Mapping the Western

The Western

Saturdays, Jul 21 – Aug 18, 10 am to 1 pm

You can probably picture a Western: sweeping desert vistas, the hot noon sun high in the sky, a lone man riding on his horse. This thoroughly American genre — with its emphasis on heroism, masculinity, the environment, and industrialism — has been part of film’s iconography since the invention of the medium. But the genre’s appeal has never stopped at America’s borders. Around the world, the Western serves as a universal mode of storytelling, revised, reformulated, and remixed for different times and places.

In this five-week Course we will begin by looking at a quintessential American Western before delving into Westerns from Japan, Germany, and Indonesia. Together, we will experience a rare screening of the newly restored 1968 Italian Western The Great Silence, only recently released in American theaters for the first time. And we will discuss how the genre has been adapted to explore cultural tensions in different countries and how international filmmakers are breathing new life into the genre.