The Favorites - Easy Rider (#32)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Easy Rider (1969/USA/dir. Dennis Hopper) appeared at #32 on my original list.

What it is • Two all-American coke dealers (dubbed Captain America and Buffalo Bill, natch) score big and head for Florida, loading up their choppers with their illicit profits (Fonda called the shot of his character shoving a pipe full of cash into his star-spangled gas tank "fucking the flag with money," and the whole film - God love it - is pitched at about that level of visual subtlety). Along the way, they stop by communes, farms, roadside diners, motels (who flash a "No" over their "Vacancy" when they glimpse the bikers' hair and costumes) and even the occasional jail cell. Marijuana is smoked around campfires, acid is dropped at Mardi Gras, and George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) pops up to ride the back of one bike, clad in a goofy gold high school football helmet. The Byrds, The Band, Hendrix, and of course Steppenwolf adorn the soundtrack and the result is a picaresque tour through late sixties America, cemented not just by the audiovisual content but the form: sinuous telephoto pans across objects and faces, quiet verite observations, cuts back and forth across space and time, fish-lensed LSD trips - all the tricks and trades of European cinema brought to bear on very American subject matter. Finally, of course, there's the violence, inescapable in the era of riots, assassinations, and the Vietnam War. An instant hit in '69, regarded more ambivalently later on (and by some, even then) as too self-serious a hippie manifesto, the film carries both a simple-but-effective iconographic power and a more sophisticated combination of elements. Most importantly, it's a joyride, relying on the power of its style to sweep up the viewer.

Why I like it •

To Become Immortal, and Then, to Die. 1969 - 1970 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 19

The nineteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
Stay tuned through the credits today, as there will be a surprise at the end
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 19: To Become Immortal, and Then, To Die."

To Become Immortal, and Then, To Die.

Chapter 13 began it. Chapters 16 - 17 shifted it into full gear. Today, in Chapter 19, the sixties come to an end. I will let the images (and sounds) speak for themselves, but would like to note that this is my favorite chapter, in terms of its construction (there are no loose ends, everything adds to the building theme and aesthetic flow), its references (this is to me one of the most exciting, poignant, and fascinating periods in history, cinema or otherwise), and its ending. Or rather its endings...

(continued below, along with NSFW specifications & other warnings)

The Trip

Ah, to be caught in the crosshairs of history, to exist at that moment where one set of cultural values, aesthetics, and sensibilities, snapped into another. By virtue of its period (1967), its pedigree (Roger Corman, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper), and its subject (lysergic acid diethylamide), The Trip is that hoariest of artifacts: a time capsule. Time capsules are highly misunderstood and unappreciated. They are often approached as if their "period" nature imprisoned them, rendered them immobile and irrelevant: come look at the mosquito trapped in amber! Yet as Jurassic Park reminded us, a mosquito trapped in amber can unleash infinite possibilities. The true value of a time capsule is not that it allows us to indulge in condescending nostalgia or kitschy camp but that it offers us that rare window into a time and place which, by simultaneously connecting us to something real and exciting but keeping enough of a distance so that we're hyperaware, opens up into the universe at large. Appropriately enough, then, this particular time capsule is actually about the expansion of consciousness. Form, meet content, under the aegis of history.

A dirty dozen

My 12 films: Some Came Running, God's Country, Paris Belongs to Us, Rosemary's Baby, Pandora's Box, Daisies, Scarface, Baby Face, Air Force, Yellow Submarine, Last of the Mohicans, Easy Rider

Do memes last more than a week? It's been eight days since Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre challenged bloggers to program 12 films at the New Beverly Cinema. Eight days in the blogosphere seems like an eternity but I'll go ahead and bite (not that anyone asked me to). The idea is to create a rep program of twelve films, in themed couplets (for example, Piper sticks High Fidelity with Punch Drunk Love as romantic comedies, and Song of the South with Coonskin as half-animated, racially controversial adaptations of Uncle Remus' tales). Some have chosen to give the entire program an overarching theme; hats off to them, but I found it hard enough deciding what to include and what to leave out.

My pairs are themed, but the overall program is not, save that they are all among my favorite films, ones I would love to share with an audience. I tried for diversity, and there are some classics, some more recent films (nothing from the past 15 years, though), all in different styles and genres. There are silents and talkies, black-and-white and color, animated and live-action, even documentary. Admittedly, all but three or four are American. And one persistent consistency proved impossible to overcome: fully half the films are from the 60s, my favorite cinematic decade. It's a testament to that era's richness that the list still feels diverse. Anyway, on to the explanations...