Film Genres

Introduction to Film Studies

The Western

• Western film is a genre telling stories set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West.

• Western films existed already in the earliest days of cinema

• Edwin S. Porter, Great Train Robbery (1903) gtr

The Western

• The height of the Western’s popularity – from the late 1930s to the 1950s

• The life styles in the American West had long disappeared at the arrival of Modern age and its traditional values replaced by modern ones.

• In reproducing and recreating the actions and attitudes from the past on a wide screen, the Western genre created ‘mythical’ reality.

The Western

• The Western depicts a world of precarious balance in which the forces of civilization and savagery struggle for supremacy

• The West – anywhere beyond the Alleghenies Mountains and the Mississippi River

• The landmark – Arizona’s Monument Valley

John Wayne and the Monument Valley: the most frequently used setting for the Western

The Western

• The opening scene in Searchers (1956) – the view from ‘inside’ civilization towards ‘outside’ wilderness and savagery (of the Monument Valley

• West versus East; social order versus anarchy, town versus wilderness; cowboy versus Indian

Stagecoach

• John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) – a ‘road’ story about nine people travelling from Tonto to Lordburg in the face of possible Apache attack.

• It revived the tradition and popularity of the Western and reestablished the genre.

Stagecoach

• Visual motifs – wilderness dotted with ‘oases’ (frontier towns, cavalry posts, campsites) which were linked with the civilized East by the railroad, the stagecoach, the telegraph

Stagecoach

• Apart from the civilization and wilderness con- frontation, Stagecoach presents other narrative themes.

• Moral and social conflicts in the Western community in the frontier age – to distinguish it from earlier Westerns.

Stagecoach

• Ringo Kid – an accused murder and moral man of the earth who takes upon himself the task of righting the moral and social shortcomings.

• Doc Boon – an alcoholic doctor and loser with something of nobility and purpose

• People on the margin

Stagecoach

• Dallas – a prostitute and social outcast. Strong but sympathetic, noble, and virtuous character who makes the audience to reevaluate their own social prejudice.

Stagecoach and The Shootist

• ‘… the marvelous thing about Westerns is that they’re all the same movie. This gives a director unlimited freedom.’

• Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976) – about the legendary gunfighter, J.B. Books who is dying and spends his last days with dignity

Stagecoach and The Shootist

• Books enters a community, seeks out three of its most corrupt citizens, and eliminates the them.

• Books played by John Wayne who played Ringo in Stagecoach.

• Both films follow a plot – a redeemer enters a community and eliminates a threat to it.

Stagecoach and The Shootist

• Books is shot at back by a bartender after killing the three villains

• Film is set in 1901 and the town is more modernized than that in Stagecoach

• No optimism and demise of the Western

Young Initiate Hero

• A narrative device – filtering the genre’s conflicts through the perceptions of a young initiate-hero

• Red River (1948), Shane (1952), The Tin Star (1957), Rio Bravo (1958), The Magnificient Seven (1960), Ride the High Country (1962), El Drado (1967) Little Big Man (1970)

Shane

• George Stevens’ Shane – about a mysterious gunman who helps a mother-and-son family in the rancher and homesteader conflicts seen through the eyes of a young boy

• Thematic oppositions – home and wandering, domestication and isolation, social law and primitive law, communal and independent

Shane

• A larger than life stoic hero helps out those who need help and protection

• Shane rides into the pastoral valley where ranchers and homesteaders are feuding. He helps homesteaders and leaves after the conflict has resolved.

Narrative and Visual Formula

• Arrival of a stranger – a male hero rugged but with strong sense of justice – confront danger and eliminate evil on his own with his excellent physical skills and ingenuity – face existential choice between staying and leaving in the community

• Visual keys –wilderness, small township, tavern, cattle farm, horses, cowboy gear, hat, gun, gun belt

Narrative and Visual Formula

• The narrative and visual formula of the Western can be employed in the films of other genre or made outside USA

• Unexpected use of such formula in Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985)

Narrative and Visual Formula

• Goro is a truck driver (carrying milk) and walks into a run-down ramen restaurant with his sidekick, Gun, where they see its widowed owner being harassed by a bully. Goro gets rid of all villains and helps Tampopo make her ramen shop a lot more popular.

• Ramen Western from Spaghetti Western

Narrative and Visual Formula

• Kurosawa heavily influenced by the Western and employed its narrative and visual formula in his samurai films.

• Yojinbo – a masterless samurai walks into a town which is torn by the feud between the two rival families.

Narrative and Visual Formula

• Kurosawa reinterpreted and redefined the Western formulae

• His formulae further influenced Western films• The narrative and settings in Seven Samurai was

transferred back to the American frontier and made into The Magnificent Seven and those in Yojimbo reused in A Fistful of Dollars FoD