Cowboy and alien: the Bardot Westerns

Abstract

French Western films land in a blind field in accounts of both film genre and national film industries. Genre studies often place a strong focus on Hollywood, while there remains a tendency to favour auteur and art cinema in studies of French film. French Westerns are all but invisible, dismissed as clumsy parodies of what André Bazin dubbed the ‘cinéma américain par excellence’. The convergence of the Western and France’s most visible post-war star therefore strikes a dissonant note. Brigitte Bardot’s global celebrity has been hailed as an emblem of transnational exchange. However, accounts of her star image dwell on the youthful sexuality exhibited in her early films or her consecration as a nouvelle vague icon. When not overlooked entirely, her Western pictures are cast as curiosities of a film career’s undistinguished end. Bringing critical pressure to the discordance between these films and the relays that shape ideas of both ‘Western’ and ‘Bardot’ yields a more differentiated understanding of her star image, of the Western genre and, when a singularly visible emblem of French cinema is cast in a genre closely associated with America and Hollywood, of the volatile conjunction of ‘French’ and ‘Western’.