Re: [Marxism] request for political film suggestions

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Les Schaffer wrote:
> i also highly recommend "Heaven's Gate". 

Very pleased to see this mentioned here. This film was viewed as an 
"Ishtar" type disaster when it came out. A friend of mine, who is by no 
means a radical, said that the negative reviews were undeserved. Since I 
hated "The Deer Hunter", I wasn't too anxious to watch it. Eventually I 
rented the video and was surprised to see what was essentially an 
American version of the Italian Marxist films pioneered by Visconti and 
others. It was basically a class-oriented analysis of the conflict 
between cattlemen and farmers, a very hoary theme but done with fresh 
eyes by Michael Cimino. After the film lost millions for the studios, 
Cimino was drummed out of the industry. I think a lot of the hostility 
was over the message of the film rather than its artistic qualities.

Here's a useful review:

http://www.moviemartyr.com/1980/heavensgate.htm

Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino) 1980

Critically mauled upon its initial release, partially due to its 
contemplative pacing and gargantuan budget and partly because its first 
theatrical release was seventy minutes shorter than the director 
intended, Michael Cimino’s elegiac western Heaven’s Gate is actually a 
powerful and surprisingly focused work. Cimino’s methodical attention to 
detail and slow plotting pay dividends throughout since the director is 
as interested in understanding the tensions that led to the Johnson 
County War of 1890, in which a group of immigrants deemed thieves were 
hunted down by a corporation, as the actual presentation of the battle. 
Even more impressive than the film’s meticulous detail, though, is that 
the film’s technical obsessions never comes at the expense of emotional 
intimacy. By the end of the film’s lengthy (3 hour and 40 minute) 
running time, we thoroughly understand the plight of both the immigrant 
farmers and the stockholders at the center of this story. What becomes 
startling, then, is the inability to clearly draw lines and declare who 
is right and wrong. Even if the villains occasionally do a bit too much 
moustache-twirling for the picture’s good, a surprising amount of the 
film’s morality falls into a gray area.

Visually, Cimino finds a way to convey this moral struggle by keeping 
his film duskily perched between day and night. The sepia tinged images 
and grainy film stock suggest a nostalgic yearning, but it takes a while 
to understand that what’s being mourned isn’t simply an idealized vision 
of the Wild West. Instead the movie laments the death of the dreams of 
those colonists who came to America with aspirations of a better life. 
The oppression that they find in the New World, instead of being 
religious, is financial. Their crimes are crimes of need, stealing as 
they do, so their family can eat (though Cimino wisely takes time to 
show these same immigrants as they are drinking and gambling). The 
eventual insurrection is at once the release to the pressures that have 
been building throughout the film and senseless resolution of absolutely 
nothing. It’s telling that when Cimino stages a whirling skirmish near 
the film’s end, he observes it from enough distance that its wild 
circular motion resembles both the dances at the Harvard graduation at 
the film’s start and the roller derby line dance that the migrant 
workers engage in at the film’s midway point. With his standoffish 
perspective, Cimino shows us the mechanical similarities between these 
events, allowing us to glimpse a natural order in things normally 
portrayed as chaotic. He poetically underscores the events of his film 
with images like this time and again, making the denouement at once 
horribly shocking and inevitably obvious. If the standoff at Heaven’s 
Gate feels inevitable, than the realization little has changed in 
American class structure lends the film a surprising amount of modern 
day relevancy. Whatever might be said about the film, it certainly isn’t 
a waste of time. Because of its ambition, the film is sometimes sloppy, 
but that sloppiness is forgivable because it’s the exalted, compelling 
kind.

* * * *

3/25/02

Jeremy Heilman


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