Meaningful Motion: The Early Films of Walter Hill

May 30, 2007 - June 27, 2007

The Long Riders, June 20

Walter Hill begins with genre. After demolishing past assumptions, he builds new ones with a virtuosic construction of cinematic space. Hill favors the hyperinflated image, so genre reinhabits a place of grandoise meaning that substitutes for the inner workings of his characters. In his earliest features—Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, and Streets of Fire—we get propulsive stories peopled by almost speechless outlaws. Their meaning exists in their actions, not in their expressions. And their actions take place in a realm of kinetic stylization and exaggerated settings—this is graceful storytelling that privileges fluidity over formula, acceleration over anecdote.

By turns hip, heroic, and harrowing, Hill's late-seventies films were part of a period effort to reinvigorate cinema. They vied for recognition with those of Spielberg and Scorsese, Lucas and DePalma. And like those of his compatriots, his energetic entries were scorned by some and championed by others, most conspicuously Pauline Kael, who understood the zero-degree lyricism he sought. Join us in revisiting these early films in which Walter Hill renegotiates genre with a muted melodrama, a neo-noir, an urban road movie, an anti-oater, and a mock musical.

Steve Seid
Video Curator

Wednesday, May 30, 2007
7:30 p.m. Hard Times
Hill’s directorial debut casts Charles Bronson as a laconic bare-knuckle fighter in Depression-era New Orleans, with James Coburn and Strother Martin as his partners in hardscrabble hustle. “On its own pulp terms, Hard Times is a triumph.”—New Yorker

Wednesday, June 6, 2007
7:30 p.m. The Driver
Walter Hill in Person. Hill's burnt-rubber ode to professional cool pits The Detective (Bruce Dern) against The Driver (Ryan O'Neal) and The Player (Isabelle Adjani). "A combination of brilliantly edited car chases and existential thriller which recalls the somberness of Melville and the spareness of Leone."—Time Out

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
7:30 p.m. The Warriors
Gangs run wild in a lurid pre-Giuliani New York in Hill’s urban rendition of Xenophon’s Anabasis. More mythmaking than social realism, the film nevertheless prompted real-life street fights on its release in 1979. “A real moviemaker’s movie.”—New Yorker

Wednesday, June 20, 2007
7:30 p.m. The Long Riders
Hill rounded up the Brothers Carradine, Keach, and Quaid for his up-to-date oater about the daring exploits of Jesse James and his gang. “Hill understands the poetry of horses and guns and big skies. He understands how to make movie magic.”—Boston Phoenix

Wednesday, June 27, 2007
7:30 p.m. Streets of Fire
Hill’s self-described “rock and roll fable” uses music as the basis for an anarchic, neon-lit allegory in which rocker Diane Lane is kidnapped by gang leader Willem Dafoe and maniacal sidekick Lee Ving. “If this isn’t action cinema in its purest form, then it’s pretty close.”—Time Out

Special thanks to Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan and Lucy Laird.