This document discusses the genre of the Western film. It provides both a semantic and syntactic approach to understanding the genre. The semantic approach focuses on the consistent elements, settings, character types, and conflicts that define the genre. The syntactic approach examines how the genre developed over time through changing relationships between elements, such as the clashes between nature vs. culture and the individual vs. community in the American West. Key conventions of the Western include settings in the 1840-1900 American West along with character archetypes like the nomadic loner hero.

1. Genre: The Western

2. Genre
A category of film, such as the western, the
horror film, the costume drama, the
melodrama, and so on, with recognizable
conventions and character types.

3. Semantic Approach Syntactic Approach
Focus on similarities Focus on change and
development over
Fixed meanings, what time
remains constant
Variable relationships
between structured
Building blocks of the elements
genre

4. Semantic Approach Syntactic Approach
The Western is a film The Western is a
whose action, genre that results
situated in the from several
American West, is overlapping thematic
consistent with the clashes: the West as
atmosphere , the
desert vs. the West as
values, and the
conditions of garden; nature vs.
existence in the Far culture; the individual
West between 1840 vs. community.
and 1900.

5. Semantic Approach Syntactic Approach
= broad applicability. = explanatory power.

6. Semantic Approach Syntactic Approach
The Western hero is How do variations in
typically a nomadic the Western hero
male loner who represent changing
comes to town, images of masculinity
purges it of its savage and changing attitudes
or criminal elements, toward the history of
and leaves. He is Western settlement?
often motivated by
revenge and/or a
sense of justice.

7. Conventions
(Semantic Elements)
o Settings
o Character Types
o Costumes and Props
o Plots/Situations
o Conflicts
o Cinematic elements:
cinematography, mise-en-
scene

8. Overlapping Thematic Clashes
(Syntactic Relationships)
The West as The West as
as garden vs. as desert
Culture Nature
Community Individual

9. The Western as Myth
“ . . . in The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956)
there is a direct confrontation with the fact that
the origin of the territorial U.S. rested on a
virulent racism and genocidal war against
aboriginal peoples, a war that would not have
been possible and perhaps would not have been
won without the racist hatred of characters like
the John Wayne character.”
- Robert B. Pippin, “What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in
John Ford’s The Searchers,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009)

10. Repeated Images
in The Searchers

21. Marriages on the Border
Debbie and Scar
Marty and Look
Marty and Laurie