I’ve watched a lot of great films
for the first time this year and an echelon below Citizen Kane and Man with a Movie Camera is a film like Easy
Rider. Written by actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and directed by
Hopper it’s a motorcycle road movie about two long haired guys travelling
across America,
encountering intolerance and hatred. Released in 1969 against the backdrop of
the Civil Rights movement, the film chooses to focus on intolerance against the
freedom loving hippie movement of the same era but its central characters can
be used to denote any group or people that experienced hate and intolerance.
Produced independently and with a
budget of around $360,000, the film went on to become a huge mainstream success,
creating enormous profits and winning Hopper an award at the Cannes Film
Festival. It has since become a classic and a film that opened my eyes to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, a movement that has traditionally been
overlooked by mainstream media. Dennis Hopper said about Easy Rider that the films that were being made at the time weren’t
about the America
that he saw and he knew and this film is just that. It’s about the America of the
youth, the hair, the drugs, the ideals, the freedom and the hatred.
