Maxims of Auteur Relevance
August 18, 2022
Welcome to Camp Cimino! Don’t know how to roller skate? Spend six weeks learning how. Extras, kindly standby, he’ll come ‘round to position you in short order. Roll! That minute and a half: $900,000. Prepare to do it 31 more times. Dust! More! Now hold for the right cloud. Where might John Hurt be? Shooting Elephant Man, but he’ll be back. Should be ready for him by then, hopefully. Wrap. Over a million feet of film and no one’s allowed to see any of it. Push to Christmas. Release! Release…
It’s ugly. There are poor reviews and then there’s the evisceration Heaven’s Gate endures. The volatile discourse fouls the film’s reputation so intensely that it (supposedly, at least in part) shudders United Artists and marks the doom of the paradigm challenging 70s cinema ethic. Lucas and Spielberg go on to thrive. The thornier likes of De Palma, Coppola, Altman, Peckinpah, etc. hit snags but persist. No one is made the heel quite like Michael Cimino. Heaven’s Gate’s wrongfully laden infamy casts him as a Hollywood pariah late into his career.
Reexamine. Recall the corner Cimino claims among the era’s foremost auteurs following The Deer Hunter, that of the painter. There’s something approaching mythic in his compositions. The West of Heaven’s Gate is grand and ghostly, shrouded in dust that imbibes the quality of a memory. That’s not to say its capture is overtly stylized, for Cimino is The New Hollywood’s keenest, most willing observer. Heaven’s Gate offers a world that is so fully (uncannily) realized, its verisimilitude so rich. It’s a painstakingly constructed reality that Cimino merely documents. Takes are long. Actors live. This pointed, non-editorial approach to an ever-expanding, renaissance-like tableau of the West is wholly singular and yields, even to the most steadfast Cimino foil, at least occasional awe. It’s lack of narrative driveshaft and perhaps heavy handed, most definitely blindspotted interrogation of the American myth recognized with much regard, the majesty of Heaven’s Gate remains undeniable.
As such, the film’s relegation to doorstop of the cinematic cannon seems unjust. In its creation, Cimino demonstrates the gamut of his talents uninhibited. It is a filmic artifact unlike any other, not for how bad Kael and others thought it was, but for how distinctly Cimino it is. Cimino loved Heaven’s Gate. This love permeates the celluloid. Perhaps his only true folly was loving it too much: Cimino’s monomaniac fixation, that which distinguishes all auteurs, tangoed with the unparalleled cart-blanche freedom U.A. afforded him, to nefarious effect. His arrogant, indulgent exploitation of said freedom soured the media and industry colleagues alike, priming the film for disaster before it ever had a chance.
Now consider a Cimino inverse: James Cameron.
Twelve expeditions to the bottom of the North Atlantic. A full-scale reconstruction of a cruiseliner, every detail rendered to the exact specifications of the original. A 162 foot crane. 17 million gallons of water. Concerns about hypothermia. The set environment Cameron cultivates becomes so hostile that a rogue technician attempts to poison the crew with PCP. Expenditures balloon to over $200 million. Rumors swirl: he’s sunk Fox. Release…
Titanic grosses more than a film ever has. Its success is remarkable given its content and the temporality of its release. A classical, sprawling epic centered on love and a niche historical event that arrives amidst the new boon of cheeky independent cinema on one hand, and an increasing populist hunger for movies as thrills on the other, should not dominate the landscape so handedly. The phenomenon remains difficult to augur. To boot, Titanic examines the same class struggle that undercurrents Heaven’s Gate. Jack and Rose dancing in steerage (e.g.) is predated by Cimino’s elegiac rollerskating sequence.
But then how to evaluate these films as works of auteurship…
The mythologies spun around each film’s production and release are as outsized as the ambitions of the directors who made them. Cameron did not love his film any more than Cimino did his. Resources unlimited, they produced works only they could. There is no hard and fast metric for determining the extent of authorship. But there is the lecherous box office. Titanic was a unicorn, Heaven’s Gate a flop. Stationed at these polar maxims, perhaps neither film is considered first and foremost as they should be: masterworks of wholly singular artists.