Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ headlines L.A.’s CineVegas Film Festival

A rare showing of Dennis Hopper’s 1971 “The Last Movie,” a true see-it-to-believe-it time capsule, will kick off an L.A. celebration of the 10th edition of the CineVegas Film Festival. Watching it today, the film, which will be presented by CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theater in the Fairfax district, it is simply astounding to imagine that Hollywood dollars paid for a film so willfully obscure and bullheadedly arty.

“The Last Movie,” which screened at CineVegas in 2003, was Hopper’s directorial follow-up to the generation-defining “Easy Rider,” which at least partly explains how he managed to leverage such a film into existence. The story concerns an American film crew that goes to the far reaches of Peru to shoot a western. One member of the production, played by Hopper, decides to stay. The natives then make a movie of their own. The film is like a complicated piece of origami, constantly unfolding in unexpected ways. To say that “The Last Movie” deconstructs cinematic language is too gentle a term, as it totally disintegrates it. The chronology is jumbled, some scenes repeat, and at times a card that reads “Scene Missing” appears onscreen, giving the entire film the fluid uncertainty of a dream or the last throes before death.

A production out of control on par with “Apocalypse Now,” the film would prove to be Hopper’s last directorial effort until 1980’s “Out of the Blue.” Even though “The Last Movie” won a major award when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival – which Hopper recalls as “a high point of my life” – he returned to Hollywood only to be told by Universal, the studio financing and releasing the picture, that he needed to re-edit. When Hopper refused, the film was given only a perfunctory release and then effectively shelved. So that must have been dispiriting, no?

“It depends on how you look at it,” responded Hopper recently, marveling somewhat at the bravado of his younger self. “I, at the time, thought I won.”

That sort of outsider spirit, the celebration of the noble loser and rebellious dreamer, runs through all the films screening as part of the CineVegas/CineFamily series that run Friday nights at the Silent Movie Theater through April. Probably the best known of the other films in the series is the cult favorite “Bubba Ho-Tep,” the Elvis-meets-JFK fantasy spoof that had its premiere at CineVegas in 2002.

Other films in the series include “The Living Wake,” “All God’s Children Can Dance,” “Garbanzo Gas” and “Radiant.” Films that had their U.S. premiere at CineVegas are “Trona,” “Loren Cass” and “Bad Habits.” Rounding out the screening series is James Fotopoulos’ “The Nest.”