Cimino: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Set against the 1890s American range wars between cattle barons and immigrant landholders, Michael Cimino’s magnum opus focuses on the relationship between a baron-turned-sheriff (Kris Kristofferson), an immigrant-turned-baron (Christopher Walken) and a French prostitute (Isabelle Huppert). However, for the first half of this four-hour epic, there’s very little in the way of dialogue or even scenes, as Cimino opts to propel the action through ever-expanding mise-en-scenes. What little speech does occur tends to be oratorical and declamatory, while the few moments of dialogue are either cryptic or inaudible, drowned out by Cimino’s small country of extras. Meanwhile, the vistas get larger and more expansive, until it feels as if the Western horizon simply isn’t wide enough for Cimino’s camera, which has to periodically cram it with beautifully choreographed bodies and objects, as if increasing the surface area of a space meant increasing the space as well. In the process, the film generates that unbelievable, otherworldly ambition that doesn’t really exist outside of a small pocket of silent films – films that were conscious of creating an entirely new medium and, often, a new vision of history in the process. In fact, it’s no stretch to say that this could play as a silent film – everything is subordinated to the visuals (in many ways, it’s a film composed of establishing shots), while the love triangle is largely gestural, suffused with the peculiar innocence that even the most sinister relationships acquire under the silent lens; these characters are children, children of a new medium and its transformative moment in history. It feels right, then, that the narrative only really comes into focus in the final third, since it’s only then that we feel the full enormity of history that Cimino has managed to erect around it. And it’s a highly critical history – under Cimino’s camera, the horizons of Western mythology make their curvature felt, come full circle time and again. By the end, there’s no single standoff between oppressor and oppressed, but a series of concentric confrontations that centrifuges into a mobile abstraction of history itself, leaving little room for reflective distance or sympathetic involvement; the film simply folds you into its vortices. It’s not hard to see, then, why critics went to such extravagant lengths to write it out of history, but like Intolerance, Napoleon and the other films from which it draws its strengths, it's already refashioned the universe that might seek to expel it; some thirty years later, it hasn’t suffered a bit.