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Almería en Corto 07

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Press release

Awards ‘Almería, land of cinema’: FAYE DUNAWAY

26th, April 2007

Faye Dunaway Faye Dunaway

Faye Dunaway's twenty-year old, angular, attractive face and feverish look well-deservedly presided over the greatest revolution experienced by Hollywood in its already eventful and complicated history. The premiere of Arthur Penn’s legendary film Bonnie & Clyde in 1967 marked the end of a way of making and watching films in the United States, and it opened the doors to a new generation of actors and directors that transformed the American film industry by pulling it out of its sad state of aesthetic, thematic, and moral stagnation. This general victory for film history was also a personal victory for Faye Dunaway as it immediately turned her into a symbol of the confusion and romantic disenchantment of young people, who had found themselves faced with the failure of a system that wouldn’t accept the changing times or support new ways of thinking.
Faye Dunaway established what we now know as the new glamour of the seventies: the end of the lavish nonsense of the classic star system, and especially of the dictatorship of decorativism in the final evaluation of actresses. Paradoxically, to the extent that the active sensuality of characters is generalized and eroticism was becoming more frontal and straightforward in movies, Dunaway and other actresses of her generation managed to do away the necessity for female performers to be thought of as sex-symbols when it came to getting the best roles available to them in the industry. She was enormously selective with the directors to whom she offered her immense acting talent. She had the instinct necessary to cross the Atlantic when filmmakers such as Vittorio de Sica, René Clement, Lina Wertmüller, Manuel Lombardero or Luc Besson requested it; or to work on American projects by filmmakers on the scale of Roman Polanski, Franco Zeffirelli, Emir Kusturica and Volker Schlöndorff. And in her home country, her name is included in the film work of several generations of masters, as disparate and even antithetical as Otto Preminger and Roger Avary, and including Elia Kazan, Barbet Schroeder, Sydney Pollack, Stanley Kramer, Richard Lester and James Gray.
Among the many virtues of Faye Dunaway as an actress, two of them are impossible to omit: first the timeless elegance of her acting styles and, to go further, even her corporal genetics. It is not strange to see the abundance of roles entrusted to her in period films, roles from all eras, from the Far West to 15th century Europe. There is something in her unwaveringly noble beauty that speaks equally of royal blood as it does distinction, and charm. The second, much more interesting because of its personal and thoughtful nature, is her prodigious capacity for showing the dark sides of personality, without ever falling into the arbitrariness of over-simplification. The traumatic neurosis of her Evelyn Mullray in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), the aseptic roughness of her Diana Christensen in Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976), a film for which she received an Oscar, and the egomaniacal and sadistic insecurity of her Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981), all show this without reservation. The director of this latter film was Frank Perry, who brought her to Almería in order to revive –and in the process demystify—a fundamental historic episode in the collective American imagination. Doc (1971) is today one of the most accurate visions of the violent forging of an untamed country, and her character Katie Elder, an enterprising prostitute, the perfect example of what a great actress is capable of doing when she has a role that is in no way indulgent and supplied with a disturbing ferociousness.

Guillermo Espinosa
Journalist and film critic