Western — Volume 1: The frontier hero on trial
The frontier hero put on trial, without giving up the pleasure of the genre.
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The volume
Five films put on trial the man the genre had built to reassure. None of them removes him: each keeps him on screen with the horse, the gun and the desert intact, and turns on him the question that used to be the outlaw's. One enlarges him until you can see the bottom of him. Another plants him in front of the closed doors of his own townspeople and grows the story by subtraction, refusal after refusal. One finds out he is a racist and goes on following him anyway, using the classical grammar to interrogate him instead of celebrating him. One reduces him to a code that no longer buys anything. The last takes the center away from him and hands it to a fourteen-year-old girl. The pleasure of the genre stays intact while the judgment changes target: that is why the five hold together.
The five films, and why they are here
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A secret broken in two and split between two men: three desires aimed at the same object hold up almost three hours.
True Grit
The same facts as a revenge ride, with a change in who is watching them: a narrating voice hands them to us already as memory.
High Noon
A story that grows by subtraction: the accumulation of refusals weighs more than any reversal, inside real time.
The Searchers
The grammar the genre used to celebrate the lone rider, employed here to question him.
The Wild Bunch
Slow motion that does not make the ending beautiful but forces you to stay with what fast cutting clears away.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.