Criticism First Cow: the best western also wants its trans law
Review The Sisters Brothers: Masterful Intimate Open-Air Western
Criticism 'The rider' or the frontier of the soul
Festival 'The world to come': the 'western' without guns or cinema free from its eternal and stale obsession with phalluses
At the end of 2017, with the Weinstein case still festering,
Filmmaker
magazine
surprised with an article by Nina Menkes. In it, the independent director cleaned up a good part of what was already commonplace in non-strictly feminist specialized criticism. It was not so much of a revelation what was read in
The visual language of oppression
(The visual language of coercion) as a certainty that the rude, known and permitted crimes of the Miramax owner corroborated to the point of nausea. Namely, the culture of rape as an epiphenomenon of what is called machismo is not only a matter of arguments, plots, archetypes and poetic clichés but, more crudely, reaches the core of the way of looking. It is the lighting, the framing, the soundtrack ... all that which generically constitutes the language of cinema that justifies
"the action of the stalkers and the humiliated silence of the victims
.
"
The codes that cinema has given itself, he continued, idealize "the ego, male power, and economic gain at any cost above all else." And so.
And in those,
First cow
appears
,
recently released, and, more specifically, the western, as perhaps a paradigm of a good part of the evils that the first paragraph exposes, rethought both by its director
Kelly Reichardt
and by some other colleague
(Chloé Zhao and Mona Fastvold,
for example) who, like her, recompose their visual language from a different, sustainable, feminist, enlightened or simply non-caveman point of view.
'The western,' Reichardt reasons, 'is a genre that constantly focuses on intense situations dedicated to proving the hero's masculinity.
When I watched movies like
Desert Centaurs
, from Ford, I was wondering what the woman serving the soup would say if someone asked her about the absurd bravado of what she was hearing. "
That was, the director reasons, the starting point for her film
Meek's Cutoff
, a desert western shot in 2010 that stopped in the silent despair of settlers heading west. Now, in
First cow,
the story is told of a cook traveling through Oregon with some trappers. There, in the midst of the fever for beaver skins, the protagonist and a mysterious Chinese immigrant start a business selling donuts. As it is.
The milk of the only cow in the region,
hence the title, it will become a treasure and the key to all conquests.
Suddenly, from an assumption between surreal and simply brilliant, the great American myth is questioned and, if necessary, even capitalism itself based on plunder, domination and inherited privilege.
“I was surprised by the effect of beaver hunting in the area and, above all, I was struck by the arrogance about the natural world.
The idea was to recover a dignified and respectful gesture for heroism and exaltation.
The heroic thing is not that a tough guy survives, wins and gets drunk afterwards, but that a kind man who bakes cakes does it ... It is already well of that heroism of masculinity,
of the white masculinity that never dies ...
Reichardt says at a good pace. If his previous western dealt with analyzing the very essence of time through the gaze of those women who wrote in their diaries the leisurely flow of landscapes and endless days, now the idea is to rewrite the ways, uses and customs. There is also something that links each film with the specific moment of its premiere. "The first is about a guy who doesn't seem to know what he's doing and takes his people into the desert without having a plan to get him out," he says. Bush? "And in the second the reply to the protagonist is given by an abuser." Trump? "Let each draw their conclusions." And there he leaves it.
Be that as it may, and despite the drive to refute the rules has always been there in timeless classics like
Johnny Guitar
or modern classics like
Brokeback Mountain
, the truth is that few genres so explicitly invite revolt right now. The director recently awarded at the Oscars for
Nomadland
, proposed in
The rider
(2017) something similar. Chloé Zhao recalled how paradoxical it was to find a professional rodeo Native American on an Indian reservation in Dakota. And from there, from the contradiction, not from the clarity of the myth, was born the need to portray "a life, that of rodeo professionals, essentially hazardous and unstable light years away from the romantic and intact western universe," he reasoned. And he continued:
«The hero has to regain his vulnerable face.
The masculine gaze eliminates nuances, dehumanizes ». Not far behind, Mona Fastvold gave the lead in
The World to Come
last year
to two women in love.
Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston
they played two colonists in the middle of nowhere suddenly surprised by the inability to understand a love for which they had not been educated and whose rules were about to be written on the very surface of both their bodies and of an untamed and wild land. His adventure of giving a story to his feeling also became the obligation to challenge all inherited stories. "My idea was not to rethink the western but to use its landscape to do something necessarily different," commented the director at the Venice Film Festival.
Menkes wrote about her experience as a teacher and how her female students have come to internalize what Tarantino called the
"Jim Crow system"
(in reference to the monstrous laws of segregation incorporated into everyday life).
Well, Reichardt and his hold on.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
movie theater
culture
USA
Oscars 2021 Oscars moments: from Glenn Close's dogging to Daniel Kaluuya's parents' sex
TelevisionThe Oscars gala records in 2021 the worst audience data in its history
Five reasons not to miss Nomadland, an Oscar movie
See links of interest
Holidays 2021
Home THE WORLD TODAY
RETAbet Bilbao Basket - Club Joventut de Badalona
15th stage of the Giro d'Italia, live: Grado - Gorizia
Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix, live
Internazionale - Udinese
UCAM Murcia - Casademont Zaragoza