American cinema has been organized by
genres really since it's very beginning
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 take a
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 are 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 gonna 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 a
blank page the blank empty desert
waiting to be written on an empty stage
in a lot of ways and under 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 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 this
you're supposed to be courageous loyal
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 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
they 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's a man who has
killed and will kill again he's rejected
by the 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 - 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 you know
the great immigrant story - to America
you say coach one 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 finer on Clementine in 1946 the
Western has achieved a kind of
privileged status in American film it's
seen as the most 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 merchants particularly
in those films of his alienated hero
who's experienced violent
who's been traumatized by exposure to
violence but amazed to discover the the
reserves of anger that he contains
within himself and as a result has
having trouble reintegrating himself
into society which is exactly the
position that hundreds of thousands of
people found themselves in returning
from World War two 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 your honor
gives you a way of stepping back from
that the emotional trauma and stylizing
it and putting it in the past giving it
a you know structure 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 the 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 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 in both trying to find
a place for themselves you know escaping
from society rather than protecting it
Once Upon a Time in the West it was
going to be the 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 for forever and ignore any
kind of narrative drive the way it opens
with 20 minutes of people waiting for a
train to show up a brilliant
manipulation of time and space it came
at a time when suspicions about the
genre mainly associated with with
Vietnam American cowboy ISM adventure
was politically bringing down the genre
what's fascinating to me about that film
has said it has both the cynicism of the
Spaghetti Westerns and the lyricism of
the classical Western able to exist side
by side most beautifully in that final
shot where you just have marvelous of
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 the spaghetti western
over 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 and the only cast
Henry found 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 the Fonda tells and his
autobiography he shows up on the set and
he's got himself some brown contact
lenses so you know mute down these
famous blue eyes which he thought were
just too heroic for this part and the
only says no no I hired you because of
your beak of blue eyes er you know take
out those contact lenses he wanted that
you know full force of fondant us and he
also finds something and find out it's a
bit cold they know that they been angry
and remote you know he's been part of
his personality from the beginning and
again a folksy aw shucks stuff it's it's
it's over a certain arrogance and I
think Leone really finds that it seems
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 suna 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 in and
particularly Star Wars which is a
constantly quoting from The Searchers
and tires the shots are modeled from
moments in the searchers and yet those
Western themes are not easily just
transplantable there was a film called
out land in the early 80s that was a
remake of High Noon set at a space
station and it was just nonsense
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 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 dilettantes
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
often - no comic end because the old
fashioned hero was seen as being out of
place out of time and then just flat out
parody westerns because like any genre
is open to parody because that language
is so familiar how much you Mel Brooks's
Blazing Saddles is the great example in
those films were contemporary with the
final embers of the classical genre
well my name is Tim but most people call
me Jim andrew has 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 and I could see him kind
of reaching for an Oscar now and he
wanted approval for criticizing the
genre fascinating hybrid Western from I
really like called bone tomahawk which
combines very respectfully treated
classical Western framework with a
horror movie two really startling the
fact we've had Westworld
we've had Deadwood I think in both of
those cases they depart so much from of
the classical Western West world is of
course science fiction Deadwood was I
used to call a revisionist Western this
was an invented world that had very
little historical basis and when you say
you're gonna provide this sort of a
corrector to that you know to me it's
just you know that's something else for
better 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're looking at frescoes or something
it's a beautiful thing that is now
pretty much over you know 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 love
I was a child you're always gonna have
special feelings for the things that
first made you can fall in love with
movies those are 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 didn't mean anything
particular to you doesn't mean anything
today please leave your your thoughts in
the comments section below and please
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Museum of Modern Art my name is Dave
Kerr I'm a curator in the Department of
film and thank you for watching