By MASSIMILIANO STUDER
It’s important that producer Filip Jan Rymsza find a distributor for this gem that has emerged from the film vault of The Other Side of the Wind; allowing Italian cinephiles to see and understand the New Hollywood environment of 1970 — a documentary that Ciro Giorgini would certainly have done everything to broadcast on Fuori Orario: cose (mai) viste, the cult broadcast show of RAI.
Hopper/Welles (2020) is a strange Wellesian object that is difficult to classify as always. Officially, in fact, it is a documentary-interview, but it is really much more. Forget the famous interviews like François Truffaut with Hitchcock or Peter Bogdanovich and John Ford or William Friedkin and Fritz Lang: it begins as an interview, but turns almost immediately into a kind of Socratic dialogue between a young pupil and his mentor.
The documentary is more than a dialogue between a young director with a master, but one of those games of mirrors that Orson Welles has often accustomed his scholars to. Shot in the “cinéma vérité” style, Hopper/Welles has the characteristics of an anthropological documentary that mercilessly and objectively records the weaknesses and humanity of Dennis Hopper — a young man raised in the American heartland who decided to become a film director and found himself in having to manage the international success of Easy Rider (1969) that overwhelmed him.
In November 1970, the filming date of this documentary, Welles had begun work on The Other Side of the Wind and wanted many prominent figures from cinema and entertainment to appear as themselves. He had even imagined involving John Lennon and putting him in the film. Dennis Hopper had made Easy Rider (1969) — the movie that had broken the rules of the Hollywood system — and Welles thought he was the most representative film icon of the American New Wave that crowded the party to honor director Jake Hannaford, the protagonist of The Other Side of the Wind.
To film this meeting, Welles had invited Hopper, who was in Taos, New Mexico and editing his second film, The Last Movie (1971), to his home in Los Angeles. Hopper/Welles has a ’70s informal aspect of an audiovisual report of a discussion between a group of people who have chosen to spend an evening together. Watching the documentary, it is clear that there was no pattern to follow and everything was left to the improvisation of the “here and now.” At the beginning, for example, we see Hopper eating pasta and talking to the others present, some are young friends of cinematographer Gary Graver, and trying to answer questions asked by Welles, who is always hidden from the camera’s eye. We never see Welles’s face during the entire documentary.
In the two and a half hour meeting, Dennis Hopper and Welles really have talked about everything. An authentic stream of consciousness where the two cineasts talked about European cinema (Luis Bunuel and Michelangelo Antonioni above all, but also Stanley Kubrick and Sergei Eisenstein), magic and religion in relation to the act of making movies, Hamlet and Christ, conflicting family relationships and at the end about politics and revolution.
If it was not a documentary it would almost seem like a psychoanalytic session. Throw the passing of the vision we can assume that Welles, in fact, is skillful in asking questions that go beyond the context of his work as a filmmaker stimulating Hopper to think about abstract issues. Is the film director, capable of creating rain or sun at will, comparable to a magician / shaman or to a God? What makes a film a work that is the fruit of a personal vision of its creator? Are you a politician when you made a movie like Easy Rider? The answers to these questions reveal Dennis Hopper to be at times both awkward and fascinated by Welles’s culture and his sophisticated dialectic. Very eloquent is the moment when Hopper, pressed by Welles on the need to express his political positions more clearly, reacts like a high school student who didn’t do his homework before the classroom questioning.
I have moreover to admit that in at least two passages of the documentary someone will get the feeling that Welles was not alone asking questions of Hopper. While the young director confides to those present that he did not have a happy childhood, a voice different from Welles’s one asks the young director “What was made it unhappy?” Who asked this question? In my humble opinion, it cannot be ruled out that this voice comes from Bert Schneider, the producer of Easy Rider and other great New Hollywood films. There are at least two scenes in which it is legitimate to think that this deduction is right. In the first Hopper, looking off camera, points to someone who has blue eyes and who might be perfect to play the role of Christ, saying: “Schneider should play Christ!” Finally, in the middle of the documentary, Welles says “Just before he left, Bert Schneider said ‘Ask him why Henry Fonda called him an idiot’,” as if the producer had just left Welles’ house. To understand what Schneider was referring to with that question, I invite readers to read the beginning of Josh Karp’s excellent essay on the making of The Last Movie.
I will not add other details for not spoil the vision of the documentary but some little notes about the creator of Hopper/Welles are necessary. Bob Murawski’s work in assembling (and not editing) the film’s raw film materials shot by Gary Graver in a scratchy 16mm black and white was very respectful of Welles’s work. It is truly appreciable that the editor has chosen to include in the credits of the documentary the unusual word “Cutter” instead of “Editor,” a linguistic option that demonstrates the modesty with which Murawski wanted to work the film footage available. This approach recalled not only the visual choice made by William Friedkin in the editing of his interview of Lang (we always see the clapperboard in front of the camera), but especially the choice made by my friends of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto of Pordenone when they have preferred, in October 2013, to screen Too Much Johnson‘s work print without any interference in the editing of the rough cut made by Welles.
I would like to watch and discuss this extraordinary documentary with somebody who had lived that historical moment. I had in mind different people who can satisfy this desire. For this purpose I hope Hopper/Welles will be distributed as soon as possible in any form: movie theaters, physical media or streaming.
(Massimiliano Studer is a PhD student at the University of Udine and his doctoral project is focused on “The Other Side of the Wind.” He is also co-founder of Formacinema and author of the 2018 book “Alle origini di Quarto potere. Too much Johnson: il film perduto di Orson Welles.” He extends his thanks to Filip Jan Rymsza for making “Hopper/Welles” available to him for review and to Ray Kelly of Wellesnet.)
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