The Deer Hunter

[Jan Klimkowski]

I've taken the liberty of moving discussion of The Deer Hunter to this dedicated thread.

No problem Jan. I know I am inclined to go off at tangents that have nothing to do with the threads headline subjects. tupido2:

Tangents are good, and to be encouraged.

I dragged The Deer Hunter into that thread, so it's my fault primarily.

That said, there's much important material about Private Military Contractors over there, and starting a dedicated discussion about the movie seemed like the fun option.

You're next post makes some extremely good and telling points too. In particular, I agree the portrayal and atmospherics of the working class immigrant steel town with their protracted, determined struggles to belong, are quite exceptional. Much the same applies to the rest of the post too

I guess these days my first question about almost anything that comes out of Hollywood is 'What will be its net effect on non-US audiences?' the answer to which is likely to be dramatically influenced by a whole raft of unspoken assumptions about its context. Despite some masterful stuff, along the lines you describe with 'Full Metal Jacket', 'Platoon' and 'Apocalypse now', my feeling is that, on the mass audiences they are aimed at, their effects are largely negative in that they cement - and even glamorise - a pretty orthodox US-centric world view.

Although I quite like JFK, Stone's movies have always been problematic. He wrote the script for Midnight Express, which is one of the most unthinkingly racist and Amero/Euro-centric movies ever made by intelligent and talented people.

So, Peter, I would consider Stone most guilty of the sin you describe above. However, I would not regard any of the directors of the movies listed above as Hollywood creatures. Stone was pretty much ostracised after JFK.

Kubrick deserves a thread of his own. He certainly knew a lot of secrets. He may finally have divulged too many in Eyes Wide Shut.

Coppola both worked within the system and bucked it. He was determined to get his cut of Apocalypse Now released, and risked his own cold hard cash to achieve that.

As a documentary maker, and a voracious reader of the various accounts of the making of Apocalypse Now, I am convinced that it was an archetypal product of various artistic minds and psyches. It is not a manufactured Hollywood studio film.

Some of the creative tensions involved in what we know as Apocalypse Now include:

- filming several scenes with Harvey Keitel as Willard, before Coppola fired him, because he was "wrong" for the part;

- the script battles between right-wing Nietzschian John Milius and Coppola, which culminate in Marlon Brando's own tortured take on Kurtz;

- back in California, editing decisions taken primarily by Walter Murch, such as cutting out every shot where Willard smiles or engages empathetically with the young GIs. Apocalypse Now Redux primarily reveals how intuitively correct Murch's editing decisions were.

As for Michael Cimino, he is an American filmmaker. However, I find scenes, moments, which have a more universal, ubiquitous, resonance in his films - just as I do in Japanese, French, Russian, English movies.

Now, if we were talking about Top Gun, I'd agree that the movie is Hollywood at its most imperialistic. A worthless piece of neo-fascist shite.... :vroam: