Western Movies

The American wilderness has been loaded with an ambivalent religious symbolism since the first puritan settlers. In the Xixth century, the idea of an Alliance between God and men in the wilderness of the New World was translated into a nationalist discourse of territorial expansion. Until the 1960s, Western films supported this imperialistic Protestantism. But the Vietnam War both discredited America’s godly mission in the world and the ability of its heroes to hear God’s voice in the wilderness. This paper focuses on the reactions of American cinema to this crisis of faith. It first analyzes the transcendentalist temptation of road movies after Easy Rider, films trying to revive the lost connection to America’s original and sacred land, before moving to mapping the shift of the Western genre from a Protestant to an Indian sacred wilderness after Little Big Man. The post-Vietnam American wilderness is an indigenous God and modern Frontier characters need to share in Indian spirituality if they want to achieve both American and heroic status.

Tourism and popular culture have long been mainstays of the American West. Combining dude ranching and Hollywood dude ranch movies, this project explores how the tourism industry and its pop cultural representation, produced a sometimes contested sense of the American West between 1922 and 1950. The Dude Ranchers’ Association (DRA) and the Hollywood studio system were two primary regionalizing institutions both located in the West that produced discourses that bound the West, and articulated the symbols that represent the West. In doing so they become institutions whose practices normalized, policed, and questioned the West (Paasi 2002). Discourse analysis of dude ranch archival materials and sixty-one dude ranch movies produced between 1922 and 1950 reveals a battle over the production of regional identity between the
DRA (the industry’s largest representative organization) and Hollywood. Interweaving class, gender, violence and vigilantism that shaped a sense of region, the DRA’s efforts to maintain control of the region’s meaning was eroded by the increasing discursive power of Hollywood. However, ultimately both institutions worked to shape a sense of the West for their own needs as well as to meet the expectations of their patrons.

L'articolo vuole riflettere la portata iconografica e tematica della serie tv Yellowstone, scritta e diretta da Tayler Sheridan e interpretata da Kevin Costner. Partendo da una rapida e sintetica riflessione sul Grande Romanzo Americano, gli elementi narrativi e tematici che dovrebbero presupporlo si possono rintracciare nella serie tv Yellowstone che, oltre ad un'ottima fattura tecnica, sa tessere esistenti ed eventi nella forma romanzesca più avvicinabile a quella tanto ricercate del Grande Romanzo Americano.

L'articolo analizza le forme attraverso cui l'autore spagnolo, Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, padre putativo del registro tremendista nella Spagna post-franchista, si avventura nella narrazione di un genere, il western, originario di un'altra cultura, l'americana, utilizzando le esagerazioni stilistiche e di contenuto tipiche del tremendismo, come la sessualità aberrante, l'animalizzazione, la violenza e la crudeltà.

(Non sono l'autore di questo lavoro, ma l'ho caricato col permesso dell'autrice)

A settantasei anni dalla sua prima distribuzione, "Ombre Rosse" di John Ford continua a rappresentare un inesauribile caso di studio. Esso è comunemente considerato il film iniziatore dell'epoca d'oro del western, dal momento che, per il suo metro stilistico, il film di Ford diverrà il paradigma del western classico.

La sceneggiatura, firmata non da John Ford, bensì dal suo collega di lunga data Dudley Nichols, non è un'opera originale. Essa infatti è tratta da un racconto di Ernest Haycox, La Diligenza per Lordsburg, pubblicato sul Collier's Magazine nel 1937. Questo brevissimo testo è a sua volta ispirato ad una manciata di altre opere, tra le quali spicca Palla di Sego, racconto di Guy de Maupassant pubblicato nel 1880 su un'antologia curata da Émile Zola, Les Soirées del Médan, una raccolta sul tema delle nefandezze della guerra franco-prussiana, persa dalla Francia appena dieci anni prima.

The article reconstructs poetics and politics of Polish westerns, focussing on the two most renowned examples of the genre: The Law and the Fist (1964) or The Wolves' Echoes (1968). They are set in the western or eastern borderlands of postwar Poland (1945–1948) and depict the struggles of righteous militiamen against plunderers and looters. The analysis is based on classical theories formulated by A. Bazin, J. Kitses and W. Wright and aims to highlight hidden contradictions between the rules of film genre, the requirements of veracity, and propagandist manipulation. These movies reinforce the official politics of memory of the Polish People's Republic. The Law and the Fist contribute to the discourse on the 'Recovered Territories' and renew the Piast concept of returning these territories to the traditional Polish homeland. In turn, The Wolves' Echoes shapes the collective memory of the Bieszczady Mountains and justifies ethnic homogeneity of this borderland.

El libro celebra el 80 aniversario del mítico film La diligencia. Cinco estudiosos cinematográficos (Marco Da Costa, Vicente Díaz, Miguel A. Fidalgo, Adrián Sánchez y Gerardo Sánchez) abordan los diferentes aspectos del film.

En el 80 aniversario del film La diligencia, varios autores de prestigio analizan los diferentes aspectos de la película. El rodaje, los logros técnicos, los personajes, la música, la estética, las influencias, los simbolismos… Todo ello acompañado por un gran despliegue gráfico con fotografías de la película, de su director, del rodaje…

All of the films discussed in this special issue of Reconstruction transgress our ideas of frontier in some sense. Of the larger themes dealt with are the Western, Science fiction, Sports film, Racism, female beauty, and Social insanity, among others.

When frontier outlaw Al Jennings made a film in 1914 glamorizing his life story, US marshal Bill Tilghman decided to make his own film condemning frontier banditry and restaging his most famous arrests. The film was called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw (1915). When outlaws held up a bank near the site where Tilghman was filming in late March 1915, he halted production to pursue them and then returned to filming. “Seldom have the frontier West and the film Western been more inseparable,” Scott Simmon writes in the program notes to this exceptional collection. While Jennings’s film is unfortunately considered lost, fifteen minutes of The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw have survived, as has another film starring Jennings,The Lady of the Dugout (1918). Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938 presents these two films alongside a wide-ranging smorgasbord of fictional, promotional, educational, and amateur films, travelogues, and newsreels about the American West. The collection vividly illu...

This essay explores some of the ways that analyzing opening titles can help us to understand the processes by which filmmakers forge an implicit contract with their audiences. In order to do so, it makes use of a detailed case study of title sequences in the ...

Ford foi um dos responsáveis por consolidar a narrativa do gênero western em Hollywood, interpretando mitos nacionais dos Estados Unidos com o olhar do século XX. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os personagens do último western desse diretor, Crepúsculo de uma raça, lançado em 1964, apontando como esse filme de Ford desconstrói o mito do cowboy ridicularizando-o ou transformando-o num sujeito consciente de seu discurso racista e assassino. Para isso, esse artigo discute a construção do mito da fronteira pela obra do historiador estadunidense Frederick Jackson Turner e mostra como o cowboy é um mito heroico forjado no final do século XIX por intelectuais como o ex-presidente Theodore Roosevelt: um mito reinventado no cinema a partir dos anos 1960 num momento de redefinição da identidade nacional dos Estados Unidos. Palavras-chave: John Ford, western, cowboy.

When frontier outlaw Al Jennings made a film in 1914 glamorizing his life story, US marshal Bill Tilghman decided to make his own film condemning frontier banditry and restaging his most famous arrests. The film was called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw (1915). When outlaws held up a bank near the site where Tilghman was filming in late March 1915, he halted production to pursue them and then returned to filming. “Seldom have the frontier West and the film Western been more inseparable,” Scott [End Page 181] Simmon writes in the program notes to this exceptional collection. While Jennings’s film is unfortunately considered lost, fifteen minutes of The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw have survived, as has another film starring Jennings, The Lady of the Dugout (1918). Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938 presents these two films alongside a wide-ranging smorgasbord of fictional, promotional, educational, and amateur films, travelogues, and newsreels about the American West. The collection vividly illustrates the intermingling of reality and representation that characterizes this particular, highly contested space.

Liberty Valance is a confession: the confession of Ransom Stoddard (James Steward), an attorney at law who eventually became a US Senator, and whose very successful political career incidentally began after he became famous for having killed in a duel a violent criminal known as Liberty Valance. The setting of movie is a city, Shinbone, a city which, for the most part of the movie, finds itself in the middle of a transitional period. Superficially at least, the transformation taking place in Shinbone substitutes order and justice to chaos and lawlessness. This transformation is what we generally mean when we think of civilization as a dynamic process. Interestingly, this first interpretation of what constitutes the movie's historical background can be found in the movie itself, where the case in favor of civilization is most eloquently put forward and argued by Senator Stoddard himself. According to this first narrative, the greatest and only obstacle to progress and civilization is violence and crime. Naturally, this greatest obstacle to civilization is at the same time its first justification. As I just said, this very flattering and rather optimistic account of what civilization means finds a clear echo in the movie. Without a doubt, John Ford (the director of the movie) wants us to be struck by the contrast between the future Senator Ransom Stoddard and the gangster Liberty Valance. In fact, Stoddard and Valance are the exact opposite of each other. Whereas Stoddard is well-mannered, well-educated, meek as a lamb and even a little bit effeminate (he wears a waitress apron and he appreciates the beauty of roses), Valance is a violent and brutish man, a thug who despises law, a hired gun of the cattle barons who needed the land surrounding Shinbone to remain an open range. Now, cast in the unambiguous light of the confrontation between Ransom Stoddard and Liberty Valance, the fight for civilization, a fight led with the firmest conviction by the crusader Stoddard, is unequivocally a just fight. Insofar as it puts an end to the tyrannical rule of big money and thugs like the cattle barons and Liberty Valance, civilization is obviously, for the vast majority of the people, a very desirable thing. Thanks to civilization, the people's rights are no longer encroached upon with impunity. The people are finally given the possibility to vote in favor of a government whose main purpose will be to secure their natural rights to freedom and property. This, however, is not the end of the story. As far as the movie is concerned, it is not even the true story. It is a legend purposely told by the advocates of civilization about the origins of civilization, a civilized legend about the origins of civilization whose main function is to hide the truth about these origins. I won't be going in any more detail for fear of spoiling the movie. I will limit myself for now at suggesting this: the intention of John Ford is to show that the advance of civilization is a more complex and ambiguous process than civilization itself, despite its commitment to truth and reason, is willing to admit. More than anything else, this earns Liberty Valance its status of " classic ". Liberty Valance Fabrice P. Beland

Acclaimed British director Michael Winterbottom is renowned for the abundance and diversity of his output. His films span a wide range of genres in art house and mainstream cinema alike, from the heritage film to neo-noir. Working with different genres gives Winterbottom a framework in which to explore favored themes, while incorporating new ideas and taking on new challenges. At the same time, his manner of undermining familiar generic qualities and frustrating audience expectations also refreshes the genres he explores. In 'The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom,' Deborah Allison investigates Winterbottom’s contributions to contemporary cinema, using ideas of genre as a critical tool. Focusing on eight films, Allison examines the ways he adopts, inflects, and challenges the main attributes of the films’ associated genres, enriching a highly personal and idiosyncratic style of filmmaking. The potency and integrity of his authorship unites films as generically diverse as the road movie 'Butterfly Kiss,' western drama 'The Claim,' sci-fi romance 'Code 46,' and docudrama 'The Road to Guantanamo.'

“Deborah Allison has grasped [Winterbottom’s] distinctive modus operandi, which no other filmmaker would dare imitate, or could afford to. Her tour of Winterbottom’s glorious ups and occasional downs, a mid-career assessment, confirms Winterbottom’s place as the most versatile and prolific director of his generation. The reader can decide whether Winterbottom’s determination to take on so many varied challenges is courageous or crazy, or both.” (David D'Arcy, Screen International)