Deaths in Cinema in 2016

The year 2016 took its last breath and left us with the memory of many well-known artists, marking one of the worst years for music lovers. Cinema was not far behind: two giants of European cinema, Jacques Rivette and Andrzej Wajda, left us, and in these last days, a mother and daughter, both actresses, passed away just a day apart in a tragic story. Andrzej Wajda was recognized as the most acclaimed Polish filmmaker in the world for several decades; he passed away at the age of 90 in October, just days before the start of the Rome Film Festival, where he was supposed to be a special guest in discussions with the audience. Wajda always operated on the edge of politics, perhaps due to the environment and situation of the country he lived in. A strong layer of political issues and ideology can be sought in many of his works, and his most acclaimed work, "Ashes and Diamonds" (1958), although very poetic, is overtly and covertly linked to politics. Perhaps this is why in his last film, "Afterimage" (2016), he expresses his resentment and anger towards the ideology that seeks to force artists into labor: the bitter story of a painter who, after World War II, says no to the ideology and power of communism that becomes dominant in Poland and bravely loses everything. A little further away, in France, a filmmaker almost of the same age, Jacques Rivette, passed away in January: he was more personal with a dreamlike and different world that had little scent of reality, society, and politics; his films celebrated imagination. He began his career in the 1950s by writing critiques for the magazine "Cahiers du Cinéma" and later became one of the most recognized filmmakers of the French New Wave, loving cinema and referencing it in various forms in his films. His greatest masterpiece, "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974) - which many films, including David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," owe a great deal to - is a film that celebrates pure imagination, clearly leaning towards cinema, where the two main characters become immersed. The most important American filmmaker who passed away in 2016 was none other than Michael Cimino, an eccentric filmmaker; a person who perhaps mistakenly was born in America and belonged to European cinema. The peak of Cimino's filmmaking dates back to the 1970s when his film "The Deer Hunter" starring Robert De Niro became historic, giving him the opportunity to make his next film "Heaven's Gate" (a visually stunning but highly personal and box-office failure) with unprecedented generosity in Hollywood, which bankrupted one of Hollywood's largest film companies (United Artists). Cimino had 220 hours of footage for this four-hour film and had filmed each scene an average of fifty times, to the extent that he was nicknamed "Ayatollah," which may also be due to the timing of the filming coinciding with the American hostage crisis in Iran. The film, which cost forty-four million dollars, only made one million three hundred thousand dollars and was pulled from theaters in the second week. As a result, Cimino was only able to make four more unsuccessful films in the following forty-six years. Curtis Hanson was another well-known American filmmaker who passed away in September at the age of seventy-one. Hanson created a bitter and shocking world in "L.A. Confidential" (1997) but never managed to replicate the success of that film afterward. Abbas Kiarostami, the most acclaimed Iranian filmmaker outside the borders, passed away in July at the age of seventy-six. His death was reported as a "medical error" and caused a lot of uproar in Iran. His film "Taste of Cherry" jointly won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with a film by Shohei Imamura, which is considered the only Palme d'Or in Iranian cinema. Ettore Scola, one of the most recognized filmmakers in Italy, passed away in January at the age of eighty-four. Scola made about forty films over four decades, the most memorable of which was "A Special Day" (1977) starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren; a brilliant comedy that delves into the heart of Italian society under the shadow of politics (the day Hitler met Mussolini in Rome). Hector Babenco, a Brazilian filmmaker (born in Argentina) who was highly praised in the 1980s with the film "Kiss of the Spider Woman," passed away in July at the age of seventy. Garry Marshall, whose most famous work was "Pretty Woman" (1990) starring Julia Roberts, passed away in July at the age of eighty-one, and Arthur Hiller, the creator of "Love Story" (1970), also passed away in August at the age of ninety-one. Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the most acclaimed cinematographers in cinema history, passed away on the first day of 2016 at the age of eighty-five. Born in Hungary, he worked during his fruitful career with some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, from Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg to Brian De Palma and Michael Cimino. Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gene Wilder, Bud Spencer, and Alan Rickman were among the film actors who passed away in 2016. In the last days of the year, Carrie Fisher, who is remembered for her role as Princess Leia in "Star Wars," passed away at sixty, and her mother Debbie Reynolds, who became immortal for her role in one of the most famous musicals in cinema history, "Singin' in the Rain," passed away just a day after her.