The Wild Bunch, 1969, Sam Peckinpah

The Wild Bunch
Late Westerns, 1960-1995

August 31 to September 30, 2007

 
To open its new season, the Austrian Film Museum presents Part II in its sizable project on the Western genre, starting on August 31. After the classic Westerns of the 1950s the focus is now on the period of the Late or Neo-Western. 34 films from the USA and Italy are being screened. In their majority, they reflect the passing of the "Old West” and its legends.

The late Westerns celebrate the end of a mythology in a highly emphatic manner. In light of the political and social developments of the 1960s and 1970s, this mythology could no longer be sustained.

 

In the works of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Arthur Penn, Sergio Corbucci, Robert Altman and Monte Hellman, Westerns often took on an almost "counter-cultural" flair which exposed a rather bleak view of both America's history and its present. The adjectives which film critics attached to these works express the fundamental transformation in the genre's meaning: dirty, cynical, revisionist, anti-American, melancholic, self-critical, destructive. Late Westerns appear as a grim spectacle in a time of crisis.
 
The beginning of this development sees the transformation of the Western hero into a "professional" without ties to family or society, a figure who is defined by his cool technical skills rather than by his values. The iconic films in this regard – John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone's Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) (1964) – were both inspired by earlier films by Akira Kurosawa.

 

A "mixture of samurai, avenging angel, bounty hunter and adventurer", the professional soon turns into a "homeless fighter in a world without any hope for a home" (Georg Seesslen). This goes for Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates in Monte Hellman's "existentialist" Westerns Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting as well as for Clint Eastwood's evolution from Leone's "Dollar trilogy” up to his own late work Unforgiven.
 
The short boom of Spaghetti Westerns, with most of its essential examples made between 1964 and 1969, introduced figures and moods that achieved a balancing act between nihilism and Commedia dell' arte, between the aesthetics of opera and comic books. For many American cinephiles, this trend represented a "betrayal of the genre"; at the same time it marked a new terrain where stylistic extremism came face to face with "political statements” in an exciting manner.

 

The films by Leone, Corbucci, Sergio Sollima, Damiano Damiani and Giulio Questi selected for this series are shown in rare 35mm prints and in Italian, English and German-language versions. They offer glimpses into a world where everything had come down to questions of ritual and style: showdowns, revolutions, revenge, death, and most of all, the filmic presentation itself.
 
By contrast, in the New Hollywood Cinema the Western still proved its suitability as an allegory of history. The toughness and melancholy, the sarcasm and violence in the masterpieces of Peckinpah, Altman, Aldrich and Penn present a new and more realistic image of the Old West, but they also bear witness to the upheavals in America's view of itself at the time when these films were made.

 

During the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1975, the white men of the West lost their inherited role as the good guys of history, and the perspective of "colonized" people, the Native Americans, became more visible. From this period onwards, more and more films can be understood as "The Last Western": from Dennis Hopper's feverish The Last Movie (1971), to Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976, with John Wayne in his farewell role) and Michael Cimino's anti-Capitalist epic Heaven's Gate (1980). Since then, the Westerner has been doomed to roam across the plains as a ghost of history – a Dead Man.
 
A new Film Museum publication, edited by Bert Rebhandl, will be released to coincide with this show: Western, Genre und Geschichte. It assembles essential essays by French and English-language writers translated into German for the first time. The book includes texts by Jacques Rancière, André Glucksmann, André Bazin, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, Robert Warshow, Scott Simmon, Richard Slotkin, Pam Cook, Sean Cubitt, Christopher Frayling, Jim Kitses and Bert Rebhandl.
 
This Retrospective has been organized with the generous support of the American Embassy in Vienna.

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