British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Heaven’s Gate

We could usefully consider Gate not just in terms of the western but that larger literature of land-grab history, work such as Frank Norris’ The Octopus, which, published in 1901, told of the conflict over land between Californian farmers and an acquisitive railway company.   Popular audiences – had the film found them – might have linked the languid pace, attention to frontier detail and insistence upon national epic to Centennial, the James Michener novel adapted for television in 1976, which covered hundreds of years, but paid extensive attention in its middle episodes to conflicts between ranchers and sheep herders. Returning to cinema, but with a wider net, Heavens’ Gate ties to other films about the battle over natural resources such as Chinatown. As a teenager, discovering these films in the eighties, the six year gap between the two films seemed like an eternity, far too large a distance for mere thematic similarities to cross.

… a last hurrah for that seventies cinema so beloved of film historians

Things look different from the perspective of middle-age, however. Heaven’s Gate was a last hurrah for that seventies cinema so beloved of film historians, the politically-engaged auteurist Hollywood of Coppola, Scorsese, Pakula …and you know the rest. That moment in cinema was giving way to something less oblique, something more genre-led and where the specific structural rules of the three act screenplay would be ruthlessly imposed. Heaven’s Gate made up its own rules, followed its own structure (which is clear if you want to look for it). Can it speak to 21st century audiences as anything other than an historical monument? There’s lots to enjoy, lots of issues to explore. It retains a certain obliqueness in its reticence to tell us things which it regards us as clever enough to deduce, and this current cut runs to three and a half hours, making it perhaps difficult to incoprporate on a course structured around two hour screenings, but modern audiences and critics seem unlikely to make the same mistakes as their predecessors. The film’s reputation looks assured now.

This Blu-ray release looks solid and detail is good. Given its palette of muted colours and sepia-tones, not to mention the haze of smoke so often drifting around the town, the film was never going to be a standard-setter of brightness and sharpness, but this surely is how Cimino intended the film to look. On the extras disc, precisely these issues of the film’s visuals are discussed in an interview with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and there is a more general discussion with actor Jeff Bridges. The foremost extra though is an hour-long documentary on the film’s making with contributions from many of those involved, though not Michael Cimino.

The definitive account of the making of Heaven’s Gate is the book Final Cut by studio executive Steen Bach. The late Robin Wood was a long-term critical champion of the film and his extensive analysis can be found in the book Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan (revised edition published in 2003).

Dr Miles Booy

 

 

 

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