French Westerns

Recent film theory has reframed genre as a discursive gesture, and pressures the idea of a national cinema by bringing to light local, regional, and transnational practices. In French Westerns: On the Frontier of Film Genre and National Cinema, Timothy Scheie explores the volatile arena where the acts of imagination to which 'French' and 'Western' owe their coherence fail repeatedly, productively, and at times spectacularly. Each chapter illuminates this unstable conjunction with a close reading of representative films that position the Western genre alongside French referents: landscapes, regional traditions, post-war modernization, language, stars and the events of May 1968. The films span the history of cinema, and include vehicles for stars like Fernandel, Johnny Hallyday and Brigitte Bardot, as well as the work of directors Christian-Jaque, Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard. Scheie traces how the encounter of the Western genre and French cinema persists into the twenty-first century as both a discordant provocation and a generator of possibilities. Timothy Scheie in an Associate Professor of French at University of Rochester.