On May 29, 2005, at 8:43 PM, Winsor Crosby wrote:
> I am having a reaction similar to the one I had in the service when a
> taciturn young man who later cleaned out every card player in the
> company spent 10 hours explaining the fine points of winning at poker
> to the rest of our little group and never repeated himself. You know
> much more than I could ever possibly learn about the subject.
>
> I never played poker after that, but I suppose I will continue to
> watch a western from time to time and think I know something about
> it. :-)
>
> Winsor
> Long Beach, California, USA
Nah, everyone has their own nerdy little things that they're into. I
just always loved westerns. It's been kind of a drag in film school
because the western is one of those genres that's kind of been
abandoned at the academic level. They teach you about The Great Train
Robbery and how that kind of made the western the first genre (unless
you count the Travel Film and then the Lumiere brothers have it hands-
down). But once you're past that the western is pretty much never
mentioned again. The one way they touch on it is when you study
Bazin's notion that genres go through phases. He said that genres
begin with an "experimental phase" where conventions of a genre are
established, then it moves to the "classical phase" where genre
conventions are reinforced and then it enters a "revisionist phase"
where the conventions are subverted and the death of a genre occurs
at the "parodic phase" where the genre becomes fodder for parody.
We'll read comments about the western because it's the easiest
example of the rise and fall of a genre, but we're not really
studying westerns; we're really studying the way genres are born and
how they age and die. We'll talk about how films like The Wild Bunch
were revisionist and then the parodic phase came along with Blazing
Saddles and that kind of stuff. The western apparently doesn't have
the same allure to modern academia as Film Noir or Gangster films or
whatever.
So yeah, I guess the western is kind of my pet "cause" or whatever. I
had an instructor once named Walt McCallum who would stand around
before and after class talking about westerns for hours on end. He
was a guy who loved westerns and never really got to talk about them
in class, so we had great discussions since it was both an
opportunity for me to pick his brain and for him to talk about one of
his passions. He's probably forgotten more about the genre than I've
ever known. My idea of a dream gig would be a shot at directing a
western. Of course, I am a really bad rider and can't really shoot
very well...I don't even have a quick-draw technique to critique as
good or bad...heh...a lot of the great directors of the genre have
practically *been* the kind of characters they were making films
about and I'm not much of an outdoorsman...eh, you never know. ;-)
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