Word: hoppers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American Dreamer , a "first person documentary," is frequently incoherent. Events slide past the screen with little connecting tissue. Though all the narration is spoken by Hopper himself, and though he makes clear that he approved of what is shown, the film's point-of-view is established only by the random placement of the camera. Its subjects unashamedly play to it, and it unashamedly records them. But it is placed pretty stupidly (by former photo-journalist Schiller); only when it fades into the background to record some extravagant event does the film achieve an authentic portrait of Hopper...
What is most ironic is that the successful scenes were set up by director Schiller and writer L. M. Kit Carson to evoke a characteristic response. It appears that the filmmakers had deemed Hopper a human phenomenon worth studying; had then requested his participation in a film which would show the reality behind his publicity image; and had finally realized that even the most idiosyncratic creator is too busy concretizing his thoughts in his work to dramatize them personally. So, at various points throughout the film, Carson and Schiller work to catalyze into film actuality a character...
...example: Hopper boasts that he can make "oh, six . . . eight . . . eighteen" girls in one night. The following scene shows the girls-burlesque queens, whores, coed groupies-entering Hopper's Taos. New Mexico ranch. kindly imported by Schiller and Carson. The reaction of one of Hopper's steady women is shock and jealousy-why are they here? why is the camera on them and not me? When Hopper joins the group, he is nonplussed. (Perhaps his dream has been greater than his reality.) He plays games with the girls. out of fear, amusement and affection; his narration tells us that...
...scene is the most crucial in the film. It presents Hopper in all his sincerity and egoism: he really wishes to know these people, and hopes that they will work together, but is himself prevented from personal exchange by his leadership position and neurotic artistry. "Listen, why don't you listen to me," he urges them at one point, but he sounds sadly self-entranced...
THROUGHOUT the rest of the film. the filmmakers attempt to communicate through fragments their own divided view of Hopper. The most obvious facet they have seized on is Hopper as acid-consciousness-extender and anti-Establishment paragon. Thus, we are given Hopper with two young maidens in a bathtub daring the camera to record the first graphic fellatio in the American cinema; also (somewhat anti-climatically), Hopper walking naked through the streets of. Los Alamos. But more interesting is Hopper's relationship to his work. We see him watching a sequence of his new film. The Last Movie: within...