New Book Release

Era uma Vez no Spaghetti Western

(Once Upon a Time in the Spaghetti Western)

By Rodrigo Carreiro

 

My doctorate thesis on the films of Sergio Leone can now be found for download in the virtual library Federal University of Pernambuco.

 

The thesis took two years of research, between 2009 and 2011 I spent hundreds of hours watching old Westerns (American and Italian), reading many books, comparing notes and working on the writing itself.

 

The bulk of the text was written in January 2010, between up to twelve hours of uninterrupted writing sessions, and in July of the same year, when I cut the original 600 pages to 200 pages and, second, added new sections and many statistics. More than 1,000 color images illustrate the text (which I hope is understandable to everyone who venture for him, as I tried to avoid at all costs the academic jargon).

 

The final research report is called "Once Upon a Time in the Spaghetti Western : Style and Narrative in the Work of Sergio Leone ".

 

Briefly, the text attempts to conduct a stylistic analysis and detailed narrative of the work of Leone, in order to understand the real contribution of his films to the repertoire of circulating schemes in contemporary cinema. We assume that Leone helped develop important to the process of intensification of classical poetic film that many researchers claim to have occurred from the 1960s features, having done so from systematic reviews of the dominant narrative construction schemes available at the time .

 

To achieve the goal, tried to identify the recurrence of stylistic and narrative patterns in the signed by Leone films, always looking to list and analyze the socio-cultural, technological, economic, and ideological contexts that led him to adopt and develop these standards, and show how each feature pioneered within the repertoire of techniques used by contemporary filmmakers. At the end, I sought further investigate the connection between the relative deletion of this stylistic contribution Leone to the fact that he worked throughout his career with the film genre, whose filmography has received little attention from historians of cinematic style.