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FРIУLБMРИКА Gjorgji Janevski
On July 2 this year Michael Cimino died
This is a small homage for the director
who had great dreams.
MICHAEL CIMINO
(1939 – 2016)
Skopje, second half of the eight-
ies of the past century. The
great beauty, the color TV
made in Slovenia, malfunc-
tioned again. In these diffi- to work as a scriptwriter and together
cult moments, the entire four-member
family gathers around the wood stove
and in front of the small, but immor-
tal Junost 603E, our faithful companion
from camping and summer holidays.
Small and portable black and white TV
produced in the Soviet Union. The Deer
Hunter is broadcast on TV. For three
hours we are motionless and hypno-
tized before the black and white screen
with a size of 25cm. There were no com-
mercials in the middle of the film, and
breaks for physiological needs are not
an option.
When the news about the death of
Michael Cimino was announced at the
beginning of July, I once again reminded
myself of this particular episode from
my childhood as one of my most unusu-
al and most powerful film experiences.
Michael Cimino was born in New York
in 1939, in a rich artistic family. Unlike wounds from the Vietnam War are still
his contemporaries (Scorsese, Coppola,
De Palma, Bogdanovich), who are the
first generation of directors who came
from film academies, Cimino studies
art, design and architecture. While
part of them were improving their craft
in the B productions of Roger Corman
(the real patron of the New Hollywood),
working fast and economically, Cimino
104 September 2016
The author is
a cultural worker
was already enjoying the status of a fa-
mous director of big-budget and visu-
ally ample television commercials. In
the beginning of the 70’s he also tried
with John Milius he signed Magnum
Force, the second film from the series
of Dirty Harry. Already in 1974 his debut
film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was cre-
ated, an action comedy with elements
of a road movie where the main roles
are interpreted by Clint Eastwood and
Jeff Bridges. The film, which has main-
tained its cultural status to present day,
courageously undermines the genre for-
mula. Here the archetype of the male
friendship is transformed into a lament
for an unattainable homosexual love.
The film is a melancholic homage about
the lost innocence and youth, a leitmo-
tif which will run through his next real-
izations as well.
It took him four years to make The
Deer Hunter. The result is one of the
most important accomplishments of
the American film, created in the spe-
cific context of the 70’s, where the
deeply open. To Cimino the very story is
a poetic tool, the atmosphere and the
visual dimension have an advantage be-
fore the world. The positioning of the
characters within the film frame, the
way how they look at each other and
the weight of their silence say more
than what is said, and the very land-