Thirty-Years Later – A Brilliant Italian-American Artist ‘Gets His Due’ – Michael Cimino and “Heaven’s Gate”
Thirty-Years Later – A Brilliant Italian-American Artist ‘Gets His Due’ – Michael Cimino and “Heaven’s Gate”
(May 19, 2013)
Alessandro (Alex) Pirolini is a Lecturer in, but not limited to, UCLA’s Italian (“Italy Ends at the Garigliano”) Department. He has an absolutely amazing Curriculum Vita describing his Italian and American film and literature education, teaching experience, publications, etc. He also has one of the most aesthetically appealing and unique blog sites on the Web (http://www.mediacinema.org/). Accordingly, when I saw the title of his recent blog positing, “The Most Underestimated American Movie Ever?”, I couldn’t ‘mouse-click’ fast enough. To my surprise he was referring to Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”; a film generally denigrated by critics and an unmitigated box office failure. Standing against the tsunami of rejection greeting the film in 1980, Pirolini thinks: “Heaven’s Gate is actually a profound and courageous portrayal of the wild west (as well as a sour deconstruction of the American Dream), in the form of an epic poem (something along the lines of Antonioni-meets-Ken Loach).” Needless to say, I was fascinated to read a master film scholar’s rational for such a sweeping embrace of one of the greatest film debacles in American film history. But sadly, he only wrote one paragraph accompanied by a YouTube trailer of the film. Nevertheless, he peaked my interest and I was grateful he brought my attention to the recent revival of a film by a brilliantly creative and artistically significant, Italian (Sicilian? Cimino is common Sicilian immigrant name) American artist.
Introduction
A bookish bent and not a film buff, I missed last years ‘big’ film festival story. Both the Venice and New York Film festivals (August-September 2012) featured the revival of Michael Cimino’s American film legend Heaven’s Gate. Alex Pirolini’s blog notice conjured memoires of arguably one of greatest ‘pannings’ in film history (e.g. Google search of Heaven’s Gate). One wonder’s how a film so categorically rejected by critics and public alike could make a come back at two of the worlds most prestigious film festivals? Indeed, why would the director of that film be heroically greeted at the festivals? New York Times culture columnist Dennis Lim wrote:
“But there was nothing resembling rejection here: the rapt audience greeted the film with a sustained standing ovation. (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/venice-film-festival-michael-cimino-revisits-heavens-gate/ ,emp.+)
Further, at the Venice Film Festival, Cimino was honored with the prestigious “Persol Award, which aims to celebrate a legend of international filmmaking.” Festival Director Alberto Barbera said:
“It is a belated but long overdue acknowledgment of the greatness of a visionary filmmaker, one of the most intense and original voices in American filmmaking of the last forty years,gradually reduced to silence after the box-office flop of a masterpiece to which the film producers contributed with senseless cuts. By virtue of his immense talent, Cimino has exalted the filmmaking art and offered a portrait of America both critical and passionate, lucid and compelling.” (http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/news/10-08.html ,emp.+)
Dennis Lim, in the above NY Times article, was particularly cogent:
“Time has been kind to “Heaven’s Gate,” which may well strike viewers who don’t know the back story, as a grand, eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West (and the western), with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. (“It’s getting dangerous to be poor in this country,” someone says at one point. The rejoinder: “It always was.”)
To understand the complete turnaround of opinion about Heaven’s Gate, one has to take into consideration the profound change in America’s political and economic milieu in the last thirty years, especially in how that change has affected American class-consciousness.
Class – a term ever so prominent in the pre-WW II years, but verboten in the Cold War years, is creeping back into twenty-first century Lexicona Americana. While there are significant dramatic shortcomings of Heaven’s Gate, one cannot discount the sociological / ideological dimension of the film’s rejection. The class character of Heaven’s Gate was particularly repugnant in the 1980s (Ronald Regan) American culture. In the “Times they are a chang’n” department, class is increasingly relevant in twenty-first century America.
Westerns, in the post-war years, depicted the American Dream ideology; European immigrants escaping the poverty and political oppression of Europe settled the American West where they found Freedom and Economic Opportunities. They found the good life on cheap if not free farmland that Native Americans left feral, unproductive and wasted by roaming buffalo herds. This mythological ideology was best captured in 1950s films such as Shane and television series such as “Little House on the Prairie”.
Profoundly to the contrary, in Heaven’s Gate, there is not even of a hint of freedom and economic opportunity for the depicted European immigrants; they are plain and simple: “brutalized and dehumanized”. In prevailing 1980 American ideology, it was inconceivable to think about America as anything, at anytime in history, other than “ the Land of the Free with Unlimited Opportunity.” Heaven’s Gate was a full frontal assault on that deep-seated passionately and indubitably believed mythology.
In an absolutely quintessential scene demonstrating Heaven’s Gate reversal of American Western film ideology up to 1980: the immigrants are fighting for their lives against the sadomasochistic vigilantes; in the fashion of the late 1940s cavalry movies (e.g. Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), the cavalry dramatically rides in flying a very large American flag. But, unlike the post war westerns, the cavalry did not come to save the persecuted, dehumanized, brutalized, robbed, raped, tortured and murdered immigrant farmers – savor Cimino’s sense of irony: the cavalry came to support the vigilantes!
But, Oh My what a difference a few decades make!
By 2012, American Freedom is no longer an indubitable. Literally a day does not go by without some major news features about phone call monitoring, warrantless searches, Internal Revenue political targeting, even the most time-honored and first freedoms on the minds of Revolutionary America, Habeas Corpus and trial by jury of peers are being called into question.
Similarly, Class is now the subject of daily news accounts describing and discussing the increasing economic hardships of the working class. Class is no longer something having to due with Other People in Other Countries. Indeed, the phrase 99% vs. 1% has become a popular metaphor for the class character of America. Accordingly, a film like Heaven’s Gate is no long considered offensive or “un-American”. Americans are now open to a dialogue about class and the class character of their history.
In short, there has been a dramatic shift in how the concepts of freedom and class are perceived in American today verses the forty year post WW II economic expansion and wealth creation (i.e. more and better paying jobs; e.g. car factories). Now that the expansion and wealth is reversed (i.e. fewer jobs paying less; e.g. food service), Americans are becoming class conscious; there is a distinct perception that we are or becoming a nation of Haves and Have-Nots. Accordingly, a film like Heaven’s Gate is food-for-thought, as it were.
Yet, while a movie may convey ideological principles and make for interesting critical commentary, ultimate the raison d'être of a movie is entertainment – DRAMAtic entertainment. Whatever, the ideological implications of the film, as Drama, it must be entertaining.
Heaven’s Gate as Drama
Call me an old fashion Aristotelian if you will, but I unabashedly embrace his critical method based on the six components of drama itemized in the “Poetics”: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle. All dramatic art forms, stage or film, consist of these six parts and the quality of the drama is determined by the relative excellence of each.
In terms of Character, Diction and Music, Heaven’s Gate may be considered fairly mundane. The lead Character, well played by Kris Kristofferson is nevertheless not particularly noteworthy. Similarly, dialogue / narrative (Diction) is pedestrian, and the Music, while enjoyable is not something especially memorable, as was the “Godfather” theme. However, these components of the drama neither make nor break the Heaven’s Gate film; they are not significant determinates of rejection or acceptance.
As per the above discussion, the Thought component of the film turns on class conflict. It is provocatively presented, and (to my mind) the reason the film is retrospectively being considered a significant work of dramatic art.
Then we come to Spectacle! It doesn’t get better than this - folks!
Heaven’s Gate is not only one of the best film Spectacles ever produced, it may arguably be THE Best Ever. It truly is beautiful. Say what you will about Cimino as a moviemaker; but in terms of Spectacle he is unrivaled. He is “cut from the cloth” of the historic Italian aesthetic tradition; a brilliant visual artist.
What is most significant about the beauty he achieves, and the mark of his brilliance, is that the subject matter in the film is not inherently beautiful. He is not filming breathtaking wonders of nature (mountains, water falls, tropical foliage, etc.) or beautiful and magnificently dressed men and women in eloquent settings a la Public Television’s Ralph Lauren draped “Downton Abby”.
On the contrary (very contrary), the film is filled with grit; literally dirt – dirty scenes and dirty homly people. Yet he manages through set designs and cinematographic technique to render the gritty, dirty and homly beautiful. The movie is worth seeing just for its beauty.
Yet, the essence of a movie is not about visual beauty. Again, as noted above, movies are about entertainment and the essence of entertainment is the Plot, the story.
When it comes to what Aristotle called the chief part of drama, its “life and soul”, Plot –Heaven’s Gate is a disaster; arguably the chief reason why it was (is) precluded from box office success. There are many aspects of the plot that are problematic. The most obvious is length. Not simply the length of the film in total; but the length of scenes within the film.
To my mind Cimino is so taken with the beauty of the scenes he creates that he can’t stop filming and he can’t cut the film. This is true from beginning to end. The opening scenes depicting the 1870 Harvard graduation events went on far beyond what was necessary for the contribution they made to the story line (plot); similarly, the various dancing scenes later in the film. One can go through the film scene by scene and say Enough! I get the point. Let’s move on – please! But, making the point was not what governed Cimino’s time frame. It was the beautiful scene that he created, loved and could not render to the cutting room floor.
In sum
It’s good that Heaven’s Gate has been revived both for the contribution it makes to contemporary ideological discussion, and its aesthetics. Because beauty is the film’s forte, it really should be seen on the big screen to be fully appreciated. Sadly, it more than likely won’t make it to the neighborhood bijou. Nevertheless, it is inexpensively available for on-line rental or DVD purchase from Amazon. In the “any port in a storm” department, seeing it on a PC or television is better than not seeing it at all.
Finally, Italian Americans may well feel a sense of pride in Michael Cimino’s Heavens’ Gate. It demonstrates, once again, Italian artists are still, as they have been for millennia, dazzeling the world of art. La Bella Figura is the essence of our History, our Culture, indeed our Being. Absolutely!
DISCLAIMER: Posts published in i-Italy are intended to stimulate a debate in the Italian and Italian-American Community and sometimes deal with controversial issues. The Editors are not responsible for, nor necessarily in agreement with the views presented by individual contributors.
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