By The TimesLedger
Michael Cimino, the director and screenwriter best known for the Academy Award-winning Vietnam film “The Deer Hunter” and the extraordinarily ambitious epic “Heaven's Gate,” will speak at the American Museum of the Moving Image during a retrospective of his films. The series, from Oct. 13 through 21, offers screenings of six feature films, including a brand new 35mm print of the complete version of “Heaven's Gate,” and Cimino's most recent film “The Sunchaser,” which will be followed by a Pinewood Dialogue with Cimino. The event begins at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21.
“Few directors have experienced the same amount of glory and condemnation as Michael Cimino,” said guest curator Antonio Monda, “and few have shown the same amount of talent, originality, excess, and proud reluctance to compromise.”
Cimino’s strong and provocative personality and his disdain of formulas, has made him an outsider in an industry that once awarded him with multiple Oscars. Even when working inside a genre, Cimino has shown a revolutionary
mentality, provoking continuous controversy. He was accused of being a racist for “Year of the Dragon,” a chauvinist for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” hyperbolically patriotic in “The Deer Hunter,” and anti-American in “Heaven's Gate.” The passion and complexity of his work belies these superficial accusations. However, there is a revolutionary impulse in all of his films. In The Sunchaser, Woody Harrelson plays a phenomenally rich doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill criminal. Forming an unusual bond with his kidnapper, the doctor jeopardizes all the wealth he has accumulated. By the end of this provocative odyssey, the audience has faced one of the boldest statements against excessive materialism.
From his personal trinity of favorite directors, Cimino has forged his own distinctive style. From Akira Kurosawa he gleaned a kinetic approach to storytelling and a Shakespearian definition of characters. From Luchino Visconti, he learned the sumptuous attention to details and a fascination with human weakness. And from John Ford he gained the defining mark of his style; in Cimino’s films, as in Ford’s, the landscape is never a simple background, but a character itself that interrelates with all the human characters.
In a period when Hollywood is defined by lavishly expensive yet empty spectacles, Cimino's films stand as the work of a director interested in the epic as a means to examine the human condition. The uneven but largely misunderstood “The Sicilian,” written by the uncredited Gore Vidal, views its gangster saga as a contemporary reworking of the Robin Hood story. The narration has the joyous liberty of an adventure film, but the stunning use of the landscape and the portrayal of characters unable to escape the Mafia mentality, plunge the audience into a saga about people who are constantly confronting their destiny.
The pivotal themes of his films (male friendship, honor, immigration) are confronted by Cimino in an approach that is instinctive, visceral, and impassioned. Beyond all the “isms” of which he has been accused comes a deep, ingrained humanism, a celebration of the strength of the individual over oppression, rules, and conventions.
Call 718-784-4520 for a complete schedule.
