Tuesday, 13 September 2016

Easy Rider - research




Explain how the text has been constructed to create meaning

Identify specific camera shot types, angles, lighting techniques, editing and sound (diegetic, non-diegetic and dialogue) and justify why they have been used to help the audience decode the text and influence them to gain the preferred reading.
You can discuss these individually, but it is often a higher level discussion if you explore how they interact and combine with one another.

Also discuss how these techniques relate to the time/ era that the production was made – you may need to research wider context.
750 words and embedded clip
Hopper and Fonda's first collaboration was in The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson, which had similar themes and characters as Easy Rider.[5] Peter Fonda had become "an icon of the counterculture" in The Wild Angels (1966), where he established "a persona he would develop further in The Trip and Easy Rider."[6] The Trip also popularized LSD, while Easy Rider went on to "celebrate 60s counterculture" but does so "stripped of its innocence."[7] Author Katie Mills wrote that The Trip is a way point along the "metamorphosis of the rebel road story from a Beat relic into its hippie reincarnation as Easy Rider", and connected Peter Fonda's characters in those two films, along with his character in The Wild Angels, deviating from the "formulaic biker" persona and critiquing "commodity-oriented filmmakers appropriating avant-garde film techniques."[5] It was also a step in the transition from independent film into Hollywood's mainstream, and while The Trip was criticized as a faux, popularized underground film made by Hollywood insiders,Easy Rider "interrogates" the attitude that underground film must "remain strictly segregated from Hollywood."[5] Mills also wrote that the famous acid trip scene in Easy Rider"clearly derives from their first tentative explorations as filmmakers in The Trip."[5]
A landmark counterculture film,[2] and a "touchstone for a generation" that "captured the national imagination",[3] Easy Riderexplores the societal landscape, issues, and tensions in the United States during the 1960s, such as the rise and fall of the hippiemovement, drug use, and communal lifestyle. In Easy Rider, real drugs were used in scenes showing the use of marijuana and other substances.

Two young "hippie" bikers, Wyatt and Billy sell some dope in Southern California, stash their money away in their gas-tank and set off for a trip across America, on their own personal odyssey looking for a way to lead their lives. On the journey they encounter bigotry and hatred from small-town communities who despise and fear their non-conformism. However Wyatt and Billy also discover people attempting 'alternative lifestyles' who are resisting this narrow-mindedness, there is always a question mark over the future survival of these drop-out groups. The gentle hippie community who thank God for 'a place to stand' are living their own unreal dream. The rancher they encounter and his Mexican wife are hard-pushed to make ends meet. Even LSD turns sour when the trip is a bad one. Death comes to seem the only freedom. When they arrive at a diner in a small town, they are insulted by the local rednecks as weirdo degenerates. They are arrested on some minor pretext by the local sheriff and thrown in jail where they meet George Hanson, a liberal alcoholic lawyer. He gets them out and decides to join them on their trip to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.


Their mother committed suicide in a mental hospital when Peter, her youngest, was ten.
Bert Schneider (executive producer): Of all the scenes in the movie, the acid scene is the one most people remember and the one that most people were freaked out by.

Peter Fonda: The graveyard acid scene was Dennis's idea. He had come up to me with tears streaming down his cheeks because he was to film in a cemetery. "Oh man, you gotta get up to the statue now. I want you to get up there and ask your old lady why she copped out on you." "Come on, Hoppy," I replied. "I'm hip to Captain America having a mother complex, but you want to take Peter Fonda's complex and put it up there on screen!" "Nobody will know." "Everybody will know, man! They all know what happened!"
The budget was so limited, there was no money for an original score, so Hopper, the director, slapped on a scratch track of rock 'n' roll standards for the first studio screening. The executives loved the sound and insisted the songs be left in, and "Easy Rider" begat countless later movies that were scored with oldies.
Motorcycle movies were not fashionable in 1969 - link two symbols of rebellion -- motorcycles and the hippie counterculture -- and catch the spirit of the time.
A hitchhiker leads them to a hippie commune that may have seemed inspiring in 1969, but today looks banal.  The group leader gives the Captain and Billy a tab of acid and the solemn advice, "When you get to the right place, with the right people -- quarter this."
Captain America and Billy find the legendary whorehouse and drop acid in the cemetery with two hookers (including Karen Black in one of her earliest film roles). It's a bad trip, but maybe they chose the wrong place with the wrong people.
Jack Nicholson: The film changed more in the editing room that from script to film.

One of the reasons that America inspires so many road pictures is that we have so many roads. One of the reasons we have so many buddy pictures is that Hollywood doesn't understand female characters (there are so many hookers in the movies because, as characters, they share the convenience of their real-life counterparts: They're easy to find and easy to get rid of.)

Peter Fonda: Easy Rider really was a trip. Back when I was making studio pictures like Tammy And The Doctor, I got a lot of fan mail - thousands of letters a week asking for my autography and my picture. When I did Easy Rider, I got letters from people saying, "What do I do?", "How do I speak to my father?", "How do I keep myself from committing suicide?", "How do I live?" Nobody was asking me for my picture and my autograph any more.
changed the relationship people had with film makers, stopped seeing them as celebrities and related to them, saw their own deviant counter culture reflected in mainstream media, new age of hollywood, buddy road movie - close relationship formed with film makers through outcast status. People rejected traditional guidance e.g. parents and looked to media for influence - still religious 
"the movie's sentimental paranoia obviously rang true to a large, young audience's vision. In the late '60s, it was cool to feel that you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless."
Dennis Hopper: I wrote every word of the script. I directed every scene of the film. You can hear what you like. Here it is: I made that fucking movie, period.

Most of the film is shot outside with natural lighting. Hopper said all the outdoor shooting was an intentional choice on his part, because "God is a great gaffer
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