Films The American Dreamer thru Sunday, at Hayden Hall, B.U.

DENNIS HOPPER has lost the naivete which made Easy Rider's self-serving romance palatable. But one can't deny that the young director is a sordidly fascinating cultural figure. Two of his friends, director Larry Schiller and writer L. M. Kit Carson, have made a film based on that assumption.

The American Dreamer , a "first person documentary," is frequently incoherent. Events slide past the screen with little connecting tissue. Though all the narration is spoken by Hopper himself, and though he makes clear that he approved of what is shown, the film's point-of-view is established only by the random placement of the camera. Its subjects unashamedly play to it, and it unashamedly records them. But it is placed pretty stupidly (by former photo-journalist Schiller); only when it fades into the background to record some extravagant event does the film achieve an authentic portrait of Hopper.

What is most ironic is that the successful scenes were set up by director Schiller and writer L. M. Kit Carson to evoke a characteristic response. It appears that the filmmakers had deemed Hopper a human phenomenon worth studying; had then requested his participation in a film which would show the reality behind his publicity image; and had finally realized that even the most idiosyncratic creator is too busy concretizing his thoughts in his work to dramatize them personally. So, at various points throughout the film, Carson and Schiller work to catalyze into film actuality a character who, as the press release puts it, "lives in the reality of his dreams."

For example: Hopper boasts that he can make "oh, six . . . eight . . . eighteen" girls in one night. The following scene shows the girls-burlesque queens, whores, coed groupies-entering Hopper's Taos. New Mexico ranch. kindly imported by Schiller and Carson. The reaction of one of Hopper's steady women is shock and jealousy-why are they here? why is the camera on them and not me? When Hopper joins the group, he is nonplussed. (Perhaps his dream has been greater than his reality.) He plays games with the girls. out of fear, amusement and affection; his narration tells us that he thought it could be a good experience only if they trusted him. With some girls swiftly getting down to their G-strings, Hopper urges the group instead to become a small community and get to know each other. treating him as a member-"treat me like a lesbian chick." The would be orgy gradually turns into an encounter session, with everyone embracing in a circle and telling each other how fucked-over they are.

The scene is the most crucial in the film. It presents Hopper in all his sincerity and egoism: he really wishes to know these people, and hopes that they will work together, but is himself prevented from personal exchange by his leadership position and neurotic artistry. "Listen, why don't you listen to me," he urges them at one point, but he sounds sadly self-entranced.

THROUGHOUT the rest of the film. the filmmakers attempt to communicate through fragments their own divided view of Hopper. The most obvious facet they have seized on is Hopper as acid-consciousness-extender and anti-Establishment paragon. Thus, we are given Hopper with two young maidens in a bathtub daring the camera to record the first graphic fellatio in the American cinema; also (somewhat anti-climatically), Hopper walking naked through the streets of. Los Alamos. But more interesting is Hopper's relationship to his work. We see him watching a sequence of his new film. The Last Movie: within the sequence, cameras film peasants who are mock-filming Hopper (portraying a stunt-man) with wooden mock-ups of camera and boom mike, while Hopper remarks to Carson on the soundtrack that he doesn't mind if The Last Movie bombs and kills him for Hollywood. "That wouldn't bother me . . . then I'd be just like Orson Welles." Hopper seems a victim of his own method of production: a man whose love for the camera allows him to project personal fantasy-but whose camera vision and obsessions threaten to cut him off entirely from reality.

Because of the uneven material, how one responds to The American Dreamer will be inspired by how one responds to Hopper. He bullshits continually about his mysticism and individuality and innate contrariness. But when dealing with other people, whether a terribly sympathetic press agent, a flushed would-be starlet. or a struggling-to-impress Playboy bunny, he can be unassumingly ingratiating-particularly when his irony is right, and subtly so. "I'm sorry, but I'm just in town for the day . . . since I'm an actress I thought I should meet you." says the starlet. "Well," replies Hopper. fanning the breeze with his arms. his face drawn from tiredness, his body wryly twisted: "I'm just the easiest person to meet. . . "

There are times when the film openly antagonizes Hopper and the audience. In one scene, Hopper is very anxious for the camera to catch a collection of his still photographs; the film makers, however, are too busy cadging him into making a statement on its worth. And instead of a detailed tour of his home and work quarters, all we get is a pretentious 360 pan.

But the film is worth seeing, both for its isolated insights into the life of an aging easy rider, whose crazing shock-treatment morality has outlived its initial impetus, and for the scenes which point to the possibility of a Pirandellian cinema. From his work here (Schiller credits him with organizing the individual scenes) and in David Holzman's Diary (in which he starred and improvised), Kit Carson seems to be heading towards a purified art, reordering basic human inter-actions with society and environment. The attitudes the film's subject expresses and the values it places on surrounding materials would determine the form the film takes. It is what Bergman has accomplished in the fiction film (particularly in The Passion of Anna ). That The American Dreamer even suggests that comparison indicates the film's worth.