Caustic, not inclined to please the public and the press, decidedly and always on his own side, even if it cost him a lot in terms of his career, William Friedkin has passed away as he saw fit, suddenly, even though he was well into his eighties. He wasn’t one to give grand farewells to the stage. He left on the eve of an event that in 2013 awarded him a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awaited in a city he loved, at a festival that always welcomed him as one welcomes the greats.
“No one has the right to say that Apocalypse Now is better than a Disney movie,” he used to repeat with his cantankerous style, hiding a smirk underneath, like saying, “I’ve done it again,” even though he often addressed critics in less elegant ways. This was because, in his view of cinema, personal inclinations and tastes are just that and should be seen as such, both from the perspective of someone watching a film and from that of someone making it. Speaking of character, someone like William Friedkin was needed to take an actor who was anything but handsome, lanky, and seemingly ungraceful like Gene Hackman and immediately build him a face and a career in The French Connection. Or to fearlessly approach a masterpiece like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and remake it as Sorcerer. Or even to set aside the image of Don Michael Corleone and sew onto the rising star Al Pacino the role of an ambiguous detective in a case involving murders in a gay community in New York, inviting endless controversies (which he didn’t mind), including the unfounded accusation of homophobia. Finally, he took the protagonist of To Live and Die in L.A., considered a genre reimagining film, and killed him well before the end.
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Six years since documentary The Devil and Father Amorth and twelve since the beautiful Killer Joe, William Friedkin would have been to Venice with his latest fiction feature, 2023′ The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Unfortunately,...
But above all, one had to be William Friedkin to take a story that was, all in all, quite ordinary, centered on the demonic presence in a young girl’s body, and make us understand that it wasn’t the grimaces, the monstrosities, and the profanities that deserved the viewer’s attention but rather the haggard, tormented, and hallucinated faces of the priest and the exorcist, their suffering, their death, and transfiguration. This was in a film that, even after fifty years, still impresses and terrifies, leaving us exhausted and close to stories that are so human even if supernatural.
His uncompromising nature and limited willingness to conform to certain dictates of the industry prevented him from realizing some projects that would have certainly allowed him to continue shaping a certain way of envisioning cinematic art and not just narrating it. However, since he wasn’t one to give up easily, he more than made up for it with his work in opera, directing productions such as Aida, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and Tannhäuser.
All that’s left for us to do, in his memory, is to consider his approach to another notable film, such as The Caine Mutiny, if only as a redemption for having had to work on lesser works in recent times. In truth, there is very little redemption at the end of each of his films; few reasons to look beyond a certain darkness in the soul. But whether it’s about combating crime by creating the longest chase in cinema history, braving the elements to transport explosives, or screaming at the demon so violently as to border on blasphemy, his characters, breathless, relentless, desperate, seek this redemption. They yearn for a tomorrow or something that can change their lives, embodying their creator, who is also an insomniac seeker of a light, a shadow, a face half-illuminated by a half-image.
