Dennis Hopper: Icon of Oblivion, BFI

This month, the BFI celebrate the career of the uncompromising, unapologetic Dennis Hopper with their season Icon of Oblivion

And what a career it is. 

Much more than an actor, Dennis Hopper was a director, writer, artist, photographer and symbol of 1960s counterculture. 

Hopper started out as 'the golden era' of the Hollywood studio system was ending, when he appeared with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. One of Hollywood’s definitive enfant terribles, Hopper was dogged by controversy, a bad reputation and his own demons. Nevertheless, his output was rich and varied – and the BFI have curated the finest moments of a man who refused to pander to expectations in Icon of Oblivion.

The season includes everything from low-budget noir thriller Night Tide to Francis Ford Coppola's extraordinary Apocalypse Now in 1971, in which Hopper played a dope-addled photographer. They will, of course, screen the film that's been credited for re-launching Hopper's career: David Lynch's majestically dark Blue Velvet, where he plays sadistic kidnapper Frank Booth. Not forgetting Hopper’s foray into the Pop Art scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, which resulted in Tarzan and Jane Regained…Sort Of: one of Warhol’s first ‘home-movies’ in 1963. 

The most interesting films in the BFI season, though, are those that Hopper self-directs. His most roundly celebrated work is road movie Easy Rider. In the original counterculture blockbuster, we motor down highways across 1960s America, pursuing freedom, clinging on to the backs of Hopper, Henry Fonda and Jack Nicholson's motorbikes. The outsider movie, sountracked by 'Born to Be Wild' and the roar of Harleys, was box-office hit, winning Hopper the 'First Film Award' at Cannes, for his superlative direction.

After the success of Easy Rider, studios were keen to invest money in up-and-coming, avant-garde filmmakers to create similarly low budget Indies- they would capture the bohemian spirit and values of young audiences (and turn the same tidy profit). This brings us to the film we’re most excited for this month: The Last Movie.

Universal Studios commissioned Hopper to work his directorial magic on another film à la Easy Rider. They didn’t quite get what they bargained for.

Ronald Bergam wrote in The Guardian, "this film, made for the stoned, by the stoned, was stoned by the critics".  It isn't coherent. There are no characters to root for. It doesn't capture mass experience in the way Easy Rider did.  Instead, it's an experiment in meta-cinema that's deconstructive to Brechtian degrees. From the title, to the 'missing scenes' signified by shots of clapboards, to its use of a film within a film, The Last Movie is an extended riff on movie making. But it's also about dreams, the rise of technology and lost innocence. Tellingly, the embedded movie is a Western, and when its images and scenes bleed out into the film that contains it, we find that desert gun twirling aptly depicts Hopper's duel with cinematic conventions.

Make sure you get to the Southbank this month and get to know one of cinema history’s true originals.