So I’ve decided the genre I shall explore with this project brief is the Western, in my current exploration I want to look at empathy within the western genre and write my exegesis based on how it is best evoked. Currently I am looking at articles on academia.com

• Westerns often depict a societal change. The town is often obsolete, a symbol of the past and it is threatened by industry and modernity.
• Unwritten social order as opposed to actual law.
• The heroes of Westerns are similar to how Knights were in old England.
• Simple tales of morality.
• The saloon holds the immorality within the wild west. Sex, alcohol and violence is drawn to the Saloon.
• The landscape/backdrop plays a part. It isolates the characters, it dwarves them and makes them come across as feeling lonely and isolated.
• Often its about a conflict between settles townspeople (civilisation) and an outsider (nature). This idea reminds me of No Country for Old Men where Anton Chigurh is described as an unpredictable force of nature, he flips the coin because like nature he operates by chance. I used to think of this character as a subversive character, an outsider more dangerous than the usual ineffective western villain, this is not the case, he quite literally epitomises the Western Villain.
• Revisionist Westerns: In Revisionist Westerns filmmakers began to depict subvert traditional Western tropes, they questioned the morality of using violence to test ones character and to prove someone as being right. They also began positively depicting Native Americans (as opposed to the traditional Western where they are depicted as villains).
• Allegorical
• Standard Western is often derided by its simplistic morality.
• Shorthand communication (villains where white etc)
• An individual bound by his own private code of honour. In No Country for Old Men Tommy Lee Jones’s character gives away being the sheriff because he can’t keep up with the times, there are simply too many evil doers. The sadness behind his final monologue is that he can’t even begin to abide by his own moral code, the world is too cruel.
• Richard Geres Bob Dylan in I’m Not There takes part in a quintessential Western Story. He is a townsman and has been a farmer in an old town for years, one day he leaves his house to go to town and see that the government is going to build a highway through the town. This is an example of the standard Westerns fear of modernity, of civilisation destroying its towns, its cultures way of life.
• Often in the Western the backdrop is a symbol for the protagonist. The vast, isolated desert reflects the individualistic, lonely protagonist.
• Often long shots begin the film, showing the open space that the protagonist will have to survive in, in order to live.
• Masculinity is often depicted in traditional westerns.
• A mixture of closeups, point of view shots and wide panoramic shots create an uneasy, lonely feel.

My Sources

• http://resources.desmet.org/bergman/a%20ink%20to%20screen/Western.pdf

Critique of the Western Genre in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man