an excitedly talking Don Gordon and a smiling, cowboy-hatted Dennis Hopper drink beer at a baralr

The Last Movie

Directed by Dennis Hopper.
With Dennis Hopper, Stella Garcia, Julie Adams.
US, 1971, DCP, color, 108 min.
DCP source: Arbelos

Made the same year as Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture ShowThe Last Movie was only possible after the grand success of Dennis Hopper’s low-budget countercultural phenomenon Easy Rider. Given the green light to set up in a remote Peruvian village, the anarchic production helmed by one of Hollywood’s loosest cannons achieved its infamy for reveling in psychedelic, decadent danger wilder and more wanton than the Old West that Sam Fuller recreates in the film-within-a-film. With the lines between reality and fantasy blurring both behind and on screen, Hopper plays a stuntman who stays behind after a film wraps in Peru. Alternatively looking for love or gold, he watches the native villagers as they incorporate the rituals and iconography of both cinema and the West into their lives, using real bullets. In taking Hollywood’s money and fleeing into the heart of darkness, Hopper also earnestly points an inverted mirror toward his own benefactors, who had to witness their investment beautifully implode into a fragmented, feverish, funny nightmare—including startlingly disruptive cuts, character personality changes and nonlinearity within nonlinearity—that ultimately out-counters the counterculture. – Brittany Gravely

PRECEDED BY

  • Looking for Mushrooms – short version

    Directed by Bruce Conner.
    US, 1959-67, 16mm, color, 3 min.
    Print source: HFA
  • Looking for Mushrooms – long version

    Directed by Bruce Conner.
    US, 1959-67/1996, 16mm, color, 14 min.
    Print source: HFA

Bruce Conner created two different “trips” from the same rhythmically edited footage he shot between Mexico and his adopted hometown of San Francisco, each featuring the eponymous magic mushrooms—glimpsed only fleetingly in the earlier three-minute version of the filmbut given haunting presence in the extended, step-printed version accompanied by music from frequent Conner collaborator, pioneering serial composer Terry Riley. – Haden Guest

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