Western (genre)
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The Western is an American genre in literature and film. Westerns are art works – films, literature, television and radio shows, sculpture (particularly that by Frederic Remington), and paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the 19th Century American West (and sometimes Mexico, Canada or the Australian Outback, during the same time period), with the setting occasionally portrayed in a romanticised light.
While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has decreased in prominence since the late 1970s.
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[edit] Definition
Westerns, by definition, are set in the Western United States during the period from the start of the US Civil War in 1860 to the end of the so-called "Indian Wars" at Wounded Knee in 1890. But this definition is very elastic. Some westerns incorporate the Civil War, which was essentially an "eastern" conflict (i.e., east of the Mississippi river). Westerns have crossed the US borders: frequently into Mexico, sometimes into Canada and even, famously, into Bolivia. The timeframe is stretched even further. The genre includes films about the Battle of the Alamo in 1836; and the Mexican Revolution as late as 1920. There are also westerns which take place in Australia, such as Quigley Down Under and The Proposition. The Australian relationship with Aboriginals has many parallels with the U.S. treatment of Native Americans.
[edit] Common themes
The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor, rather than the law, in which persons have no social order larger than their immediate peers, family, or perhaps themselves alone.
One of the best examples, where honor supersedes everything else, including the law, work, and family with disastrous results, occurs in The Jack Bull (1999) starring John Cusack. This minor Western classic is a gritty, unromanticized study of the individual against the world, of a lone horse breeder in a region on the verge of statehood, yet where the law is in flux and for sale to the highest bidder. Only the individual's sense of morality, fairness, and compassion stand up to rampant greed, violence, power, and corruption. In the end, however, the individual drowns in the sea of civilization. In a way, this film, alongside Unforgiven, represents a bleaker yet some say more realistic cinematic shift where the hero may be the technical lawbreaker but the moral victor, and though vigilante justice may succeed, this new form of antihero will not be rewarded in the end.
In the Western, these themes are forefronted, to the extent that the arrival of law and "civilization" is often portrayed as regrettable, if inevitable.
[edit] Western movies
A genre in which description and dialogue are lean, and the landscape spectacular, is well suited to film. Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio like other early Hollywood movies, but when location shooting became more common, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Kansas, Texas, Colorado or Wyoming, often making the landscape not just a vivid backdrop, but a character in the movie. Productions were also filmed on location at movie ranches.
The Western genre itself has sub-genres, such as the epic Western, the shoot 'em up, singing cowboy Westerns, and a few comedy Westerns. The Western re-invented itself in the revisionist Western.
Cowboys and gunslingers play prominent roles in Western movies. Often fights with Native Americans are depicted. In early Westerns, the "Injuns" are frequently portrayed as dishonorable villains; however, many "revisionist" Westerns give the natives more sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of westerns include western treks and groups of bandits terrorising small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven.
[edit] The Classical Western film
The western film traces its roots back to 1903's The Great Train Robbery, a silent film directed by Edwin S. Porter and starring Broncho Billy Anderson. The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first cowboy star, making several hundred Western movie shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon had competition in the form of William S. Hart.
In the United States, the western has had an extremely rich history that spans many genres (comedy, drama, tragedy, parody, musical, science fiction, etc.). The golden age of the western film is epitomised by the work of two directors: John Ford (who often used John Wayne for lead roles) and Howard Hawks.
[edit] Spaghetti Westerns
- Main article: Spaghetti Western
During the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of the Western emerged in Italy with the "Spaghetti Westerns" or "Italo-Westerns". Many of these films are low-budget affairs, shot in locations (for example, the Spanish desert region of Almería) chosen for their inexpensive crew and production costs as well as their similarity to landscapes of the Southwestern United States. Spaghetti Westerns were characterised by the presence of more action and violence than the Hollywood westerns.
But the best of the genre, notably the films directed by Sergio Leone, have a parodic dimension (the strange opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West being a reversal of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon opening scene) which gave them a different tone to the Hollywood westerns. Charles Bronson, Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although they were also to provide a showcase for other noted actors such as Jason Robards, James Coburn, Klaus Kinski and Henry Fonda.
[edit] Ostern
- Main article: Ostern
Westerns from the United States were popular in Communist countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin. An entire genre of "Red Western" or "Ostern" films developed in Eastern Europe. These films usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, as oppressed people fighting for their rights, in contrast to American westerns of the time, which frequently portrayed the Indians as villains. They frequently featured Yugoslavians or Turkic people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe.
Gojko Mitić is famous for his portrayals of righteous, kindhearted and charming Indian chiefs ("Die Söhne der großen Bärin" directed by Josef Mach). He became honorary chief of the tribe of Sioux when he visited the United States of America in the 90s and the television crew accompanying him showed the tribe one his movies. American actor and singer Dean Reed, an expatriate who lived in East Germany, also starred in several films.
[edit] Revisionist Westerns
- Main article: Revisionist Western
'Revisionist' is a term used in genre studies to describe films that change traditional elements of a genre.
After the early 1960s, many American film-makers began to question and change many traditional elements of westerns. One major change was in the increasingly positive representation of Native Americans who had been treated as "savages" in earlier films. Audiences began to question the simple hero-versus-villain dualism and the morality of using violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right. Some recent Westerns give women more powerful roles.
[edit] Contemporary Westerns
Contemporary Westerns, as the name implies, are films that have contemporary American settings but nevertheless utilise Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious antihero, open plains and landscapes, climactic gunfights, etc.). For the most part, they still take place in the American West and reveal the progression of the Old West mentality into the late twentieth century. Examples include Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), John Sayles' Lone Star (1996), Robert Rodríguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking (2005).
[edit] Genre studies and Westerns
In the 1960s academic and critical attention to cinema as a legitimate art form emerged. With the increased attention, film theory was developed to attempt to understand the significance of film. From this environment emerged (in conjunction with the literary movement) an enclave of critical studies called genre studies. This was primarily a semantic and structuralist approach to understanding how similar films convey meaning. Long derided for its simplistic morality, the western film genre came to be seen instead as a series of conventions and codes that acted as a short-hand communication methods with the audience. For example, a white hat represents the good guy, a black hat represents the bad guy; two people facing each other on a deserted street leads to the expectation of a showdown; cattlemen are loners, townsfolk are family and community minded, etc. All western films can be read as a series of codes and the variations on those codes.
Since the 1970s, the western genre has been unraveled through a series of films that used the codes but primarily as a way of undermining them (Little Big Man and Maverick did this through comedy). Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves actually resurrects all the original codes and conventions but "reverses the polarities" (the Native Americans are good, the U.S. Cavalry is bad). Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven uses every one of the original conventions, only reverses the outcomes (instead of dying bravely or stoically, characters whine, cry, and beg; instead of a good guy saving the day, irredeemable characters execute revenge; etc.).
One of the results of genre studies is that some have argued that "Westerns" need not take place in the American West or even in the 19th Century, as the codes can be found in other types of movies. For example, a very typical Western plot is that an eastern lawman heads west, where he matches wits and trades bullets with a gang of outlaws and thugs, and is aided by a local lawman who is well-meaning but largely ineffective until a critical moment when he redeems himself by saving the hero's life. This description can be used to describe any number of Westerns, as well as the action film Die Hard. Hud, starring Paul Newman, and Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, are other frequently cited examples of movies that don't take place in the American West but have many themes and characteristics common to Westerns. Likewise, it has been pointed out that films set in the old American West, may not necessarily be considered "Westerns."
[edit] Westerns in other media
The Western genre has touched all of comic books to computer and video games and role playing games.
[edit] Influences on and of the Western
Many Westerns after 1960 were heavily influenced by the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. For instance The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and both A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing were remakes of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which itself was inspired by Red Harvest, an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammett. It should also be noted that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced from American Westerns, especially the works of John Ford (Senses of Cinema).
Despite the Cold War, the western was a strong influence on Eastern Bloc cinema, which had its own take on the genre, the so called 'Red Western' or Ostern. Generally these took two forms: either straight westerns shot in the Eastern Bloc, or action films involving the Russian Revolution and civil war and the Basmachi rebellion in which Turkic peoples play a similar role to Mexicans in traditional westerns.
An offshoot of the western genre is the "post-apocalyptic" western, in which a future society, struggling to rebuild after a major catastrophe, is portrayed in a manner very similar to the 19th century frontier. Examples include The Postman and the Mad Max series, and the computer game series Fallout.
Many elements of space travel series and films borrow extensively from the conventions of the western genre. Peter Hyams' Outland transferred the plot of High Noon to interstellar space. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, once described his vision for the show as "Wagon Train to the stars". More recently, the space opera series Firefly used an explicitly western theme for its portrayal of frontier worlds. Anime shows like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Outlaw Star have been similar mixes of science fiction and Western elements. The science fiction Western can be seen as a subgenre of either Westerns or science fiction.
Elements of western movies can be found also in some movies belonging essentially to other genres. For example, Kelly's Heroes is a war movie, but action and characters are western-like. The British film Zulu set during the Anglo-Zulu War has sometimes been compared to a Western, even though it is set in South Africa.
The character played by Humphrey Bogart in such films as Casablanca, To Have and Have Not or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - an individual fighter bound only by his own private code of honour - has, whatever the film's setting, a lot in common with the classic western hero despite being classic noir films. In turn, the western, which has been so influential on noir film, has progressed back into noir, as with the film Sugar Creek, which combines classic elements of both noir and western films.
In many of Robert A. Heinlein's books, the settlement of other planets is depicted in ways explicitly modeled on American settlement of the West. For example, in his Tunnel in the Sky settlers set out to the planet "New Cannan", via an interstellar teleporter portal across the galaxy, in conestoga wagons, their captain sporting moustaches and a little goatee and riding a Palomino horse - with Heinlein explaining that the colonists would need to survive on their own for some years, so horses are more practical than machines.
Stephen King's The Dark Tower is a series of seven books that meshes themes of westerns, high fantasy, science fiction and horror. The protagonist Roland Deschain is a gunslinger whose image and personality are largely inspired by the Man with No Name from Sergio Leone's films.
In addition, the superhero fantasy genre has been described as having been derived from the cowboy hero, only powered up to omnipotence in a primarily urban setting.
The western genre has been parodied on a number of occasions, famous examples being Support Your Local Sheriff, Cat Ballou, Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, and Rustler's Rhapsody.
George Lucas's Star Wars films use many elements of a western, and indeed, Lucas has said he intended for Star Wars to revitalise cinematic mythology, a part the western once held. The Jedi, who take their name from Jidaigeki, are modeled after samurai, showing the influence of Kurosawa. The character Han Solo dressed like an archetypal gunslinger, and the Mos Eisley Cantina is much like an old west saloon.
See also: Weird West
[edit] Television Westerns
[edit] Famous actors
[edit] Quote
- "As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz."
- — Clint Eastwood, classic actor in Westerns
[edit] See also
- American Old West
- American West
- Dime Western
- Frederic Remington
- Golden Boot Awards
- History of United States continental expansion
- "Gibanica" Westerns
- List of movie genres
- List of Western fiction authors
- List of Western films
- Notable figures in Westerns
- TV Western
- Movie ranches
- Native American fighting styles
[edit] External links
- Yezbick, Daniel. The Western, St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
- Top Fifty Westerns
- Golden Boot Awards
- Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
- Steele Review
- The Western Writers of America website: http://www.westernwriters.org/
- Cowboy Pal
- Existential Westerns
