T h e F il m m a k e r a s L o n e R id e r : J a m e s B e n n in g ’s “W e s t e r n s ” S c o t t Ma c D o n a l d By the 1950s, the family automobile and the national highway sys tem were making the West simultaneously more accessible and less imaginatively potent for Americans, and during the following decades, the fading mystique was reflected in the popularity of the films about the demise of the Old West, both historically and mythically. While some films focused on the last Western heroes— The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)— others, like Little Big Man (1970) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), debunked the traditional Western myths. In more recent decades the popular appeal of the traditional Western has dissipated, and we are left with relatively infrequent instances of nos talgia for the genre— Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992), most notably— and with films focusing on protagonists who emulate, or at least echo, traditional Western heroes from within contemporary life: Easy Rider (1969), The Electric Horseman (1979), Thelma and Louise (1991), Natural Bom Killers (1994), Lone Star (1996), to name a few. One of the ironies of Western film history is that with few exceptions S c o t t Ma c D o n a l d 2 9 9 the sense of mythic place so important to nineteenth-century landscape painters of the West, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century photogra phers, as well as to the maturation of the Western in the films of John Ford, from Stagecoach (1939) through The Searchers (1956), seems to have disappeared despite the fact that the actual geographic spaces of the West remain visually compelling—all the more compelling, one might argue, as they are increasingly environmentally endangered. Obviously, advertisers have continued to use spaces familiar from the Western— Monument Valley, most obviously— to market products, but few com mercial directors seem interested in honoring the magnificence of the West, the way Ford regularly did. In fact, in modem American film history, the most interesting evo cations/explorations of western spaces have tended to come not from Hollywood, but from the independent cinema and especially from what is generally termed avant-garde film. While the commercial cinema has privileged characters over place, filmmakers working outside the indus try have at times used their freedom from commercial necessity to look beyond melodrama and to focus on western spaces in all of their geo graphic and historical complexity. Landmarks in this more fully placecentered type of Western include Bruce Baillie’s To Parcifal (1966), in which the filmmaker imagines himself a knight-errant witnessing the intersection of the original landscape of northern California and the forces of development epitomized by the railroad and the lumbering industry; Robert Nelson’s Suite California Stops and Passes: Parts 1 and 2 (1976, 1978), in which Nelson explores and compares southern California (Part 1) and northern California (Part 2); Babette Mangolte’s The Sky on Location (1983), for which the filmmaker drove 20,000 miles in an attempt to evoke a sense of the western American landscape akin to what the earliest European and European American explorers and settlers might have experienced as they traversed the landscapes of the West for the first time; and Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation series, especially #2: Mesa Verde (1989) and #4: D. H. Lawrence (1990), expressionist evocations of Brakhage’s consciousness as he travels the Southwest. Perhaps the most impressive recent exploration of the West is the series of feature films made by James Benning during the 1990s: North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four Comers (1997), and Utopia (1999). While Benning has been a fixture of the American avant-garde for twenty years, his “Westerns” are virtually unknown outside of film stud ies despite their considerable relevance and pedagogical value for teachers and scholars in other fields, especially American studies and 3 0 0 WAL 3 5 . 3 F A L L 2 0...