Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

John Ford's Vision of the West by Matthias Stork

This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

[It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

 

Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel by Matthias Stork

An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western

The Construction of Genre and Space in The Searchers by Austin Fisher

A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).

Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos

A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western. (Related Link)



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog

This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps' 

Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Once Upon a Time in the West - Jill Arrives at Flagstone from The Film League

 

Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

The Failure of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

CINEPHILE on Contemporary Realism: Post-Classical Hollywood, Mumblecore, Neo-Neorealism,Tonacci, Reichardt, Greengrass, Van Sant

Framegrab from Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010). Read 'Beyond Neo-Neo Realism: Reconfigurations of Neorealist Narration in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff' by James Lattimer here (large PDF)

[I]n the last decade or so, a reappraisal of realism has risen to the fore. Sparked by the demise of cinema’s ontological basis (the existential link between film’s corporeal nature and its real-world referent) and the renewed pertinence of Bazin’s cardinal question, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, realism has been re-framed as a generative area of study in a parlous digital age, enabling new (or newly situated) discourse on cinematic reportage, authenticity, and representation. Recent scholars who have embraced realism’s epistemological subscription—yet managed to traverse the epistemic fissure of a positivist approach—have recognized moments of contingency in contemporary art house and marginal cinemas, rooted either in classical tenets (spatio-temporal integrity, social extension, moral despondence) or emergent ones (“haptic” visuality, profilmic exclusivity, ethical engagement). This issue of Cinephile is situated at the intersection of such discussions. [Editors' Note, Cinephile, Fall 2011]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the Fall 2011 issue of the great Canadian online film journal Cinephile -- a special issue on realism -- is now available for free download, following its usual period of availability only in a print edition.

The table of contents is given below, and you can download the PDF of the issue here. Below the list of articles, you can find the next Cinephile Call For Papers for an upcoming issue on the New Extremism.

For more on Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies, please check out FSFF's entry as well as other posts accessible via its film realism tag.



Cinephile Fall 2010 Table of Contents

• Editor’s Note
• Contributors
• 'Reenactment and A-filiation in Andrea Tonacci’s Serras da Desordem' by Ivone Margulies
• 'Post-Classical Hollywood Realism and “Ideological Reality”' by Richard Rushton
• 'The Sound of Uncertain Voices: Mumblecore and the Interrogation of Realism' by Justin Horton
• 'The Aesthetics of Trauma: Authenticity and Disorientation in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday' by Marc Di Sotto
• 'Beyond Neo-Neo Realism: Reconfigurations of Neorealist Narration in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff' by James Lattimer
• 'Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Visionary Realism' by Tiago de Luca

Call For Papers

Cinephile 8.2, Contemporary Extremism

Deadline for draft submission: September 1, 2012
The last decade has marked an escalation in the treatment of extreme subject matter in European cinema, heralded by the graphic violence and sexuality of French New Extremism at the turn of the millennium and increasingly apparent in films from across Europe. While extreme violence and graphic sexuality have long played a part in the European film tradition (Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel 1929); I Am Curious (Yellow) (Sjöman 1967), Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci 1972), Salò (Pasolini 1975), etc.), these contemporary films are exceptionally abrasive in the use of transgressive material, employing the sensory capabilities of cinema to impact the spectator on a visceral level. Scholars such as Martine Beugnet, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, and Tim Palmer have pointed to New Extremism as a burgeoning cinematic trend that seeks to re-examine our relationship to the body and to the film screen itself. Onscreen penetrative sex, sexual violence, and explicit gore are central features of films like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009), and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), to name a few films that can be situated within the New Extremist canon.
    With the Fall 2012 issue of Cinephile, we wish to interrogate the parameters and significance of New Extremism. In doing so, we are willing to extend our questions beyond Europe with the hopes of inquiring into Extremism as a global phenomenon. Is New Extremism a feature of European film in particular, prefigured by the European film tradition, or has its influence extended beyond Europe’s borders and bled into other global cinemas? Is Extremism really “new,” or is it merely a contemporary incarnation of old provocations and transgressions? What is the impact of these films, and why should we be watching them (if we should be watching them at all)?
Starting points might include:

• Extremism outside of Europe: Asian cinema (Ichi the Killer (Miike 2001), Old Boy (Park 2003), etc.), North American cinema (Deadgirl (Sarmiento & Harel 2008), August Underground (Vogel 2001), etc.), and other global cinemas
• The legitimacy of New Extremism: extreme content in art cinema vs. extreme content in exploitation, horror, and grindhouse cinemas
• Controversy, notoriety, and censorship (Antichrist, A Serbian Film (Spasojevic 2010), The Human Centipede 2 (Six 2011), etc.)
• New Extremism and horror cinema (High Tension (Aja 2003), Calvaire (Du Welz 2004), Inside (Bustillo & Maury 2007), Martyrs (Laugier 2008), etc.)
• Spectatorship, affect, and corporeality
• Approaches to New Extremism: Genre, mode, movement, or trend?
• Theory and New Extremism

We encourage submissions from graduate and doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty.
    Papers should be between 2000-3500 words, follow MLA guidelines, and include a detailed works cited page, as well as a short biography of the author.  Submissions and inquiries should be directed to: submissions@cinephile.ca
    Cinephile is the University of British Columbia’s film journal, published with the continued support of the Centre for Cinema Studies. We are proud to feature a new article by Sarah Kozloff in our Spring 2012 issue. Previous issues have featured original essays by such noted scholars as K.J. Donnelly, Barry Keith Grant, Matt Hills, Ivone Margulies, Murray Pomerance, Paul Wells, and Slavoj Žižek. Since 2009, the journal has adopted a blind peer-review process and has moved to biannual publication.  It is available both online and in print via subscription.

• The Voice-Over (Issue 8.1)
• Contemporary Realism (Issue 7.2)
• Reassessing Anime (Issue 7.1)
• Horror Ad Nauseam (Issue 6.2)
• Sound on Screen (Issue 6.1)
• The Scene (Issue 5.2)

On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Even if John Ford had not made his ten best movies (whichever they are), he'd still be the greatest. [Tag Gallagher]

In Young Mr. Lincoln, John Ford achieves the perfection of his art. Never were his matter and his method more aptly fitted, and never were his tendencies toward sprawl and overemphasis more rigorously controlled. It is a masterpiece of concision in which every element in every shot, every ratio, every movement, every shift of viewpoint seems dense with significance, yet it breathes an air of casual improvisation. While its surfaces paint, with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm, an imaginary antebellum America, it sustains an underlying note of somber apprehension, all the more powerful for being held in check.

Ford finds a mood that avoids the clutter and ponderousness of most Hollywood history movies, a mood more of parable than of textbook chronicle. That preoccupation with history and its contradictions—the variance between actual human experience and the official version that will be constructed after the fact—that suffuses films as different as They Were Expendable (1945), Fort Apache (1948), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) resonates troublingly at the heart of this film, for all its apparent serenity. Nothing here is as uncomplicated as it seems designed to appear, which may be why the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, in a celebrated, if by now scarcely readable, special issue of 1970, brought the full force of their post-’68 Althusserian-Lacanian rhetoric to bear on the film in a scene-by-scene analysis, as if here the secret mechanisms of the American ideology itself might be decoded and exposed. In trying to pin down the meanings of Ford’s art, however, Cahiers du cinéma missed his mercurial—and, admittedly, sometimes infuriating––ability to be in two places at once. If Ford’s Lincoln exhibits at once a radiant sincerity and the devious subtlety of a trickster, he is to that extent the director’s mirror image. [Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006]

Cahiers du cinéma’s 1969 analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), reprinted in Screenin 1972 in its first English translation, introduced symptomatic reading to British feminist film critics such as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston. Louis Althusser (1968, trans. 1970: 28-9) coined the term “symptomatic reading,” an interpretive strategy that searches not only for the structural dominants in a text but most importantly, for absences and omissions that are an indication of what the dominant ideology seeks to repress, contain or marginalize. Reading against the grain operates under the assumption that the text comprises a hierarchy of discourses in which one discourse – patriarchal ideology – asserts its dominance over others. Nevertheless, tensions between the dominant ideology and subordinate discourses produce ideological contradictions that the popular film cannot mask nor reconcile, try as it might. [Aspasia Kotsopoulos, 'Reading against the grain revisited', from Jump Cut, Issue 44, 2001]

While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how an ‘oblique’ analysis of film would proceed, the editors of Cahiers [du cinéma’s] essay on John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939) is a significant example of this type of criticism and stands as exemplary of the many important analyses of mainstream Hollywood films that were carried out in the pages of Cahiers and elsewhere. The analysis of Young Mr Lincoln is a close reading of this film, which belongs to the category that is in many ways the most difficult to endorse: films that remain within bourgeois ideology, but reveal its ambiguities and fissures (when subjected to a highly specialised mode of reading).The reading by the Editors of Cahiers uses principles of Marxism, semiology and credits Marxist and Freudian discourses, and includes fleeting references to Jean-Pierre Oudart, Althusser, Roland Barthes and Serge Daney, and Lacan. However, there is no sustained explanation as to precisely which principles drawn from these discourses they will deploy. While Peter Wollen, in his Afterword to the translation of the analysis of Young Mr Lincoln in Screen, declares that the text “owes its concepts to Jacques Lacan” [...], this text would seem to be exemplary of Žižek’s contention that a sustained and explicit consideration of Lacan was in fact missing from 60s and 70s film theory.
     At first glance, therefore, the Young Mr Lincoln article might seem to exemplify a move towards Lacanian psychoanalysis. Furthermore, upon first glance, it appears to be a step towards a consideration of narrative content. As such, it might seem to undermine a contention of this thesis: that the content of popular film was systematically precluded by considerations of film and ideology during the 60s and 70s. In this article, the Editorial Collective treat the text of the film in many ways like a work of literature, analysing it sequence by sequence, with scarcely a mention of its materiality. It could be argued that here is an example of textual analysis that confounds the assertion that subject matter was neglected in favour of form and materiality in analyses of film and ideology. While an extensive examination of the content of Young Mr Lincoln, or signifié, to use the Editors’ turn of phrase, appears to consume the bulk of this article, it must be noted that it is the film’s form which is ostensibly the impetus for the discussion of its content. [Kate Greenwood, Confronting the limits: Renditions of the Real in the Edge of the Construct Film, PhD Thesis, The University of Adelaide, December 2006: 63-64]

It's been a slightly quieter week than usual here at Film Studies For Free, as its voracious readers may have noticed.

A good reason for that is that this blog's author has merrily begun a new university year, teaching ... (drum roll) ... Film Theory!

This shiny, new, non-virtual, pedagogical order will continue to slow up FSFF's production a little, it's true, but it will also inspire the direction that some of its entries will take in the coming weeks and months.

For example, as next week's teaching focus is John Ford's 1939 film Young Mr, Lincoln, and the ideological film readings that it inspired, or provoked, here's a little list of online and openly accessible scholarly books, articles and videos on the inspirational and/or provocative work of that very director.

• Charles Barr, 'About the John Ford Archive', Paper at Archives and Auteurs Conference, University of Stirling, September 2-4, 2009'
• Charles Barr, 'Irish Brother Feeney: Francis Ford in John Ford’s films', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010
• David Bordwell, 'John Ford, silent man', Observations on Film Art, June 28, 2010 
• Seán Crosson, "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people' - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridan's In America (2003)", Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, Issue 3, (2008)
• Seán Crosson, 'Vanishing Point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film', E-Keltoi, Vol. 2, 2003
• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Ruurd Dykstra, 'The Search for Spectators: VistaVision and Technicolor in The Searchers', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, 1.1, 2010 
• Arthur M. Eckstein, 'Darkening Ethan: John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen', originally published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-24
• Martin Flanagan, 'Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Richard Franklin, 'John Ford', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001
• Ross Gibson, 'The Searchers - Dismantled', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004 
• Shigehiko Hasumi, 'John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture', Rouge, 2005
• James Hawko, 'John Ford's The Horse Soldiers', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Arlene Hui, 'The Racial Frontier in John Ford’s The Searchers', Revista Complutense de Historia de América, 2004, vol. 30, 187-207 
• Peter Lehman, '"Tonight Your Director Is John Ford":The Strange Journey of Stagecoach from Screen to Radio', Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes', Edited by Andrew J. Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)
• Miguel Marías, 'Ford's Depth', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004
• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'The Quiet Man and Angela’s Ashes: Hollywood Representations of Irish Emigration as Male Quest Narrative', Estudios Irlandeses , Number 2, 2007, pp. 93-106
• Gary Morris, 'The Searcher: On Ethan Edwards and John Ford's Masterpiece', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 58, 2007
• John T. Nelson, 'The Berkhofer Duality Revealed in the Western Films of John Ford and John Wayne', Madison Historical Review, Vol. 4, November 2007
• Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006
• Timothy P. O'Neill, 'Two Concepts of Liberty Valance: John Ford, Isaiah Berlin, and Tragic Choice on the Frontier', Creighton Law Review, Vol. 37, 2004
• Jeffrey C. Prater, John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy: Myth or Reality?, Masters Thesis, Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 1989
• Art Redding, 'Built Ford Tough: John Ford and the Persistence of the American Western', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Sam Rohdie, 'Four essays [on Painlevé, Jennings, Vigo, and Ford], Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Norman Rosenberg, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: The Lawyer as Super-Hero', Legal Studies Forum, Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘"The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause":John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright', Rouge, No. 7, 2004
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part One', Screening the Past, 23, 2008 
  
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (a)', Screening the Past, 24, 2008
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (b)', Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (c)', Screening the Past, 27, 2010
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Three (a)', Screening the Past, 28, 2010 
• Sean Ryder, 'Representing Ireland: Literary Adaptation and Irish Cinema', Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9, 1998, 119-130
• Thomas Schatz, 'Stagecoach and Hollywood's A-Western Renaissance', in John Ford's Stagecoach, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [long extract] 
• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] Kathryn Kalinak. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford', The Journal of film music, Volume 2, numbers 2-4, Winter 2009, 279-82
• Nicoleta Stanca, 'Hollywood Gender Representations of Irish America in the 20th Century: Maureen O’Hara and Pierce Brosnan', The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta - Philology (20/2009)
• Temenuga Trifonova, 'John Ford’s Funeral Oration: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Phil Wagner, 'John Ford Made … Monsters? The Grotesque Tradition in Ford’s Work', Senses of Cinema, Issue 48, 2008 
• Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jim Kitses,'Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006

Video Essay by Kevin B. Lee on The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) and Gertrud (1964, Carl T. Dreyer) with commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Part One of Two. Part of the Shooting Down Pictures project

Video essay by Kevin B. Lee on Tobacco Road (1941, dir. John Ford), #905 (46) in the Shooting Down Pictures project.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps'