LA Art Girls

westerns @ lacma

LACMA has a Westerns film series that goes hand-in-hand with "The Modern West" Anyone up for "HUD" and "The Last Picture Show" ?

After World War II, a new "darkness" and skepticism toward authority pervaded American popular culture, a change in the national mood that registered almost immediately in the expressionist lighting and alienated heroes of film noir. With its archetypal narratives and mythic protagonists, the Western was considered immune, but the changes were inevitable: the genre became more violent, the heroes more conflicted, and the stories more allegorical. One of the earliest Westerns to manifest an expressionist style was The Ox-Bow Incident, William A. Wellman's seventy-five-minute film about a lynching with the fatalism and momentum of a Shakespearean tragedy. Winchester ’73 was the first of five Westerns by Anthony Mann that starred James stewart as a troubled anti-hero. And in The Searchers John Wayne was seemingly transformed overnight from hero to psycho while director John Ford, whose films had defined the classic Western for twenty years, demonstrated that the genre could achieve unexpected dramatic power and psychological insight not by perpetuating its mythic archetypes but by reexamining them.

Searchers, Misfits, and Left-Handed Guns is designed to complement the exhibition The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950 and showcases eighteen films: the three masterpieces mentioned above, nine revisionist Westerns that reflect the influence of the new countercultural Hollywood and the Vietnam War, two recent films that examine the American West from a European perspective, and four acclaimed character studies set in what has come to be called the New West.

Friday, April 13
7:30 pm The Searchers (1956/color/119 min.)
9:40 pm Ulzana's Raid (1972/color/103 min.)
Special guest: screenwriter and associate producer Alan Sharp will be present for a Q&A following the screening.

Saturday, April 14
7:30 pm The Misfits (1961/b&w/124 min.)
9:45 pm Junior Bonner (1972/color/100 min./CinemaScope)

Friday, April 20
7:30 pm Winchester '73 (1950/b&w/92 min.)
9:15 pm High Plains Drifter (1973/color/101 min./Panavision)

Saturday, April 21
7:30 pm Johnny Guitar (1954/color/110 min.)
9:30 pm Forty Guns (1957/b&w/80 min./CinemaScope)

Friday, April 27
7:30 pm The Ox-Bow Incident (1943/b&w/75 min.)
9:00 pm The Wild Bunch (1969/color/145 min./Panavision)

Saturday, April 28
7:30 pm Hud (1963/b&w/111 min./Panavision)
9:30 pm The Last Picture Show (1971/b&w/118 min.)

Friday, May 4
7:30 pm The Left-Handed Gun (1958/b&w/102 min.)
9:30 pm Dead Man (1995/b&w/120 min.)

Saturday, May 5
7:30 pm McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971/color/121 min./Panavision)
9:40 pm Electra Glide in Blue (1973/color/114 min./Panavision)

Friday, May 11
7:30 pm Once Upon a Time in the West (1968/color/165 min./CinemaScope)

Saturday, May 12
7:30 pm Paris, Texas (1984/color/147 min.)

Posted by Elizabeth at 08:23 AM | Comments (0)