![]() ![]() You would expect this out of a Kenneth Anger film, not the third highest grossing movie of 1969 (in the US, at least). There aren't many scenes like it in mainstream cinema (outside of a Kubrick picture). A trippy, drugged out sequence of 16mm visions, like the Stargate sequence of 2001, crash-landed in the middle of Mardi Gras. ![]() Its a rough looking picture, with natural lighting and unvarnished locations, but it suits its subject matter perfectly. Easy Rider has the same sort of wandering, exploratory narrative that was used in L'avventura almost a decade earlier. In fact, if The Last Movie hadn't been such a failure, Hopper could have been something of an American countercultural version of Michelangelo Antonioni. All very bold, especially for a directorial debut. Jump cuts, rapid intercutting between scenes, flash-forwards and handheld location camerawork. As is the case with other New Hollywood filmmakers, he shows a clear influence from European cinema, especially the French New Wave, with a bold editing style from innovators like Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad in particular. Now that I mentioned the flash-forward, I should talk about the style that Hopper employed. Their little revolution, as fun as it might have been, went up in flames with their bikes, as predicted in a hallucinatory flash-forward, making their burnout inevitable. Thompson's "wave speech" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Wyatt, played with a reserved cool by Peter Fonda, sums it up perfectly with his quote near the end: "We blew it", a succinct predecessor of Hunter S. But the film balances this out just as much, with a commune on the brink of failure, violent clashes with traditional society, bad acid trips, and an overall sense that the countercultural movement of the time, which started off with self-evident promise, had devolved into an empty, shambling, drug-addled mess. ![]() Sure, Wyatt and Billy head out on the road on their choppers, to the anthemic sounds of Steppenwolf, The Band, Hendrix and others, smoking weed freely at their selected campsites, picking up chicks and having that sweet, free love we all wish for. This is one of those rare works that manages to capture the spirit of an era while not getting too caught up in it notionally or wistfully, instead choosing to show its failures as well as its glories. Additionally, I just really dig this picture and wanted to see it again. As one of the defining movies of the New Hollywood generation, both in content and form, I thought it'd be nice to talk about it. I recently re-watched Easy Rider as part of a continuing look at the counterculture of the 1960s and its effects. ![]()
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