The western: the genre that invented the myth of the West

A street of beaten earth, two men face to face, hand over the revolver. Around them, a saloon with swinging doors, a leaden sun, silence. In the distance, the red buttes of a desert that seems to have no end. In a few shots, everything is said: we are in a western, and America is telling itself its own legend.

The western is the most emblematic film genre of the United States, the one that put into images the myth of the conquest of the West in the nineteenth century. Cowboys and outlaws, sheriffs and duels, deserts and stagecoaches: behind its immediately recognisable codes hides a genre that shaped, and sometimes distorted, the idea America has of its origins.

The myth of the Frontier#

The western draws its material from a founding moment of American history: the conquest of the West, that push of settlers towards the western territories during the nineteenth century. At the heart of the genre is the notion of the Frontier — that moving line between civilisation and wilderness, where, according to the myth, the very character of the nation is played out: individualism, courage, the law of the strongest and conquest.

From this historical base, the western drew a repertoire of figures and settings: the lone cowboy, the avenging sheriff, the outlaw, the bounty hunter; the saloon, the stagecoach, the railroad, the little wooden town planted in the middle of nowhere. The grandiose landscapes of the desert, notably the buttes of Monument Valley, became the very face of the genre.

The western does not film the West as it was, but as America wanted to remember it: a theatre of conquest and courage.

From the golden age to John Ford#

The western is almost as old as cinema itself. As early as 1903, The Great Train Robbery, a film of a few minutes, laid the foundations of the genre with its train robbery and its famous shot of a bandit firing towards the camera. The western thus accompanied the birth of Hollywood and became, for decades, one of its pillars.

Its golden age is inseparable from one name: John Ford, a filmmaker who raised the genre to the rank of art. With Stagecoach (1939), he revealed to the general public the actor John Wayne, who would become the very embodiment of the cowboy. Ford would film many times in Monument Valley, signing major works such as The Searchers, where the myth already begins to crack.

The spaghetti western#

In the 1960s, the genre experienced a second youth from an unexpected country: Italy. The director Sergio Leone reinvented the western with a trilogy in which a still little-known American actor, Clint Eastwood, played a laconic avenger with a cigar and a poncho. A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: these films, shot in Europe, were immediately christened spaghetti westerns.

More violent, more stylised, more cynical than their Hollywood models, these films owe part of their legend to the music of Ennio Morricone, whose whistles and guitars have become inseparable from the genre. The spaghetti western dusted off the codes and proved that the American myth could be revisited by other gazes.

The twilight and the soul-searching#

From the 1960s and 1970s, the western entered its twilight, or "revisionist," age. Filmmakers no longer celebrated the conquest: they questioned its violence, showed its underside, and finally posed the long-evaded question of the treatment of Native Americans. For the glorious myth of the western long concealed a far darker historical reality — the dispossession and massacre of the indigenous peoples, often reduced, on screen, to mere adversaries.

A worldwide legacy#

Even in decline as a dominant genre, the western has watered all of cinema. Its codes — the duel, the lone hero, the clash of good and evil in a lawless space — are found transposed in science fiction, the action film or Japanese cinema (and vice versa, Leone himself drawing inspiration from Kurosawa). Few genres have travelled so much.

The western remains the great narrative that America made of itself, with its glories and its grey areas. To discover it is to understand how a country manufactures its myths — and to learn English is to be able to savour the laconic dialogue of a duel, grasp the meaning of the word Frontier and enter the imagination that shaped Hollywood.

FAQ#

What is a western? The western is an American film genre that stages the myth of the conquest of the West in the nineteenth century: cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws, revolver duels, saloons and vast desert spaces. It is one of the most emblematic genres of Hollywood.

Who are the great filmmakers of the western? John Ford is the major figure of the golden age, who revealed John Wayne (Stagecoach, 1939). In the 1960s, the Italian Sergio Leone reinvented the genre with the spaghetti western and Clint Eastwood, to the music of Ennio Morricone.

What is a spaghetti western? It is a western made in Europe, mainly in Italy, in the 1960s. The term, at first mocking, designates the films of Sergio Leone (the trilogy with Clint Eastwood), more violent and stylised than the classic Hollywood westerns.

Why do we speak of the revisionist western? From the 1960s-1970s, the twilight or revisionist western ceased to glorify the conquest: it showed its violence and questioned the treatment of Native Americans, long concealed or caricatured by the traditional myth of the genre.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.