He was one of the flagship directors of the 70s and despite not winning an Oscar and having fallen into oblivion for a good part of the last decades, his tireless dissemination work and the constant rediscovery of his work always kept him at the fore. foot of the cinematic cannon. Peter bogdanovich has died at 82 years old.
The director who taught cinema
Maybe it was the least recognized of the great generation that revolutionized Hollywood. In the shadow of Coppola, Friedkin, Lucas, Scorsese or Spielberg, Bogdanovich saw his magnetism diminish in the 80s. A pity, because behind the character that was created behind those glasses, one of the most important filmmakers in cinema was hiding. American.
In the late 1960s, Bogdanovich joined Roger Corman’s team, a b-series factory that sheltered some of the world’s greatest well-known filmmakers. His first works, ‘The hero is on the loose‘and’ Journey to the planet of prehistoric women ‘are two examples of this indefatigable cult factory
Of the second, adaptation of a novel by Pavek Klushantev, Bogdanovich did not want to know anything or sign his name. Despite that stumble the legend of the filmmaker was reaffirming Thanks to his previous thriller starring Boris Karloff, where the legend took on the role of a veteran horror movie actor on the verge of retirement who ends up crossing paths with a psychopathic war veteran.
Shortly after would arrive his masterpiece. ‘The last movie’, one of the great classics of American cinema, focused on the feelings of a group of teenagers from a town that seems to be taken from a western where they spend hours in an old cinema. Bogdanovich, a sick movie buff, has always confessed in his work his inability to live in the present.
Its characters see movie images from Hollywood’s (former) golden age before their eyes and project their dreams of a better life despite the fact that his life is completely empty. Filmed in black and white, starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd, it had eight Oscar nominations and two awards for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.
‘Luna de papel’, his other great “popular” film (along with ‘What’s wrong with me, doctor?’), Also had a bittersweet atmosphere where its heroes would never achieve find your place in the world. Bogdanovich went through a long journey through the desert before returning in the late 1990s producing his own films, though he will never experience any success comparable to those that had been released to him thirty years earlier.
Taking advantage of the fact that he has left, I would like to claim the hilarious ‘What a ruin of function!’, A Supporting comedy and flawless pacing that conquered our hearts in the other golden age that mere mortals had to live: that of the video store.
It will be thanks to the admiration of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, Bogdanovich you will not see your name erased from memory. In addition, his appearance in titles such as ‘On the other side of the wind’, stealing the movie from Orson Welles himself, or his latest documentary, ‘The Great Buster’, have served as a historical class and master lesson for a new generation of viewers. Rest in peace.
