It’s the entire Hollywood legend who died with him. Peter Bogdanovich – 82 years old, died on Thursday, January 6th in Los Angeles – perhaps on a larger scale than his work, which in the eyes of the filmmakers embodied a vivid memory of cinema, but at the same time a vivid love for this medium.
Born on July 30, 1939 in Kingston, New York, the son of an Orthodox Serbian father and an Austro-Jewish mother, he began his career as a critic and programmer, then switched to directing, pushed by the new wave. Three successes in a row bring him to the top. last session (1971), a depressingly illusory portrait of a small town in Texas in 1951, is soon abandoned by the stormy friendship of two young men. The film exposes Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and immediately places itself in the signs of loss and longing for classic American cinema. Shall we pack our bags, doctor? (1972), trying to revive Comedy-Spirale (“Crazy Comedy”), which unites Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand as a duck couple. Papas Bart (1973), a preliminary road movie that traces O’Neal back in the role of Sourdough with a reluctantly captured young girl (his daughter Tatum O’Neill).
The rest will be more difficult. Both professionally and personally, but not excluded from the quality, like here great socket (1979), A Strange Drift, in which Cassavite actor Ben Gazzara plays Mac who emigrated to Singapore to seek his freedom. And everyone laughed (1982), a detective comedy that crystallizes a kind of fat. One of the film’s actresses, Dorothy Stratten, a dramatist who fell madly in love with whom he had dreamed of Pygmalion, was killed by her husband during the liberation. Subsequently, the devastated Bogdanovich decided to distribute the film himself after buying the rights to Fox and was destroyed in the process. A few years later, he sued Universal for inappropriately cutting his film. mask (1985), a strange and magical act, starring Cher, whose teenage son suffers from a deformity that makes him look like a lion.
Lively anachronism
Burned out in Hollywood, Bogdanovich, in a sense, joins what he has undoubtedly not stopped: a character out of phase, a living anachronism. A newcomer to the era of New Hollywood, which revolutionized American cinema both politically and structurally, he is the author of a work that can be described as neoclassical and does not dream of turning the tables. He goes by looking at a past in the cinema, the inevitable loss he suffers painfully, in recognition of the art of his great masters.
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