s fever dream Apocalypse Now, is among the most torridly unhinged films of the decade, an operatic dementia conclusion to the slow-burn of a decade, and a decade’s cinema, losing its mind. Something like the Great American Tall Tale of the 20th Century, The Deer Hunter is precisely the mess that the Vietnam Generation was. And, as an explosion of unmitigated, almost uncontrolled filmmaking that pursues the New Hollywood ambition to its limits, Michael Cimino’s most famous film is the perfect work to serve as the last bow on the New Hollywood style of filmmaking. Continue reading
American New Wave RIP: The Deer Hunter
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Update 2018: I know Coppola’s film is famous for its sound, but there’s an indescribably elegant moment in the middle of the film that not only encapsulates The Conversation but sums up the American New Wave. When Hackman’s character witnesses what he believes to be a murder after a drawn-out waiting game, a bloody hand lashes out at the frame, the film graphically matches to Hackman’s hand rising in terror, and the rest of a scene which had so elegantly wound-up its suspense in perfect continuity style now unwinds itself into a pit of abjection, the continuity of the editing ripping to shreds as if the film is scratching at its own celluloid in itchy paranoia. Hackman returns into his hotel, his fears clarified, but he can not ensconce himself in the safe haven of continuity cinema anymore. The film practically undoing itself before our eyes, it’s an incredible visual, and an even more incredible visual metaphor for the US in the ’70s.
Having finished the extended yearly New Wave series that somehow held me hostage until well into the mid ’90s, I’ve decided to go back to a couple of reviews I had milling about but didn’t make it into the yearly bit. Both are related formally in that they star Gene Hackman and more existentially in that they illuminate important realities about the cynical ’70s that frighten like few films we can think of, and which may be more relevant today. 
Ahh, the biopic. Lionizing and valorizing when you ought to humanize and critique, you are the greatest filmic manifestation of the hyper-individualist tendencies of modern America society which favor a view of the world where-in individuals are its chief agents. You emphasize not the complicated and conflicting causation of change in society, but the “greatness” of certain individuals who can rise above others and lead. As a result, you tend to see something innately compelling about individuals and displace how these individuals developed in the first place, what social factors drove their development. If you are particularly adventurous, you will pay lip service to how complicated and flawed these individuals can be in secret, but nothing more.
Science fiction was in vogue in the late ’70s, largely due to the success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which kick-started perhaps the greatest popular revolution in American film history and drove the medium to new commercial heights. Of course, it saw mixed results for the art-form: a rebirth of genre filmmaking married to the deadening and eventual end of the New Hollywood drama which had married classical themes to European New Wave modes of storytelling to brilliant effect and which, in fact, made American film interesting after a long drop-off in the ’60s. After Star Wars, many studios grew less interested in drama and shifted toward pop commercialism, aiming for big, big, and bigger at the expense of nuance.
Edited
Updated mid-2017 after another rewatch – such an amazing, amazing film, not particularly violent in a diegetic sense, but one which feels as though violence has been done to it. 
The Long Take 