Movie Club—Unforgiven

This month the Movie Club will be screening Clint Eastwood's elegy to the western, Unforgiven. Directed by Eastwood, he also stars alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and Richard Harrison. Made at a time when the popularity of the western had long since gone, Unforgiven nonetheless won Academy Awards for Best Film and Best Director for Eastwood. What's more, it has provided very striking commentary on the western tradition as a whole from one of its most recognisable faces.

A pair of cowboys disfigure a prostitute, Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Levine), in Big Whiskey, Wyoming. The local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Hackman), is a former gunfighter and extracts harsh punishment on any transgressions in his town. But with the cowboys his concern is not for the disfigured prostitute, but for brothel owner Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) and the financial losses of having a "cut-up" prostitute. This leads the other prostitutes led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) to gather $1000 for a bounty on the two cowboys. This brings all manner of former and current gunslingers to town, including English Bob (Harris), the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), and Ned Logan (Freeman) and William Munny (Eastwood), leading to violent confrontations with Little Bill as he tries to maintain the order of his town.

The film has all the hallmarks of a classic western, from the hardened gunfighters to the striking but harsh landscape that establishes the human toil. But all of these are questioned, from the nobility of violence to the increasing commercialisation of the west where the moral absolutes and the belief in violence as a solution are made entirely ambiguous.

The film will be screened on Wednesday 11 May at 6pm at Narellan Library, Corner of Queen and Elyard Street, Narellan. Tea, coffee, and biscuits provided, but BYO snacks are more than welcome. Stay after the screening to share your thoughts about the film and join in a discussion about the many intriguing commentaries the film makes. 

Film Review—Slow West

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young Scottish man, has come to the American West to search for his love Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Along the way he meets bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) who agrees to accompany him along the way to Rose in exchange for a nominal fee. What Jay doesn’t know is that Silas is also looking for Rose, hoping to collect the $2,000 bounty on her and her father’s heads.

The genre of the Western gives the film a set of conventions to play with, both to utilize and subvert. This is done mainly with its setting in Colorado although being filmed in New Zealand. This gives it some hallmarks that resemble the cinematic iconography of the western genre but gives it a distinct flavour that clearly demarcates it.  It lacks the extreme harshness expected of the setting, but is by no means less striking. It allows for rapid shifts in the environment, both by changes in landscape itself but also by cinematic shifts in lighting, that directly affects the story. The west is not a bland setting, but can be both a place of violence and suffering or of dreams and toil. “Love is universal, like death”, young Jay is told, and these two extremes, perfectly twined in the western setting, are in full force in Slow West.

A land of beauty and bleakness, Slow West treks this manifold landscape with masterful skill.

Andreas

Movie Club—The Searchers

This month’s Movie Club screening is The Searchers. One of 14 collaborations between John Wayne and John Ford, the film has gone on to gain critical acclaim, often considered one of the greatest westerns of all time.

Ethan Edwards is a Civil War veteran who fought on the side of the Confederacy. After returning to his brother’s home in Texas they are attacked by a Comanche raiding party. The only survivor is his niece who has been taken, and Edwards embarks on a five year long journey to save them.

Edwards is obsessive, unrelenting, and flawed. The motives for his unending search are less to bring his niece back to civilisation than to remove her from the clutches of the Comaches, even if that means killing her. At the heart of the film is Ford’s look at the role of race in the development of the American West and the Western film genre to which he made significant contributions. This has led the film to gain a reputation as a revisionist Western. But the question remains if its actual intention came through or if it is simply another addition to a genre that is so based on and so enthralled in the conflict between white settlers and native Americans.

Either way it is a technically stunning piece of cinematography from a master director as well as having a lot going on in its reels. The screening will be Wednesday 8 July at 6pm at Narellan Library with a discussion about all the ideas and depictions afterwards. Share your thoughts or use the discussion questions to get a debate going.

Book Review: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams

John William’s third novel, Stoner (originally published in 1965), was heralded as a ‘must read’ of 2013. Now, his earlier work, Butcher’s Crossing (1960), is receiving similar treatment, with invocations of Herman Melville as influence and Cormac McCarthy as successor. 

Bostonian Will Andrews travels to Western frontier country, to Butcher’s Crossing, a town, or rather inhabited road, filled with rumoured prosperity and dwindling reality. The economy is based on buffalo hide and the train is said to be coming through. But times are tough, with the buffalo population on its last whispers. Andrews convinces, or is convinced by, Miller, a seasoned hunter, to partake in a tall-tale expedition to a hidden, untouched valley with several thousand head of buffalo. Although promising to be lucrative, for Andrews this is not about money but experience. It is the grand adventure that entices Andrews.

As the expedition continues aggression exacerbates into fatigue, with the negotiations between hatred and dependence, the wild and the controlled, nature and man, becoming the staples of life. The promise of the grand adventure dwindles into the frivolity of reality. Certainly a must read of 2014. 

Andreas.