Film Studies: Events

CFS Talk: Neill Campbell, The posthumous and the post-Western: Theorising the Modern Cinematic West through John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock.

Tue 26th February 2013 17:15 to 19:00

Neill Campbell

The death of the Western in cinema has been a common refrain almost since its inception. The nineteenth century West has often been the staple historical and imagined landscape for these films. However, the ‘modern' West as a more complex and multiple space has often been represented ‘outside' the so-called Western genre or reflected through the changing nature of the established genre, especially in the 1960s. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical frame for the idea of the ‘post-Western' as a ‘trans-genre' that both comes after and moves beyond the classical or traditional Western and yet in so doing engages both with the conventions of the established form and also interrogates themes and issues prominent in a more accurate consideration of the cultures of the post 1945 West.

In order to examine this generic mutation I will play with concepts of death and life, the burial of the past and its return, and the ghostliness of history - of the ‘posthumous' as a way of seeing that which emerges after a supposed ‘death'; a living inheritance of a form that finds new, regenerated expression in the ‘spectral' forms of the cinema. Using ideas derived from Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida in particular and linking to recent western studies work by Stephen Tatum on the ‘spectral', I will extend to a new analysis of contemporary western cinema.

My case study for this paper will be an early and critical example of this new form of cinema, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). A quote from the film suggests its self-conscious desire to explore the position of the West in the post-war era: "Somebody's always looking for something in this part of the West. To the historian it's the Old West, to the book writer it's the Wild West, to the businessman it's the Undeveloped West -- they say we're all poor and backward, and I guess we are, we don't even have enough water. But to us, this place is ‘our' West, and I wish they'd leave us alone!" In delving into some of the implications of Reno Smith's speech and how it reverberates through the film, I will propose the centrality of this movie to the definition of the post-Western and to its consequent development in later films such as Lone Star, The Misfits, Down in the Valley, and No Country For Old Men.

Bio

Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Research Manager at the University of Derby, U.K. He has published widely in American Studies, including the books American Cultural Studies (with Alasdair Kean), American Youth Cultures (as editor) and co-editor of Issues on Americanisation and Culture. He has published articles and chapters on John Sayles, Terrence Malick, Robert Frank, J.B. Jackson, Wim Wenders, D.J. Waldie and many others. He has recently edited two essay collections Land and Identity (Rodopi, 2011) and Photocinema (Intellect Books, forthcoming 2012).

His major research project is an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the contemporary American West. The first two are The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh, 2000) and The Rhizomatic West (Nebraska,2008) and he is currently editing the final part, Post-Westerns, on cinematic representations of the New West.

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CFS Talk: Neill Campbell, The posthumous and the post-Western: Theorising the Modern Cinematic West through John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock.

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