Biografie

29. April 1938 · Pocatello, Idaho, USA

25. März 2009 · Arlington, Vermont, USA (Krebs)

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival in 1990.

He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, France and earned dual degrees in English and French from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois in 1961.

He earned a doctorate in film studies at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

He taught film at Columbia University in New York City and film and literature at Bennington College in Vermont.

He is best known for writing ""Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate" [first published in 1985], his famous non-fiction book about the making of Heaven's Gate - Das Tor zum Himmel (1980). Bach was a senior executive at United Artists whilst the film was being made. The film's director, Michael Cimino dismissed the book as "fiction".

Heaven's Gate - Das Tor zum Himmel (1980) left few viewers merely cold. There was something else there that aroused antipathy in many, and the anger of the critics is still discernible in their condemnations of it (whether they are right or wrong). That something else, I think, is a pervasive nihilism that runs through the film from its advertising slogan - "What one loves in life are the things that fade" - to its climactic and violent reworking of history. That nostalgic-sounding slogan is finally reductive. It narrows the world instead of enlarging it.

[on Innenleben (1978)] One of the rare instances in modern American movie history in which an artist has been allowed to make a picture because of what it might mean to his creative development, success or failure.