Marek Paryz (University of Warsaw), “Unwanted Salvation: The Use of the Savior Formula in Andreas Prochaska’s The Dark Valley (2014)”
- document 1 document 2 document 3
- niveau 1 niveau 2 niveau 3
- audio 1 audio 2 audio 3
Descriptif
The Austrian film The Dark Valley (dir. Andreas Prochaska, 2014) provides a uniqueattestation to the applicability of the convention of the Western forproblematizing context-specific social and cultural issues. The film featuresan American man named Greider who arrives at a godforsaken Austrian villagelocated in the mountains. As it turns out later, he comes there to avenge thefather who had been killed before his birth. The village community isterrorized by the Brenner family, the descendants of the village’s founders.The Brenner patriarch and his sons follow very special rules regarding nuptialceremonies: on the wedding night, every bride, instead of consummating themarriage with her husband, comes off with the Brenner clan. They execute theirprivilege with utmost relentlessness and allow no exceptions. On one suchoccasion, Greider stands up against the Brenners and successfully defends anewly married couple. This confrontation will eventually culminate in a bloodyshootout. This paper discusses the ways in which The Dark Valley employs narrative scripts of the Western genre soas to showcase a particular kind of cultural experience. The film combines arevenge plot with a savior formula, foregrounding the ways in which therevenger’s intervention helps to eliminate the source of oppression and restorea moral order within the oppressed community. An anticipated positive change ofthe community’s life redeems the revenger’s egoistical motivation. However, in The Dark Valley the narratives of revengeand salvation ultimately diverge because the villagers, on the whole, are farfrom being grateful for the help offered by Greider. They are all, in one senseor another, former victims who have failed to prevent the terror sanctioned bythe local tradition, and their passiveness is virtually tantamount tocomplicity. The logic of the savior formula thus becomes undone, underminingthe moral sanction of revenge. Importantly, Greider’s interventionist actionexpresses not only an personal craving, but also a sense of culturalsuperiority, even if the protagonist does not manifest this in any discernibleway. Being an American, Greider embodies the far-reaching forces ofglobalization and technological advancement, as contrasted with a local,self-contained culture; and this difference has been most symbolicallyreflected by the respective weapons used by Greider and his opponents (therepeating rifle vs. the breechloading rifle).
Thèmes
Notice
Dans la même collection
-
Samira Nadkarni (Independent Scholar), "Chhattisgarh as India’s Frontier: Reading Masurkar’s Newton…
Amit V. Masurkar’s 2017 film, Newton is simultaneously a satire and reconfirmation of the myths of democratic nationhood, exploring a postcolonial narrative of internal colonisation in the creation
-
Jesus Angel Gonzalez Lopez (Universidad de Cantabria, Santander), "Transnational Post-Westerns in F…
The concept of transnational post-Westerns stems from Neil Campbell’s definition of post-Westerns as films “coming after and going beyond the traditional Western [genre] while engaging with and
-
Hadrien Fontanaud (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), • “Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962): Refra…
Filmed in 1962, Lawrence of Arabia offers a critical look on British imperialism. Yet this British and American co-production draws on the Empire films of the 1930’s: it focuses on one of the
-
Delphine Robic-Diaz (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), “Claude Bernard-Aubert's Les Tripes au …
Claude Bernard-Aubert est un ancien combattant d'Indochine (comme Pierre Schoendoerffer qu'il a d'ailleurs côtoyé à cette époque), auteur de Patrouille de choc, 1er film sur la guerre d
-
Fareed Ben-Youssef (NYU Shanghai), “'Just Make Me Look Good’: The Duel Against Mythic Representatio…
Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao has established herself as a foremost chronicler of the experience of Native American youth. Her Westerns—"Songs My Brother Taught Me" (2015) and "The Rider" (2017)
-
Seung-Hwan Shin (University of Pittsburgh), "North by West: The Manchurian Western and Minoritarian…
Reflecting on the Western’s development after WWII, André Bazin noted, “Its roots continue to spread under the Hollywood humus and…robust suckers spring up in the midst of the seductive but sterile
-
Table ronde "Contemporary Western FIlm Studies"
Roundtable on Contemporary Western Film Studies Chair: Hervé Mayer, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 With, from left to right, Matthew Carter (Manchester Metropolitan University), Andrew Patrick
-
Céline Murillo (Université Sorbonne Paris Cité), “The Mimic Indians in Westerns : a Transnational C…
When Nobody, the native American character in Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), recounts his travels as “an exhibit” in Europe, he explains that, to avoid attracting the attention he started to imitate
-
Costanza Salvi (Bologna University), “John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy: American Imperialism or Irish Re…
Loosely based on James Warner Bellah’s stories published on Saturday Evening Post, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950) are pervaded with a jingoism totally
-
Jenny Barrett (Edge Hill University), “(Not) John Wayne & (Not) the American West in Jauja (2014): …
Until Jauja (2014), Argentine director Lisandro had filmed only contemporary stories of isolated men in a long-take, observational style with non-professional actors, said to centre on ‘men who
-
Patrick Adamson (University of St Andrews), "Transnationalism and the Transcontinental Railroad: Ex…
The Covered Wagon (1923) has long been regarded as a landmark in the development of both the western genre and the historical film. Paramount’s epic, along with the cycle of large-form westerns
Sur le même thème
-
Marco Caracciolo: Rhythm and Scalar Levels in Reading FictionCaraccioloMarcoSorlinSandrine
Marco Caracciolo, Rythme et niveaux scalaires dans la lecture de fiction. Intervention au sein du séminaire de recherche des Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone (EMMA, Université Montpellier 3
-
Claude Chastagner, "Black Lives Matter, un nouveau terrain pour la protest song ?"ChastagnerClaude
Claude Chastagner (UPVM3, EMMA)
-
-
Lawrence Aje, « Entre reconnaissance et effacement : la mémorialisation publique de l’esclavage aux…AjeLawrence
Lawrence Aje (UPVM3, EMMA)
-
Marc Lenormand, « Les manifestations antiracistes de 2020 au Royaume-Uni: référence états-unienne e…LenormandMarc
Marc Lenormand (UPVM3, EMMA)
-
Hervé Mayer, « Black Bodies/White Spaces: the Horrors of White Supremacy in Get Out (Jordan Peele, …MayerHervé
Hervé Mayer (UPVM3, EMMA)
-
Nicolas Tournadre (AMU, Institut Universitaire de France, LACITO), "The Status of Egophoric Markers…
After having discussed some definitions of evidentiality and epistemic modality, I will concentrate upon the main characteristics of the Tibetic Evidential-Epistemic systems, which are among the
-
Jan Nuyts (University of Antwerp), On the relations between evidentiality and modality
This talk focuses on whether or not the domains of evidentiality and modality relate, and if so, how they relate. The literature does not give a simple answer to this question, mainly because
-
Pr. Bernd Heine (Köln University), "The grammar of interactives: The challenge of discourse"
Most work on grammatical analysis has focused on the structure of clauses and sentences organized in a propositional format. Work on discourse processing and the organization of texts suggests,
-
Alexandra Aikhenvald (Central Queensland University), The Web of knowledge: Evidentiality at the cr…
Knowledge can be expressed in language using a plethora of grammatical means. Four major groups of meanings related to knowledge are Evidentiality: grammatical expression of information source;
-
Praxis politique du cinéma populaire étatsunien : les ambigüités du numérique dans Black Panther (R…MayerHervé
Cette séance de séminaire du laboratoire EMMA (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) s'inscrit dans l'axe 3 du laboratoire intitulé "faire commun". Elle est animée par Hervé Mayer est consacrée à la
-
Roger Sell (Åbo Akademi University, Turku Finland), "You, Me, and Dickens, Plus Lots of Others: The…
In my view literary activity is one form of communication among others. In this paper, I shall be discussing the extent to which communication in general, but more especially literary communication