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Post-Westerns
Cinema, Region, West
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Book Presentation:
During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America’s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply “maintaining its empty frame.” Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films—including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men—reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself.
Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact “ghost-Westerns,” haunted by the earlier form’s devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values.
About the Author:
Neil Campbell is professor of American studies and senior research fellow at the University of Derby, England. He is the author of The Rhizomatic West: Representing the West in the Global, Media Age (Nebraska, 2008) and the editor of, most recently, Photocinema: The Creative Edges of Photography and Film.
Press Reviews:
"Readers of western history and literature and, of course, fans of the Western will find Campbell's insights and interpretations a compelling reason to revisit the post-Westerns he analyzes so well."—Leonard Engel, Western Historical Quarterly
"This is the work of a mature, well-informed scholar very much at the top of his game."—James F. Scott, Western American Literature
"Post-Westerns is distinguished by its theoretical sophistication, its brilliant close readings of the form and content of a diversity of modern and contemporary films, and its close meditation on the potential politics associated with such films [as they] address the intersection of memory, identity, and history."—Stephen Tatum, author of In the Remington Moment
Published On: 2013-07-08
See the publisher website: University of Nebraska Press
> From the same author:
Photocinema (2013)
The Creative Edges of Photography and Film
Dir. Neil Campbell and Alfredo Cramerotti
Subject: General
> On a related topic:
The Hero's Trail (2022)
Myth and Art in the American Western, 1903–1953
Myth of the Western (2014)
New Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative
Westerns (2012)
The Essential 'Journal of Popular Film and Television' Collection
Dir. Gary Edgerton and Michael Marsden
Hollywood's West (2008)
The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History
by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor
Our Country/Whose Country? (2024)
Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism
by Richard Abel
Subject: Countries > United States
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