Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969)
The Calgary Cinematheque is pleased to present a one-night-only showing of Dennis Hopper’s newly restored 1969 masterwork: Easy Rider.
Chronicling the meanderings of two motorcycle-borne Americans, the film’s plot offers up as much artful film style as it does genuine cultural, social and historical intrigue; the open road, the drug trips, the free love—Easy Rider doesn’t define a generation so much as it captures one in all its naturalistic, poignant honesty.
[Billy and Wyatt] don't communicate with us, or each other, but after a while, it doesn't seem to matter. They simply exist … We accept them in their moving isolation, against the magnificent Southwestern landscapes of beige and green and pale blue.Vincent Canby, 1969, NYT
After a big Mexican cocaine haul, Peter Fonda’s Wyatt (aka ‘Captain America’) and Dennis Hopper’s Billy (aka ‘Billy The Kid’) hit the road to do their own thing in their own time as they cruise towards New Orleans, Mardi Gras and Florida retirement. Along the way, they encounter a real live hippie commune, Jack Nicholson’s football-helmeted ACLU lawyer, some hippie-hating rednecks, a French Quarter working girl, and the screen’s baddest acid trip ever. Whether out of nostalgia or curiosity, to watch Easy Rider is to join Wyatt and Billy on their intangible quest for freedom; it’s a liberating journey, no doubt, but one whose final destination might just throw the very nature of freedom into question.
The film won a special prize for Best First Work at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, and helped to unofficially launch the new wave of American “independent” filmmaking that has come to be known as the New-Hollywood era (which also includes the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, and Arthur Penn, among many more). Jack Nicholson’s breakout role as drunkard lawyer George Harrison was enough to earn him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and, indeed, his character’s aura permeates many of the film’s most unforgettable moments. Easy Rider is not to be missed—whether you’re a ‘flower child’ yourself or just have parents who were!
Does Easy Rider take its heroes to be prophets or fools? Does its apparently romantic view of antisocial roaming contain an element of satire? The movie itself plays its cards close to the fringed buckskin vest, grooving on the American landscape rather than spelling out its meanings. Mr. Hopper, a sly showman and a cunning formalist, blended the stripped-down muscularity of contemporary hot-rod B-movies with flights of abstraction and intuition that show more than a passing acquaintance with art-house heroes Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard.A. O. Scott, 2009, NYT
About the Restoration
Although initially restored in 1999 through a complicated mixture of photochemical techniques and old digital technologies, there were still many issues that couldn’t be fully addressed at the time. For this new restoration, Sony began with a 4K scan of the best surviving 35mm film elements; following an extensive digital restoration, with the repair of all torn frames and scratches and the removal of all dirt from the image, a brand new 35mm negative was created, from which new 35mm prints have been struck.Film Forum