12/7/2022 0 Comments Acid cam the movie![]() At its best, the transformation of the western gunslinger’s wandering into a spiritual kind of seeking.Īnd what better place for an American surrealism than the desert plain, the untamed frontier, a dangerous and spiritual land, the great empty expanse, under stars, home of the mescaline yielding peyote plant, source of thousands of years of sacred knowledge. The introduction of the conventions (or anti-conventions) from throughout the surrealist tradition, the psychoanalytic dreamstuff of Maya Deren’s At Land (1944) and Meshes of the Afternoon (1944), the absurdist allegory of Bunuel’s Simone of the Desert (1965) or Arrabal’s I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973), the counterculture picaresque of Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis (1968) or James Broughton’s Dreamwood (1972), and the archetypal minimalism of Philippe Garrel’s The Inner Scar (1972) or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Eden and After (1970). This was the “acid western” as Jonathan Rosenbaum would finally term it in his 1995 review of Dead Man, and marked the psychedelicization of America’s much-loved genre introducing it to the realms of the spiritual, metaphysical, and abstract, outside the historical setting traditionally essential to the genre. Meanwhile from out of Italy came the so-called, spaghetti westerns, notably those of Sergios Corbucci and Leone, themselves already a kind of cynical deconstruction of the traditional western which replaced morality with greed and heroism with brutality.īut then there was another strain of western forming, frequently critical of the genre conventions but less interested in declaring the death of the western than revitalizing it and using its popular mythography to new and experimental ends in surrealist filmmaking. This was what came to be known as the revisionist western, a wave of westerns demythologizing, mourning, and critiquing John Ford’s west of good guys in white, bad guys in black, cowboys and Indians. Miller (1971) and Peckinpah’s Pat Garett and Billy the Kid (1973) cast the western’s classical heroism into an elegiac doubt. ![]() ![]() The Shootist (1976) saw John Wayne confronting his age and mortality, while Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. The old screen heroes were ageing out and so were their moralities. Something was happening to the western in the 1960s and ’70s. ![]()
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