{"id":23585,"date":"2024-07-15T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-15T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23585"},"modified":"2024-07-14T20:34:48","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T03:34:48","slug":"how-the-west-was-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/how-the-west-was-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"How the West Was Shot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an odd twist of fate, I am writing this as the news broke that Kevin Costner\u2019s Horizon: An American Saga \u2013 Chapter 2<\/em> has been indefinitely postponed from its original August 16 release date, owing to the subpar box office of Chapter 1<\/em>. Odder still, the latter\u2019s opening day coincided with the start of the 2024 edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which is what prompted me to write this piece to begin with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the festival\u2019s regular guests is Alexandre O. Philippe, a Swiss-born American filmmaker who specializes in documentaries about cinema and pop culture in general. Following the success of his 2022 visit with Lynch\/Oz<\/em>, which was accompanied by screenings of The Wizard of Oz<\/em> and Wild at Heart<\/em>, another mini-retrospective was created\u00a0around one of his works. Thus, Philippe gave Karlovy Vary attendees the chance to see The Taking<\/em>, which deals with the iconography of the desert landscape in Westerns, with a particular focus on Monument Valley.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, one of the three accompanying movies was by John Ford, the man whose filmography is practically synonymous with the genre (\u201cI make Westerns\u201d, he once somewhat dismissively said about himself) and that specific location, which popped up time and time again in his work, even when the story took place nowhere near it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A prime example of this is 1948\u2019s Fort Apache<\/em>, an early instance of the \u201cprint the legend\u201d maxim Ford would later state explicitly at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance<\/em>: the real events took place in Montana, but the director transposed them to Arizona so he could use Monument Valley. The film reflects on its own fictionalized nature with its final scene, a precursor to a similar moment in Liberty Valance<\/em>, and one can also argue Ford had his cake and ate it too via the unusually \u2013 for the time \u2013 sympathetic depiction of Native Americans vis-\u00e0-vis the conquering Yankee army. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewed in conjunction with The Taking<\/em>, which alludes to the generally unflattering portrayal of Natives already in its title and then makes it clear through its featured interviews, Ford\u2019s movie provides an even starker contrast between his romanticized view of the desert landscape and how it ultimately punishes those who trespass on it (it is perhaps in the same symbolic vein that he cast frequent collaborator Henry Fonda in a shockingly unsympathetic role). It also sets the tone for the other two titles that were screened as part of the program: Wim Wenders\u2019 Paris, Texas<\/em> (1984) and Bruno Dumont\u2019s Twentynine Palms<\/em> (2003).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Philippe, who has lived in the US for virtually his entire adult life but still views himself as an outsider, specifically chose those films to show how two European directors would approach the vastness of the American desert. And while there is a clear philosophical difference between the two films (Wenders is a romantic at heart, albeit with a touch of melancholy, while Dumont inches ever closer to nihilism), they share a wish to convey the vastness of the landscape and the sense of solitude it conveys; in Dumont\u2019s case, that includes multiple shots with angles so wide you can barely see the two protagonists, a choice that highlights their worthlessness in the grand scheme of things (Philippe memorably introduced the Twentynine Palms<\/em> screening with the phrase \u201cI\u2019m not going to say \u2018Enjoy the movie\u2019, because you won\u2019t\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, despite the occasional bleakness of the post-Ford era, the feeling of awe when looking at the desert remains. Kevin Costner described it well in Dances with Wolves<\/em>: \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to see the frontier. [\u2026] Before it\u2019s gone.\u201d Perhaps a similar spirit moved Wenders and Dumont, so impressed by the locales they captured on film they used their names in the titles\u2013although the Paris in Texas is only mentioned, never seen as far as the German filmmaker is concerned (with a hint of printing the legend within the movie\u2019s narrative, as main character Travis is drawn to that place simply because he\u2019s been led to believe he may have been conceived there). Conversely, Dumont actually shot in Twentynine Palms, California and the surrounding desert, allowing them to effectively become the main character in a film where so little happens (barring the final fifteen minutes) we barely know anything about the human protagonists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All three movies share an admiration for and fear of the desert landscape: it\u2019s beautiful and utterly terrifying at the same time, a duality that keeps popping up in films that have adopted the Western tropes and iconography without explicitly situating themselves within the genre (most recently, the revamped Mad Max<\/em> saga). Costner embraced that duality with his new Horizon<\/em> cycle, although audiences have so far been generally unresponsive, signaling once again that the more classic incarnation of that most quintessentially American myth is of little interest on the big screen in the era of superheroes and physics-defying automobiles. The Western, according to common wisdom in the past few decades, is slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaur (ironically, dinosaurs themselves are still quite popular at the movies). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because, in its golden era, the genre was selling the folk tale of how the West was won, a romantic notion of cowboys and soldiers taming the savage, scorched plains under the blazing suns. And once the harsher realities underneath started to get unearthed, both at home (Sam Peckinpah) and overseas (the two Sergios, Leone and Corbucci), it was hard to put the genie back in the bottle and peddle the myth again, as though nothing had happened. Ironically, many have described Horizon<\/em> as catering to a crowd that is prone to accepting myths of a different kind, the ones surrounding Donald Trump (even though Costner has officially been a Democrat since the 1990s).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The program shown at Karlovy Vary dissected the myth, with one film selling the beauty of the landscape and the appeal of the genre while simultaneously poking a few holes in the romanticized take on the era \u2013 one using elements of Americana to tell a story of profound loneliness (perhaps unwittingly channeling the French comic book Lucky Luke<\/em>, where the eponymous character describes himself, in the final panel of each album, as a \u201cpoor lonesome cowboy, a long way from home\u201d), and one turning the desert into the stuff of nightmares, with the visuals retaining their beauty while also gaining an increasingly haunting quality. And yes, we may not have enjoyed that last one, but even at its most unpleasant, that image of the West remains irresistible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2024 Karlovy Vary Film Festival devoted part of its lineup to the Western genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":23587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416,1399],"tags":[1419,1422],"class_list":["post-23585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","category-looking-back","tag-film-fests","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23589,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23585\/revisions\/23589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}