Heaven's Gate

Annotation for KRRR! 2016 by Radomír D. Kokeš

It is one of those films that has made it into the history books of film, albeit in a slightly different sense than its creators would have liked. Heaven's Gate was made in 1980 and, to put it mildly, managed to bury three promising projects. The first was the career of Michael Cimino, who, after the "Eastwoodian" crime comedy Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), made the very successful and highly regarded The Deer Hunter (1978). And if Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was still a relatively classic narrative film, in the artistically daring The Deer Hunter Cimino had already disrupted the established patterns of film construction in many respects and foreshadowed the ambitions of Heaven's Gate. The Deer Hunter was composed of three very different parts, breaking up the causal organization of the narrative with episodic elements and unexpected detours, spanning large periods of time and unexpectedly changing the atmosphere. The risky authorial project worked out for Cimino, and the United Artists studio gave him free rein in choosing and conceptualizing his next project, which, with exaggeration, spelled doom not only for Cimino, but mainly for himself... The self-confident, obsessively perfectionist creator managed to take on a monumental time slippage in the realization of his vision, reworking an enormous amount of material and spending a barely imaginable amount of money at the time, which was never recovered. In simple numbers, the film cost forty-four million dollars at the time and has grossed three and a half million dollars since its premiere (with the value of the dollar falling and falling since then). It was originally five and a half hours long, was cut to four and a half hours - and finally went to theaters in a distribution version lasting two and a half hours, which we will also see in Krnov. Heaven's Gate is an opulent anti-Western fresco about the life of immigrants in the United States, which, following the methods of The Deer Hunter, significantly shifts the audience's expectations associated with the genre, not only by making a love triangle the key dramatic motif. The film, condemned by critics and audiences, has over time experienced artistic rehabilitation and is often seen as a sick great work, impressive in its details and failing as a whole. At the same time, however, as a work that has fallen under the weight of its creator's ambitions, it is significant precisely for its effort to achieve their fulfillment. It did not fall by itself, after all, it took with it not only Cimino's career and the United Artists studio, but, according to some, also the dream of a new Hollywood film.