About the Book
Once one of the most popular film genres and a key player in the birth of early narrative cinema, the Western has experienced a rebirth in the era of post-classical filmmaking with a small but noteworthy selection of Westerns being produced long after the genre's 1950s heyday. Thanks to regular repertory cinema and television screenings, home video releases and critical reappraisals by cultural gatekeepers such as Quentin Tarantino, an ever-increasing number of these Westerns have become cult films. Be they star-laden, stylish, violent, bizarre or simply little heard-of obscurities, Reframing Cult Westerns offers a multitude of new critical insights into a truly eclectic selection of cult Western films.
These twelve essays present a wide-ranging methodological scope, from industrial histories to ecocritical approaches, auteurist analysis to queer and other ideological angles. With a thorough analysis of the genre from international perspectives, Reframing Cult Westerns offers fresh insight on the Western as a global phenomenon.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Cult Westerns and Cult Films
Lee Broughton
Part One: Classic Cult Westerns
1. “It seemed like a good idea at the time”: Hollywood, Homology and Hired Guns – The Making of The Magnificent Seven
Paul Kerr, Middlesex University, UK
2. The Historical Accuracy of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Peter J. Hanley, University of Münster, Germany
3. Where White Men Dream Out Loud: Robert Altman’s West
Cynthia J. Miller, Emerson College
4. The Gold Rush: The New Right and the Westerns of 1980
Craig Ian Mann, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Part Two: Charting New Frontiers and Mapping Identity and Politics in International Cult Westerns
5. Landscape, imagery and symbolism in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo
Matt Melia, Kingston University, UK
6. Dancing with Death: Whity, a Singular Western
Hamish Ford, University of Newcastle, Australia
7. Man of the West: Dean Reed’s (Cinematic) Frontier Personas in Blood Brothers and Sing, Cowboy, Sing!
Sonja Simonyi, independent scholar, Hungary
8. An(Other) West: The Limits of National Identity in The Proposition
Chelsea Wessels, East Tennessee State University, USA
Part Three: Contemporary Cult Westerns and Contemporary Concerns
9. The return of the repressed: locating the supernatural in US Civil War Westerns
Lee Broughton (Independent scholar, UK)
10. Stranger and Friend: Non-American Westerns and the Immigrant in the Twenty-First Century
Jenny Barrett, Edge Hill University, UK
11. The Intrusion of Climate in The Revenant
Jack Weatherston, independent scholar, UK
12. “Hand in hand we’ll get there”: The Racial Politics of The Hateful Eight
Thomas Moodie, freelance writer and script supervisor, UK
List of Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Dr. Lee Broughton is a freelance writer, critic, film programmer and lecturer in film and cultural studies. He is the author of The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the 'Other' in Film (2016) and the editor of Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained (2016). He has contributed chapters and articles to numerous edited collections and academic journals.
Review :
[An] exceptional look at what has become of the contemporary western.
Once the backbone of Hollywood production, the Western film has - since the 1960s - moved to the margins, often into the world of midnight movies and cults. Most studies of the Western tend to lose interest in the genre when it ceased to be mainstream - which is precisely where Reframing Cult Westerns begins. The various essays in the book, curated by Lee Broughton, examine films which set out to be cults, and films which didn't but which have turned into cults over time. They revisit classic Westerns through the prism of more recent generic developments. They treat the Western as a global text, including examples from Australia and Argentina, Mexico and Italy, Denmark and Scotland, East and West Germany. The result is not only a reframing of some cult Westerns, but a reframing of our understanding of the Western film. Maybe it hasn't headed for the last roundup after all...
Lee Broughton has compiled an exciting collection of essays that draws together a range of contemporary approaches to studying the cult Western. For anyone wanting to find out why the genre remains crucial for our understanding of the United States and its role in the world, and for anyone interested in making sense of the genre’s place within a global cultural context, this is a must-have book.
An adventurous and illuminating collection, throwing light on many marginal, even eccentric films, and demonstrating that the Western still has many ways of exciting and intriguing us.
Seen through the lens of cult cinema, the Western, that most familiar of movie genres, takes on exciting and often unexpected new meanings. Whether providing fresh perspectives on familiar works or drawing our attention to understudied films and trends, these essays serve as a valuable reminder of the Western’s vibrancy over the past half-century, and of the expressive possibilities it still offers filmmakers today.
