Easy Rider by Lee Hill (review)

HUMANITIES 341 Very early in his career as artist, Heward left behind the use of traditional painterly supports such as stretched canvas enclosed within frames and, Campbell argues, traditional thoughts about painting and sculpture. He is perhaps best known for his use of unstretched rayon, upon which he paints spare, often monochromatic, abstract shapes. For Campbell, Heward's work invokes a variety of other meditative forms, including'Zen koans/ 'the cave paintings at Lascaux, the vase paintings of the ancient Greeks,' 'medieval illuminations/ and, according to Campbell, they say as much I about the dynamics ofnarrative as a Durer etching or Chian (flungink ) paintings.' These opinions are fine, although such pronouncements (Campbell would hate that word) are usually left with little or no further elaboration. There are times when Campbell is more insightfut as when he discusses Heward's painterly and sculpturalinvestigation of 'timelessness' or, rather, 'duration'; his grappling with 'symbolism' and the inherent difficulties of symbolic interpretations; the influence of masks; and Heward's aesthetic critique of postmodernism. What is said (if not always how it is said) is often quite evocative and compelling. Unfortunately for the reader, the book is not easy to navigate. The plates are not well mapped out and the result is that the reader has to flip through the book somewhat desperately, searching for the image that mayor may not be referred to in the text. I also would have been pleased to see relevant bibliographic information on Heward (both writings by him and on him) and a list of where and when he has shown his art in both group and oneperson exhibitions. The idea behind this book - to present a lengthy critique of a contemporary artist still in his prime - is admirable. Apart from the odd coffee-table book devoted to Christopher Pratt or' the catalogues devoted to Paterson Ewen and Betty Goodwin, for example, there are too few such in-depth studies of contemporary Canadian artists. Unlike visual artists, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, and a host of others have been treated to a variety of critical assessments. I am not sure this particular book will reverse the trend, or gain a new audience for Heward's work or Campbell's prose. But the intent is there. (PETER O'BRIEN) Lee Hill. Easy Rider BFI Modem Classics. British Film Institute. 80. us $9.95 The British Film Institute's BFI Modern Classics series is something of a potpourri (or, according to taste, an alla potrida). Over the past few years they have included book-length studies, typically of about eighty pages in length, of 'individual films of recent years/ with the aim of setting 'the agenda for debates about what matters in modern cinema.' The choice of films is eclectic, ranging from Orson Welles and John Ford to Arnold 342 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Schwarzenegger, from Double Indemnity to Gun Crazy: from true classic to cult. Where does Easy Rider stand in such a spectrum? Its status as a cult film is probably beyond cavil, but is it a classic? Lee Hill, a Canadian who has already written a biography ofTerrySouthern, the co-screenwriterfor most of the film, believes it to be the film that decisively broke away from the Hollywood studio system, and, as J the road movie,' set a tradition of its own by incorporating the voice of political activism and rebellious youth in film, and the dark view of American so~iety now so endemic to the American cinema. But on his next to last page, Hill is still posing the same query: is it a classic? Hill seems ambivalent in answering this question. On the one hand he downplays the film's significance as the most important diagnostic film of the 1960s: Dr Strangelove, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, as well as others, may have higher claims for annalizing the American swings between hope and despair in that period. But on the other hand he seems to prefer its counter-culture politics to such as theirs, and maintains that the full force of its influence was thwarted by a right-wing resurgence in the 19708 and 1980s,culminatingin Ronald Reagan's...