Western — Volume 2: Five ways of taking leave of the West
Five leave-takings from an era already over, not five degrees of maturity.
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The volume
When these films begin, the rails already have an owner, the law is in the hands of whoever finds it useful, and the exploits of the gunfighters are already in print and sold to people who were not there. The end of the West is the starting point, not the discovery, and what separates the five is the way they take their leave. One holds a solemn funeral and stretches every figure of the genre until it becomes a monument. One walks the dead man to the grave still joking, and stops one frame before the outcome. The trial is opened by the man who had signed that myth for thirty years. The remorse comes from the side the genre kept off screen, and is obtained by moving only the place you watch from. The last loads the grammar of the West onto a wagon and takes it where it had never gone, to see whether it starts again.
The five films, and why they are here
Once Upon a Time in the West
A story states its thesis by choosing its heir: here the land with the water goes to the one who does not shoot.
Django Unchained
The best-loved forms of the genre made to carry an indictment, in a place the canon had never visited.
Unforgiven
The myth taken apart from inside by someone who had embodied it for decades, with a law that treats a disfigurement as damage to property.
Dances with Wolves
Not one image of the genre is touched, and the Lakota speak their own language for three hours: the regret is produced by the framing, not by a speech.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
A leave-taking that laughs: the glorious shootout never arrives, and the image stops an instant before the outcome.
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.