Revisionist Western Research Articles

Ways of (Un)Seeing Race and History in Clint Eastwood's Revisionist Western Unforgiven

Ways of (Un)Seeing Race and History in Clint Eastwood's Revisionist Western Unforgiven

Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in American Film Criticism

I am showing the Old West as it really was . . . Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric. -Sergio Leone (qtd. in Hi-Ho, Denaro! 57) WHEN ITALIAN DIRECTOR SERGIO LEONE'S/4 Fistful of Dollars arrived in the United States in early 1967, the American film industry and the critics who observed it were in state of ferment. Critics sense that the American cinema was changing and that its old pieties and genres, often spoken of in the same breath, were in vital sense dying out. Among them, the was perhaps the greatest barometer- the genre long seen as most uniquely American, most assuredly linked to the national character and mythology, seemed to be evolving into new, rougher beast. And for critics, Sergio Leone's films were clearly part of the problem. Leone's Dollars trilogy, starting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964, US release: January 1967) and continuing with Fora Few Dollars More (1965, US release: May 1967) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release: December, 1967), was neltherthe entirety nor the beginning of the Western cycle in Italy,' but for Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of their privileged cultural form (Liehm 186). Hindsight tempts one to simply question critics' judgment: after all, Leone's films have been vindicated by continued popular and critical interest, and their place in the now sturdy family tree of post-studio revisionist Westerns suggests their healthy influence on the evolution of the Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian spaghetti Western, describes American critical reception of the spaghetti cycle as to a large extent, confined to debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western. He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre. Pauline Kael, he notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how film such as Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) could exploit conventions while debunking its morality (39). This revisionist project, Frayling argues along with many others (e.g., Bondanella 255), was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the spaghetti genre as whole. The term sterile debate, however, effaces the almost venomous hostility that greeted Leone's Dollars trilogy in American critical circles. Critics found the Dollars films deeply problematic on number of levels: their unusually graphic and cynical violence, their ambivalent relationship to historical and generic realism, and their relationship to the history of the genre as whole. However, film critics of the time were not merely displeased by these films' perceived aesthetic flaws: they were bitterly resistant to what they saw as an existential threat to the genre and to some extent their understanding of the American cinema as whole, for in Leone's films critics found echoes, and perhaps causes, of deeply disturbing trends in domestic film culture- trends that would later culminate in what would be dubbed the New Hollywood. However, Leone's films seem to have had uniquely distasteful element for American critics of the late 1960s beyond their place in broader shifts in American film culture, for whereas films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) split critics into hotly contentious camps, the Dollars films were simply generally excoriated. Our goal here is not to say that critics of the period were defending critical good taste against the barbarians at the gates or that they somehow didn't get it. Rather, we seek an understanding of moment in the history of the American popular critical institutions wherein critics attempted to resist aesthetic change, refused to acknowledge emerging artistic norms as legitimate, and in so doing attempted to defend the genre as an institution against Leone's illegitimate revisionism and the wider developments it typified. …

Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West

Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is & Mrs. Miller. - Roger Ebert in The Great Movies. When he died in 2006, director Robert Altman left a rich legacy of films, from MASH, his breakthrough black comedy, through masterpieces like Nashville, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. But many would agree that his crowning achievement was & Mrs. Miller, a daring down-beat film about a gambler and a prostitute. Robert Self now provides an illuminating new look at this long neglected classic. A snowbound version of High Noon, Altman's film has been described as a revisionist western, an antiwestern, and even a hippie western. Featuring cinematic icons Warren Beatty and Julie Christie at the zenith of their careers and a haunting soundtrack from legendary troubadour Leonard Cohen, it provided a new way of looking at the western and the West. Placing the film within the contexts of Altman's career, its critical and popular reception, and the history of American cinema, Self shows how Altman's idiosyncratic interplay between story and style reframed the American West for a new generation. Viewing McCabe as a kind of precursor to the New Western History, he argues that it both embraces and revises the conventions associated with the Western movie genre, especially with its antiheroic protagonist. He also highlights the film's portrayal of the contemporary counter-culture, pitting the loner against corporate power and mainstream religion and granting women a newfound voice. In addition, Self sheds light on the film's production, showing how its rare sequential filming reflected the seamless collaborative efforts of director, actors, cinematographer, and set designer. Here, too, are Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue, painterly visuals, signature pan and zoom shots, crowded and communal mise-en-scenes, and a musical soundtrack mirroring the narrative - all in the service of Altman's inimitable storytelling and indelible gallery of fascinating characters. Self's beautifully written, admiring, and insightful study of this great film should significantly enhance its reputation and reinforce Altman's place in the pantheon of American filmmakers.

The Seductive and Subversive Meta-Narrative of Unforgiven

The Seductive and Subversive Meta-Narrative of Unforgiven Joseph H. Kupfer (bio) So You Like Westerns? Responses to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) divide into those that align it with the traditional Western and those that group it with what has been variously described as the "alternative Western," "new Western," and the "revisionist Western." Revisionist Westerns are viewed as questioning or attacking the structure and norms of the genre. Traditional Westerns clearly demarcate the forces of good and evil and endorse expert gunfighting in the cause of justice. Good gunfighters were sometimes sheriffs and marshals but could be gunslingers or simply outsiders. As Richard Slotkin describes the likes of Shane (Alan Ladd) and Will Kane (Gary Cooper in High Noon), a good man with a gun is "in every sense the best of men" (396). The noble hero defeated opponents who were evil or the henchmen of the unjust. Unforgiven was included by some reviewers in the subgenre of Western films that debunked the myths of the West as well as the films that enshrined them. David Ansen wrote that Eastwood was himself revealing "disgust for the false mythology of the Western hero" (52). Unforgiven is unlike Eastwood's other Westerns in asking us "to ponder the danger of mythifying reality to justify questionable acts" (Greenberg 54). It provokes the audience to question mythologies of the West by sabotaging the "legend of quick death in six-gun glory," the very legend to which Eastwood happily contributed for much of his career (Greenberg 54). Even critics who believe that Unforgiven ultimately does not go against the grain find that it departs from the traditional Western. Will Munny initially has no "affinity with the western's two indispensable icons: the six-gun and the horse" (Prats 116). Moreover, the film privileges Munny's wife at the outset, whereas the civilizing force of women usually occurs in the middle of the Western story (Prats 115). The interpretation of the film that I offer is intended to strengthen the view of Unforgiven as revisionist and to show why interpretations that resist the revisionist stance are inadequate. The revisionist interpretation presented here rests on three integrated claims: the film is a meta-narrative, it is subversive of the Western genre, and it is seductive in its adherence to the genre's form. To say that the film is a meta-narrative is to say that it is a story about stories, Western stories in particular. As a story about Westerns, it is subversive in that it aims to demythologize the false picture that the tradition of Westerns has created. It exposes how the Western narrative has seduced us by glamorizing violence and glorifying gunmen as expert sharpshooters ennobled by courage and moral ideals. The film subverts the Western by explicitly uncovering and questioning its seductive power, but it does so with a seductive narrative [End Page 103] of its own. Embedding its meta-narrative in a first-order story that follows the contours of the classic Western, Unforgiven entices us with its familiar mix of plot tension and character development. In so doing, the film cues us to question ourselves. This self-questioning invigorates the film's own interrogation of the process of myth-making by which cruel men and sordid events become the stuff of legend. By self-consciously incorporating the seductiveness of Western violence within the narrative form, Unforgiven's subversion of Western narrative occurs immediately in our experience of the film, not simply in post-viewing reflection on it (such as offered here). Because the subversiveness occurs directly in the story and our experience of it, we are implicated in the valorization of violence that audiences have grown to enjoy and expect from the Western. Our disillusionment with the traditional Western is reinforced by awareness of how we have been seduced by the film's classic features. The traditional Western justifies violence thematically and structurally. Thematically, the heroic gunman defends society or makes it possible against lawlessness. John Cawelti explains that the protagonist must be a hero "in relation to the victory of civilization over savagery" (63). Gun violence is necessary because without it, "savage, anarchic or regressive forces will engulf the...

Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”: Reframing the American West by Robert T. Self

B o o k r e v ie w s 2 0 7 In truth, The Sagebrush Anthology achieves three worthy goals. First, it char­ acterizes a significant period in American literary culture. Second, it demonstrates the richness of a coherent group of authors. Third, and perhaps most important, it offers a tasty menu of their writings. All together, this is an outstanding collec­ tion of poetry and prose, put together in a meaningful and entertaining way. Robert Altman’s “McCabe & M rs. M iller” : Reframing the American West. By Robert T. Self. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 208 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Neil Campbell University of Derby, United Kingdom This book is a detailed study of a single film, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, aiming to place the work within the contexts of the director’s career, its critical and popular reception, and the history of American cinema. Robert Self’s central claim is that Altman’s revisionist Western “reframed” the way the West was interpreted and, in certain ways, preceded New Western History with its aim of dispelling myth and reconsidering issues of power and gender. Chapters within the book explore “The Real and Mythic West,” the “Revisionist Western,” “Countercultural Contexts,” and “Altman’s Art.” I was impressed by the commitment of a publisher in giving an author the opportunity to delve into a single film in order to explore its significance as a cinematic event and as a cultural and political phenomenon. To this end, Self sets up some interesting frameworks for the study, reading the film as “tradi­ tional and innovative,” as a reworking of the Western as the “central national American narrative,” and as a “reflexive” commentary on how history is told and how fiction is created from its materials (1, 3, 6). It also recognizes Altman’s own interest in revising the Western genre itself to “mess around in the corners, in the details,” as he put it, in order to reconfigure the look and the feel of an increasingly tired cinematic form (11). Central to Self’s argument is his sense of Altman’s multiple “negotiations” between these positions, and, at its best, the book demonstrates the director’s “complex layering of major and minor stories, of competing narratives ... captured in the very temporal rhythms of the film’s telling” (12, 156). To an extent, Self succeeds in these aims, presenting a depth of knowledge and information about the film, its director, and its social and political context. However, in other ways it disappoints by, for example, not engaging enough with the broader arena of contemporary western cultural studies or theory. Such a conversation is only developed in a section on “third space” where he begins to present some interesting lines of inquiry only to retreat back into more conventional approaches to film history (126-34). Another limitation is in not considering the film’s impact and influence on later works such as Michael Winterbottom’s icy epic The Claim (2001) or on television’s dark, 2 0 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 brooding Deadwood (2004-2006). At times, too, Self sees the film too literally as a historical document, dealing with some of the tried and tested subjects of New Western History (prostitution, business, gender) or the counterculture (anti-war, women’s liberation) at the expense of analyzing the aesthetic energy and sensual experience of the film’s power as a “painting in motion” (170). Despite these criticisms, it is a worthwhile and useful book, detailed and enthusiastic in its examination of an important post-Western—“post” in the very precise ways that it comes after and moves beyond the mythic West while simultaneously dialoguing with its forms, themes, and traditions. Almost Ashore. By Gerald Vizenor. Cam bridge, U K: Salt Publishing, 2006. 110 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Jerry D. Mathes II University of Idaho, Moscow When I opened Gerald Vizenor’s latest collection of poems, I was struck by the table of contents and its narrow occupation of the margin and...

Night Moves (1975): America at Middle Age

Night Moves (1975):America at Middle Age Jonathan Kirshner Released to little fanfare thirty years ago—warmly received by the more serious critics but just past the moment when it might have enjoyed broad commercial success—Night Moves, still relatively obscure, stands as one of the achievements of the 1970s, a period now widely acknowledged as Hollywood's last golden age. While the peerless Chinatown—the Citizen Kane of the seventies film—reached back so seamlessly to the great classic studio films noir of the 1940s that in memory it has almost become one of them, Night Moves remains plainly neo-noir, unambiguously of the period, visually, stylistically, and politically. Finally available on DVD, Night Moves is a reminder of the extent to which great films depend on the unpredictable magic and serendipity of collaboration. Alan Sharp's tight, witty, and insightful script is brought to life by Gene Hackman and a pitch-perfect supporting ensemble, brilliantly orchestrated by director Arthur Penn and his team of period-pros including cinematographer Bruce Surtees and editor Dede Allen. Writer, star, and director bring their best stuff to the table, and it is hard to imagine the movie absent each of their contributions. Hackman plays Harry Moseby, an ex-Pro-Bowl football player who now gets by, more or less, running a one-man private-eye agency. By convention, he is hired to track down the wayward daughter of a disreputable guardian, and by convention the routine investigation must disturb and uncover darker and more dangerous secrets. Against genre, however, Harry not only has a wife but finds out (by accident) that she has taken a lover, one with a limp and a cane, no less, both mocking his masculinity and depriving him of the right to square things with a good sock to the jaw. This apparent sub-plot, of Harry's troubled marriage and the riveting domestic confrontations between husband and wife (in the kitchen, in the driveway, in the bedroom), is neither a distraction nor of secondary interest, for Night Moves is ultimately about the investigator, not the investigation. This raises the stakes considerably, because Harry Moseby is not just anybody; he is America. Stranded at the embarrassing age of forty, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, down a peg and directionless, with the hopes of the sixties long given way to the hollowness of the seventies, Harry is defined by disappointment and lost opportunity. A chess player, he passes the lonely hours of surveillance playing and reenacting classic matches on his portable set. One match he plays over and over again is from 1922: black had a mate and he did not see it. "Three little knight moves," Harry explains at one point. But he "played something else and lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I do, and I wasn't even born." Writer Sharp, a Scotsman, clearly saw the movie as a vehicle to puzzle through the American enigma (though his novelization betrays a more heavy-handed critique of both character and society) as he had done with his script for the revisionist western and Vietnam allegory Ulzana's Raid for Robert Aldrich. Gently probing national myths, Harry attributes his ability to resist the advances of young nymph Delly by conjuring the pure thoughts of Thanksgiving and George Washington's teeth. More pointedly, in response to a question about the Kennedy assassination, Moseby explains, "when the President got shot I was on my way to a football game in San Diego; when Bobby got shot I was sitting in a car waiting for a man to come out of a house with his girlfriend—a divorce case." Harry states the facts and does not dwell on the point, but a more concise summary of America's fall from grace is unlikely to be found. Certainly the sentiment did not escape the politically astute Arthur Penn, who had previously earned an Oscar nomination for directing the downbeat counter-culture classic Alice's Restaurant and also enjoyed a big hit with his revisionist western Little Big Man, a retelling of the conquest of the west from the perspective of the conquered. Penn plays with perspectives in Night...

Sam Shepard's Anti-Western Silent Tongue as Cultural Critique

In 1993, hard on the heels of Dances with Wolves, Sam Shepard's small budget Western, Silent Tongue, made a fleeting appearance in art-house movie theatres. The film received appreciative coverage in those publications for which paying attention to offbeat, slightly avant-gardist cultural manifestations is part of their liberal self- image, but not unexpectedly, mainstream media took no heed. Instead, Dances with Wolves was heralded as a culturally authentic, politically correct, revisionist Western.

Detecting the Real Fictions of History in Watershed

Late into Percival Everett's 1996 novel Watershed, the narrator and protagonist Robert Hawks, hydrologist who has felt compelled to investigate the murder of two FBI agents near the (fictional) Plata Indian Reservation, considers I had done so much to remove all things political from my life. As disinterested scientist disinclined to care about even the applications of his work, he is accustomed to seeing himself an objective, hired gun, regardless of whether the state or the Naturalist's Conservancy is calling on his expertise.1 As with the emotional distance that Jake Gittes, the private investigator in the film Chinatown, usually puts between himself and his clients (in story in which water also plays leading role), so with Robert's cool, studied, and guiltless indifference to the social and political realms: his detachment is, in the end, not immune to the entanglements of the personal and political past, to the history in the water. The to know about case in which he is not involved turns into a longstanding, unanswered, personal (153) to understand his grandfather, an atheist and doctor who committed suicide while on hunting expedition with the young Robert. This desire to know more also becomes historical quest that leads Everett's narrator not only to discern the connections and differences between Africanand Native American experience under American colonialism, including the narrator's personal experience at the hands of white police officers, but to participate in minor act of revolution alongside members of the Plata Creek tribe, in which he acts no longer as objective scientist but as human subject with borrowed gun. Part mystery, part western, Watershed is novel in which history weighs heavily, perhaps more so than in any other of Everett's works. If Everett's other westerns, God's Country and Grand Canyon, Inc, are mischievous re-workings of generic conventions that call to mind Mark Twain, then Watershed is non-formulaic but equally revisionist western more like John Sayles' soberly searching film Lone Star, in which an investigation into the incestuous western past has both personal and political consequences for the curious. Seen together, Everett's western novels both exhibit and tackle one of the central literary problems in literature of the American West: how does western writer free his imagination and at the same time respond to the demand for historical authenticity that readers for two centuries have brought to this cultural landscape (whether real or imagined) of conquests and land-grabs, of national myths and regional realities? The formula Western (in its most popular version and with little sense of irony or parody) often responds to the history of American expansion and colonialism with

Sam Shepard's Anti-Western Silent Tongue as Cultural Critique

In 1993, hard on the heels of Dances with Wolves, Sam Shepard's small budget Western, Silent Tongue, made a fleeting appearance in art-house movie theatres. The film received appreciative coverage in those publications for which paying attention to offbeat, slightly avant-gardist cultural manifestations is part of their liberal self- image, but not unexpectedly, mainstream media took no heed. Instead, Dances with Wolves was heralded as a culturally authentic, politically correct, revisionist Western.

Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West

Introduction Michael Kowalewski Part I. Nature and Place in Western Writing: 1. Region, power, place William W. Bevis 2. Burros and Mustangs: literary evolutionism and the wilderness west David Rains Wallace Part II. Reimagining the American Frontier: 3.The Literature of loneliness: understanding the letters and diaries of the American West Shannon Applegate 4. Quoting the wicked wit of the West: Frontier reportage and Western vernacular Michael Kowalewski 5. Bierstadt's settings, Harte's plots Lee Mitchell Part III. Modern Western Revisions: 6. Sentimentalism in the American Southwest: John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin and Edward Abbey Peter Wild 7. Revisionist Western classics Thomas J. Lyon 8. Molly's truthtelling, or Jean Stafford rewrites the Western Susan J. Rosowski 9. Borders, frontiers and mountains: mapping the history of 'US Hispanic Literature' Margaret Garcia Davidson Part IV. Contemporary Western Writing: A Mosaic: 10. The return of the native: the politics of identity in American Indian fiction of the West Philip Burnham 11. Regionalism makes good: the San Francisco Renaissance Linda Hamalian 12. 'The Circle Almost Circled': some notes on California's fiction James D. Houston 13. Fighting the religion of the present: Western motifs in the first wave of Asian American plays Misha Berson.

Whose Home on the Range? Finding Room for Native Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans in the Revisionist Western

In 1939, John Ford, the master auteur of the Western film, directed two films with significantly different endings. In Drums Along the Mohawk, after Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda survive the English, the Indians, and the French, the entire community gathers to watch the raising of the first American flag. The camera pans from Old Glory to a united people, lingering a moment on the faces of Blue Back, the film's only good Indian,(1) and the maid, Daisy, the film's only black face and one which has barely been seen until she is needed for the finale. These underdeveloped, or perhaps even misdeveloped, characters are included only to create an illusion of wholeness and integration at the birthing of America. In contrast to the inclusive, communal world of Ford's great Eastern, his first great Western, Stagecoach, concludes with the expulsion of the Ringo Kid and Dallas John Wayne and Claire Trevor). These outlaws, expelled from a fledgling U.S., head off to Mexico, fleeing a country that has become too respectable, uptight and prudish to tolerate the different and the dangerous, a country no longer hospitable to a man with a pistol or a woman with a past. The movement from inclusion to exclusion could suggest Ford's growing disillusion with the vision of American harmony he had first imagined, were it not for the inconvenient fact that the two films were made in the reverse order: Stagecoach precedes Drums Along the Mohawk. Rather than suggesting the opposite conclusion, however (i.e., that Ford experienced a sudden burst of faith in the American dream), it is more likely that the later film reflected his growing awareness of the threat to that dream, as it became clear that American intervention would be necessary to check Nazi aggression. Ford created a mythic multicultural America in order to persuade a somewhat reluctant populace to unite in the war against the Axis. Whichever came first, however, the antithetical endings of these films define two competing visions of America, the inclusive versus the exclusive. Exclusion from America, at least the vision of America presented in the Hollywood Western, has been the traditional fate of Native Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans. Attempts to re-insert them into the fabric of the West are often no more successful than the unconvincing unity of the anthem singers at the end of Drums Along the Mohawk.(2) In the past decade, particularly interesting attempts to remedy this omission have been supplied (with widely varying degrees of success) by Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves, Mario Van Peebles in Posse, and Robert Young with Edward James Olmos in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. Although most of us seem to recall Native Americans as ubiquitous in Westerns, Jane Tompkins makes the surprising claim that she found no Indians in them: Images of Indians sprang to mind, detached from any one picture. That yipping sound on the soundtracks that accompanies Indian attacks, the beat of tom-tome growing louder as you near the Indian encampment. The encampment itself...[m]ost vividly, a line of warriors. . . [b]ut no people. (9) While Tompkins herself acknowledges (barely) some exceptions, like Cheyenne Autumn, she overstates her case(3) and overpraises the late arrival, Dances With Wolves, which she claims represents Native Americans in a serious, sympathetic way (10). But does it? Like Posse and Ballad, Dances with Wolves begins with a claim to authenticity, situating the narrative in the middle of the Civil War (1863).(4) This is only the first move, however, in the film's consistent strategy of textualizing its narrative (a feature it shares with Posse). The opening appeal to the authority of history and the written word is an attempt to establish a truth claim that recurs in the repeated references to Lieutenant John Jay Dunbar's diary, a text that is intended to validate the film, although it is, of course, the film that invents the book, thus creating a remarkably circular claim of authenticity. …

Historical Fiction and the Allegorical Truth of Colonial Violence in The Proposition

Firing another shot in the history wars, Prime Minister Howard used his 2006 Australia Day speech to berate postmodern approaches to historical truth. At the same time, a UK-Australia co-production, The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) was enjoying critical acclaim as both a violent revisionist Western and an important film about Australia’s frontier history. It would be tempting to include this frontier film in the cycle of ‘post Mabo’ films exemplified by The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002). Yet unlike The Tracker, The Proposition eschews historical reference in favour of baroque allegory. If The Tracker’s moral fable is clearly a left-liberal intervention in the history wars, The Proposition seems to offer no illumination of the present, only the unredeemed violence of retribution as the irrefutable truth of the frontier, aligning it with the 1976 mini-series, Luke’s Kingdom. This article asks in what sense history persists in the allegorical truth of frontier films which cannot be subsumed into historical representation. I argue that The Proposition offers a philosophical view of history as mediated time, rather than a political view of history as traumatic event. I contrast the popular reception of The Proposition as a revisionist, bushranger Western ‘about’ Australian history, with Routt’s counter-claim that The Proposition is an art film ‘about’ violence, revealing Australia as ‘a primal scene of annihilation.’ However, in order not to reinstate the myth of a fatal landscape as the template of Australian identity, I turn to Benjamin’s critique of Baroque allegory as a retrospective mode in which the transience of time finds expression in decay, ruin and debris. The question to be resolved is whether, by giving us multiple horizons of historical time, the revisionist film avoids being drawn into allegory’s melancholy alliance with myth, opening instead into a cinematic revelation of history’s unrealised potential.