American cinema has been organized by genres really since its very beginnings.
It was a way of establishing a bond with the audience, a certain set of expectations, certain
set of familiar characters.
Today we're going to look at what makes a genre film, and more specifically take a look
at the Western.
And the questions we'll be asking are: What exactly is a Western?
Who were the key directors and stars of this genre?
We'll be looking at filmmakers like John Ford
Sergio Leone
and Clint Eastwood.
And ultimately we're going to explore a question that's nagged me since the 1980s
when I first began to write—
is the Western dead?
Probably the first thing that people expect from a Western is the Western landscape.
And it is a bit of blank page
the blank empty desert
waiting to be written on, an empty stage in a lot of ways.
And onto that stage, we can project many different kinds of stories.
Genres create a way of communicating in a kind of shorthand through clusters of meaning
that had gathered around these various stock characters and plot devices and themes and
images.
A way of expressing pretty substantial sets of values and associations with minimal means.
At their most profound, Westerns, deal with the intersection of the individual and society.
You have a sense of what is gained and what is lost by belonging to a community as opposed
to living in the wilderness where, as an individual, you're completely free.
It's the arrival of civilization in the form of those ranchers and farms and small towns
that means that the hero is going to have to sacrifice some of that freedom.
"Alive or dead. It's your choice."
The classical Western is fundamentally concerned with the coming of law that defines a new society.
The central irony of the classical Western is that the law has to be established through
exactly the kind of personal force, strength, violence that the law is meant to suppress.
So the hero is the perennial outsider who has to use the methods of the outlaw to fight
the outlaw.
"Tell me, isn't the sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal, and above all honest?"
"Yeah, that he is."
And he's too much of an outlaw, ultimately, because he has killed, because he has seen
this other side of life, to ever be fully accepted by the townspeople he's been defending.
So the hero sacrifices himself for the sake of the law.
"I think you people need a new sheriff."
And he, in a way, wills his own extinction in the name of civilization.
"Stagecoach" is a very good guide, among other things, to the genre in its raw state.
The outlaw, played by John Wayne, uses his skills and violence to protect the people around him.
He becomes the savior of this little symbolic society inside the stagecoach.
Because he is outside of the social norms, because he is able to use violence,
because he is a man who has killed and will kill again, he's rejected by the uptight bourgeois characters,
and at the end, he can go off and found a new world with another moral outcast
which is the saloon girl/prostitute played by Claire Trevor.
Two rejects who go off and found what seems to be an entirely new dynasty in some magical
place across the border, which is, of course, the great immigrant story to America.
"Stagecoach" won a lot of Critics Awards, extremely popular film, pulled the Western
back up out of those Saturday morning matinees and made it a more respectable genre.
By the time John Ford makes "My Darling Clementine" in 1946, the Western has achieved a kind of
privileged status in American film.
It's seen as the most American of genres.
It's seen as the genre that most closely reflects people's experience of the recent war.
It's about universal sacrifice in pursuit of a common goal.
And you see the emergence, particularly in those films, of this alienated hero who's
experienced violence, who's been traumatized by the exposure to violence but amazed to
discover the reserves of anger that he contains within himself.
And as a result, is having trouble reintegrating himself into society, which is exactly the
position that hundreds of thousands of people have found themselves in returning from World War II.
In an immediate sense, it was very hard for a lot of those returning war vets, who'd seen
things that they could not possibly describe, to just walk back into a normal life and pick
up where they left off.
Genre gives you a way of stepping back from that immediate emotional trauma and stylizing
it and putting it in the past and giving it a, you know, structure in which it can be
contained and kind of analyzed and understood, and then, ultimately, overcome.
Well, then you have Sergio Leone coming along in the early '60s and realizing that things
have changed.
That this kind of self-sacrificing, altruistic hero is not quite as plausible, quite as relevant.
Society is not worth saving.
Society is hopelessly corrupt.
There's not much he can do about it.
It's bigger than he is.
All you can do is try to take care of your own interests.
Very different perspective.
I would say more cynical but more in tune with what was happening in the '60s in terms
of social alienation, all the nonconformist impulses, people needing to reject the dominant culture.
You have hippies on the one hand and you have "the Man with No Name" on the other
and both trying to find a place for themselves, you know, in escaping from society rather
than protecting it.
"Once Upon a Time in the West," was going to be the ultimate Western.
It's the great opera Western.
It's grand.
It's full of big gestures.
It's full of, kind of, hypertrophied sequences that seem to go on forever and ignore any
kind of narrative drive the way it opens with 20 minutes people waiting for a train to show up.
Brilliant manipulation of time and space.
It came at a time when suspicion about the genre, mainly associated with Vietnam,
American cowboyism, adventurism, was politically bringing down the genre.
What's fascinating to me about that film is that it has both the cynicism of the Spaghetti Westerns
and the lyricism of the classical Westerns able to exist side by side most beautifully
in that final shot where you just have marvelous panorama of the city under construction.
And walking through it, deep in the background, is the horse carrying the dead body of the
protagonist almost imperceptible.
Beautiful, beautiful image and just full of such, you know, rich ambiguity.
You can measure the distance between the classical Western and the Italian Western
"Spaghetti Western" of the '60s, just by looking at the way John Ford treats Henry Fonda
and the way Sergio Leone treats Henry Fonda.
Same actor, same technique, and yet, radically different characters.
Leone cast Henry Fonda in that part as a direct connection to John Ford's films.
And, of course, he cast him as the villain.
So it's an inversion of what he was playing in the Ford movies.
There's a great story that Fonda tells in his autobiography.
He shows up on the set and he's got himself some brown contact lenses.
He says "We'll mute down these famous blue eyes," which he thought were just too heroic
for this part.
And Leone says, "No, no.
I hired you because of your blue eyes."
You know, take out those contact lenses.
He wanted that, you know, full force of Fonda-ness.
And he also finds something in Fonda that is a bit cold, you know, a bit angry and remote.
This has been part of his personality from the beginning and that kind of folksy
"ah shucks" stuff, it's over a certain arrogance.
And I think Leone really finds that.
It seemed like the kind of film that would just infuse energy
into this dying form and yet it was almost too much.
There was no way to follow that.
In a way, it was the end of the conversation.
The world was just too big and too evil for us ever to do anything about, which I think
became more and more the sense of the American public as the '70s wore on and is certainly
the case today.
When the American cinema was turning toward fantasy and science fiction in the 1970s,
filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg drew on that classical Western imagery, plot
patterns, characters, when they created films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and particularly
"Star Wars," which is constantly quoting from "The Searchers." Entire shots are modeled from
moments in "The Searchers."
And yet, those Western themes are not easily just transplantable.
There was a film called "Outland" in the, early '80s that was a remake of "High Noon"
set at a space station and it was just nonsense.
It really felt arbitrary, didn't work.
As much as filmmakers have tried to refashion science fiction or the superhero movie into
the heroic mythos of the Western, it has never really taken.
I don't think it's possible to make a classic Western today.
We're just not organically related to the genre in the way American culture was.
At some point in the '70s, movies stopped being about life and started being about other movies.
And Western certainly figured in there.
And you would see more, kind of, artistic, decorative dilettantish kind of Westerns
like "Heaven's Gate" with lots of baroque stylistic flourishes, some new wave affectations
and less well-defined characters.
You had Clint Eastwood, who had come out of the Italian Westerns, making contemporary
Westerns like "Bronco Billy" that attempted to bridge the gap between the values of the
classic Western and contemporary society and often to, you know, comic end because the
old-fashioned hero was seen as being, you know, out of place, out of time.
And then just a lot of just flat out parody Westerns because like any genre is open to
parody because that language is so familiar. Of which Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" is the great example.
And those films were contemporary with the final embers of the classical genre.
"What's your name?"
"Well, my name is Jim.
But most people call me…"
"Jim."
There's never been a star after Eastwood who has embodied the genre that way.
I suppose, Jeff Bridges, who is constantly being cast in, well, literally old John Wayne
parts as in the case of the Coen brothers remake of "True Grit" or the more recent "Hell or High Water."
Certainly Tarantino's films embody that. Some of the later Clint Eastwood films like "Unforgiven."
He's not working from inside the genre so much as using the genre to make a point about
changing notions of heroism.
It's almost like he's borrowing something that he was once part of and he isn't really anymore.
It's self-conscious.
I could see him kind of reaching for an Oscar in that one.
He wanted approval for criticizing the genre.
A fascinating hybrid Western, a film I really like called "Bone Tomahawk," which combines
a very respectfully treated classical Western framework with a horror movie with a really
startling effect.
We've had "Westworld."
We've had "Deadwood."
I think in both of those cases, they depart so much from the classical Western.
"Westworld" was, of course, science fiction.
"Deadwood" was what people used to call it a revisionist Western.
This was an invented world that had very little historical basis.
And when you say you're going to provide the historical corrector to that, you know, to
me, it's just, you know, that's something else.
For better or for worse, the audience has just departed from that little cluster of
moral and social values.
This is now a beautiful self-contained thing that we can approach with some historical distance.
We can identify what's rich and wonderful about it.
We can identify what's reactionary and unfortunate about it as well.
But it's just not something that's going to grow and change substantially from now on.
It's like, you know, looking at frescoes or something.
It's a beautiful thing that is now pretty much over.
I grew up in the '50s and early '60s when Westerns were everywhere.
It becomes a very personal thing.
And, of course, I'm attached to the things that I loved when I was a child.
You're always gonna have special feelings for the things that first made you fall in
love with movies.
Those were the Westerns for me.
So those are some of my thoughts on genre filmmaking and specifically on the western.
And I'd love to know what your thoughts are.
Do you think the Western is dead?
Do you think there's any chance of bringing it back?
Did it mean anything particular to you?
Does it mean anything today?
Please, leave your thoughts in the comment section below and please subscribe for more
videos from The Museum of Modern Art.
My name is Dave Kehr.
I'm a curator in the Department of Film
and thank you for watching.
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