Close Up

31 December 2018: Close-Up New Year's Eve: The Last Movie

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"One of the craziest (and druggiest) movies ever made, it's also blatantly self-deconstructing and meta to the max" – J. Hoberman

We’re thrilled to mark the last day of the year with Dennis Hopper’s radical, much-mythologised lost masterpiece The Last Movie – widely unseen for nearly 50 years. Join us in the bar to celebrate in the good company of film, drinks and music until late.

The Last Movie
Dennis Hopper, 1971, 108 min
New 4K Restoration

"Dennis Hopper’s little-seen follow-up to the epochal hit Easy Rider is one of cinema’s legendary films maudits. Given carte blanche and a large budget by Universal Pictures, the actor-director took a film crew and a cast of pals – including Kris Kristofferson, Peter Fonda, Michelle Phillips, and Samuel Fuller – off to Peru, where they made this radically self-reflexive New Wave wonder, the acid-trip tale of a Hollywood company shooting a Western in the Andes. Hopper plays stuntman Kansas, who becomes caught up in the local indigenous community’s alarming new religious rituals. Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern co-wrote the script. Hopper described the film’s production as “one long sex-and-drugs orgy.” The unconventional narrative structure suggests a director under the thrall of both psychedelics and Godard. The film bombed at the box office, derailing Hopper’s directorial career. He remained convinced it was his masterpiece." – The Cinematheque