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Publicado: 14 de noviembre de 2012
Characteristics
The American Film Institute defines western films as those "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier.
The term Western, usedto describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World Magazine.
Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th centurypopular Western fiction and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form. Western films commonly feature as their protagonists stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bountyhunters, often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival, and ride between dusty towns and cattleranches on trusty steeds.
Western films were enormously popular in the silent era although, in common with all films of this period, relatively few of the thousands of silent Westerns made have survived tothe present.
However, with the advent of sound in 1927-28 the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers, who churned out countlesslow-budget features and serials in the 1930s. By the late 1930s the Western film was widely regarded as a 'pulp' genre in Hollywood, but its popularity was dramatically revived in 1939 by the release ofJohn Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach, which became one of the biggest hits of the year released though United Artists, and made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade ofheadlining.
There are many subgenres of the typical or traditional western, to name a few:
* the epic Western (The Big Country 1958)
* the 'singing cowboy' Western (films of Gene Autry andRoy Rogers, see below)
* the "spaghetti" Western (the "Man With No Name" trilogy of films by Sergio Leone)
* the "noir" Western (Pursued 1947)
* the "contemporary" Western (Had 1963)...
The American Film Institute defines western films as those "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier.
The term Western, usedto describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World Magazine.
Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th centurypopular Western fiction and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form. Western films commonly feature as their protagonists stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bountyhunters, often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival, and ride between dusty towns and cattleranches on trusty steeds.
Western films were enormously popular in the silent era although, in common with all films of this period, relatively few of the thousands of silent Westerns made have survived tothe present.
However, with the advent of sound in 1927-28 the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers, who churned out countlesslow-budget features and serials in the 1930s. By the late 1930s the Western film was widely regarded as a 'pulp' genre in Hollywood, but its popularity was dramatically revived in 1939 by the release ofJohn Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach, which became one of the biggest hits of the year released though United Artists, and made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade ofheadlining.
There are many subgenres of the typical or traditional western, to name a few:
* the epic Western (The Big Country 1958)
* the 'singing cowboy' Western (films of Gene Autry andRoy Rogers, see below)
* the "spaghetti" Western (the "Man With No Name" trilogy of films by Sergio Leone)
* the "noir" Western (Pursued 1947)
* the "contemporary" Western (Had 1963)...
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