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.
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
