West
Initially, there was no such thing as “the Western.” The word was just
an adjective that added some local color to a variety of genres ranging
from “Western comedies” to “Western melodramas,” “chase films,”
“romances,” and “epics.” But the adjective was a geographical one, and
it quickly overshadowed the nouns it was supposed to serve, because
geography was essential to the new form. Think of the titles: rivers (Red River, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande . . .); states and other large regions (The Virginian, Texas Rangers, Nevada Smith, California, Cimarron . . .); outposts (Fort Apache, The Alamo, Comanche Station . . .); a few cities (Vera Cruz, 3:10 to Yuma, San Antonio, The Man from Laramie . . .); plus an entire lexicon of space and movement (The Big Trail, Destry Rides Again, Stagecoach, The Bend in the River, Two Rode Together, Canyon Passage . . .).
Every story needs a space in which to unfold, of course, but the
Western does more; it is in love with space; it foregrounds it,
full-screen, whenever it can. The start of the cattle drive in Red River
(1948): in two minutes, we get a static background (drovers and herd,
at dawn, motionless against the landscape), a panoramic so powerful—this
is our cattle, this is our land—not even a legendary continuity blunder
can spoil it, a confident sense of direction (“Take them to Missouri,
Matt”), and an explosion of joy. Beginnings are particularly good at
evoking the immensity of this space: in The Man of the West (1958), a horseman appears on the horizon, looks at the empty expanse around him, and rides calmly off; in The Virginian (1929) and My Darling Clementine, a herd of cows disperses slowly in every direction; in Red River, The Man from Laramie (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959), it’s wagons that advance cautiously this way and that.
Cautiously, slowly, calmly: the initial tempo of the Western: Lento assai. The first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968): three men at a station, a fly buzzing, a wheel screeching, a
drop of water hitting the rim of a hat. In no other form does
waiting—for the train, the attack, the night, the stage, the cavalry . .
. —play such a large role: a dilated sense of time, mirroring the
enlargement of space. The Big Trail, The Big Sky, The Big Country. Big,
and empty: in film after film, the first to “set eyes” on the land is a
white man, who sees nothing but an uninhabited country. Native
Americans—“Indians,” as the Western calls them—were of course already
living in the West (and everywhere else in America, for that matter);
but by routinely introducing them only after we have already become
familiar with white characters, the Western makes them look like
illegitimate intruders. In reality, they were there first; in fiction,
they arrive always too late. Seldom has narrative lied so spectacularly
about the history it claimed to narrate.
Wagon train
“Cinema is the specifically epic art,” wrote André Bazin in a famous
essay on American film, and “the migration to the West is our Odyssey.” Epic, yes; Odyssey,
no. That there is no return is the founding act of the genre. Home is a
vague hope, distant in space and in time; for now, all there is is a
wagon; two or three generations, together, surrounded by hundreds of
other families; all different, and all leading exactly the same life.
Life in the open, on unsteadily undulating stoops, under everybody’s
eyes; because what matters, in these films, is not the private sphere of
the individual family—we never see the inside of a wagon, and the
intimacy of a sentimental conversation, or of a good wash, are often met
with rough collective humor—but the amalgamation of everybody into a
community. Into a nation. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/western-vs-noir-how-two-genres-shaped-postwar-american-culture/
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