New book release Reframing Cult Westerns

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight

Edited by Lee Broughton

 

Country: U.K.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 1501386891

Available: September 23, 2021

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 from around the world. 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 both American and international perspectives, Reframing Cult Westerns offers fresh insight on the Western as a global phenomenon.

Key films covered: John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), Herschel Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio, 1968), Sergio Garrone’s Django the Bastard (Django il bastardo, 1969), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Whity (1971), Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Joaquín Romero Marchent’s Cut-Throats Nine (Condenados a vivir, 1972), Werner Wallroth’s Blood Brothers (Blutsbrüder, 1975), Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980), William Wiard’s Tom Horn (1980), Dean Reed’s Sing, Cowboy, Sing (1981), George Hickenlooper’s Grey Knight (1993), Alex Turner’s Dead Birds (2004), John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014), Kristian Levring’s The Salvation (2014), John Maclean’s Slow West (2015), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone (2016).

The contributors: Paul Kerr, Peter J. Hanley, Cynthia J. Miller, Craig Ian Mann, Matt Melia, Hamish Ford, Sonja Simonyi, Chelsea Wessels, Lee Broughton, Jenny Barrett, Jack Weatherston and Thomas Moodie.