It is a whole Hollywood legend who dies with him. Peter Bogdanovich – 82 years old, died Thursday, January 6 in Los Angeles – perhaps more broadly than his work itself, embodied in the eyes of cinephiles a living memory of cinema, at the same time as a vital love for this medium.
Born July 30, 1939 in Kingston, New York, to a Serbian Orthodox father and an Austrian Jewish mother, he began his career as a critic and programmer, then, electrified by the New Wave, moved on to directing. Three consecutive successes take him to the pinnacle. The last session (1971), a disenchanted picture of a small Texas town in 1951, through the stormy friendship of two young men who will soon leave it. The film reveals Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and immediately places itself under the sign of loss and nostalgia for classic American cinema. Shall we pack our bags, doctor? (1972), attempted resuscitation of the screwball comedy (“Crazy comedy”) which brings together Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand as a perched couple. Cotton candy (1973), an initiatory road-movie which again associates O’Neal in the role of a sour-fin to a girl taken in reluctantly (his own daughter, Tatum O’Neal).
The rest will be more difficult. Both professionally and personally, although not exempt from quality, like this Jack the Magnificent (1979), an exotic drift in which the Cassavetian actor Ben Gazzara plays an expatriate mac in Singapore to conquer his freedom. And everyone was laughing (1982), a detective comedy, nevertheless crystallizes a sort of fatum. Dorothy Stratten, one of the actresses of the film, playmate with whom he fell madly in love and with whom he dreams of the Pygmalion, is murdered by her husband during the editing. Bogdanovich, devastated, then decides to distribute the film on his own, for which he buys the rights from Fox, and is ruined in the operation. A few years later, he sued Universal for inappropriate cuts in his film. Mask (1985), a strange and charming work, with Cher as a mother whose teenage son suffers from a disfigurement that makes him look like a lion.
A living anachronism
Burned out in Hollywood, Bogdanovich in a sense joins what he has undoubtedly never ceased to be: an out of phase character, a living anachronism. A beginner in the era of New Hollywood, which is revolutionizing American cinema politically and structurally, he is the author of a work that could be described as neoclassical and does not dream of overturning the table. He walks with his eyes turned towards a past in cinema, the inevitable loss of which he painfully experiences, out of reverence for the art of his great masters.
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