Du western au crépusculaire : textualités et narrativités du genre pour une approche de l'image-fin
Our study is centered on the “Twilight western” (western crépusculaire) and is more precisely concerned with the “Twilight” aspect of the genre. The "Twilight" epithet, inherited from the French critical vocabulary of the 1960s and 1970s, encompasses a relatively restrained number of works whose stories, often associated with revisionist discourses, or as “pro-indian westerns”, are dedicated to aging cowboys with a style where aesthetical and psychological realism is put forward in favor of showing how these tired protagonists feel outdated and outmarched by History. By a turn on the literary forms that have for their diegetic background the American West (dime-novels and novels more generally contextualized at the border), our research is structured by a back and forth between the epic and romantic forms of narration, between History and its myths, and moreover between the literary form and the filmic form for a better grasp of the dyadic relationship that the West entertain with its writing of History, both with its more monumental and critical approaches. Less interested towards the aesthetic of these “Twilight” images than the narratological aspects of the film considered as text, our approach is founded on literary analysis to better challenge the classifications which have marked the evolution of the Western film. Based on the intuitions of film critic André Bazin on the “sur-western” (high western), we study the narrative modulations of the genre as much as the emergence of a critical awareness from its mythological heroes (mostly the cowboy). Our approach is epistemological as it is transhistorical since it seeks to conceptualize “Twilight western” as a genre beyond genres, not established on a collection of semantical observations, but on the incitement of a twilight narrativization that emerges from the viewer. We concentrate this narrativization alongside the deleuzian crystal-image as not only an existentialist conception of the western genre in regards to History, but also as a highlighting of cinema’s “hors-cadre” (beyond-frame) perceived as an enlightenment that is both pragmatic and historicizing. We define this precise kind of historiographical image as an “image-fin” (end-image), a chronogenetic image axed on the contemporaneity of theses mythological figures and their authors.
western western crépusculaire dime-novel mythologies contemporaines Gilles Deleuze The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance twilight western historiography contemporary mythologies philosophy and cinema