Cultures de l'image

New conversation on the western. Ultra-violence and idiosyncratic women (and men) in two contemporary western TV series 

Bloodletting, as historian Richard Slotkin has shown in his works Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier1600-1860 (1973) and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th-Century America (1992) is at the core of American society and history. It has actively formatted any form of storytelling since the early days of the first permanent settlements. Early narrative cinema and subsequent TV series are no exception to the rule. The criminal and murderer using violence as a first, not a last, resort has always been a prominent fixture in America’s media rhetoric and film. Westerns, and more specifically contemporary serial westerns, are most often predicated on violence. They reflect its place in and impact on the American mediascape and American society at large. 
Using two contemporary western limited series, Scott Frank’s Godless (Netflix, 2017, 7 ep.) and Mark L. Smith’s American Primeval (Netflix, 2025, 6 ep.) as case studies, we’ll consider how the representation of violence displays a more specific and extreme dimension in the contemporary western. In Godless (with Michelle Dockery, Jeff Daniels & Jack O’Connell), Frank’s approach to the genre mostly hinges on the iconoclastic roles played by the women of the city of La Belle, NM, in the 1880s where most men have been killed in a mining accident. Along with his producing partner Steven Soderbergh, he explores the birth of a new kind of social contract foregrounding independent, powerful women who have to resort to male-oriented strategies, among others, to fight back uber-villains & who hence redefine the rules of a traditionally male-centered Wild West. In American Primeval (with Taylor Kitsch, Betty Gilpin & Dane DeHaan), Smith also crafts an unflinchingly unsentimental gritty tale of survival on the Frontier in the 1850s, focusing on the head-on collision between men and more specifically one woman, Sara, & her young son Devin. He chronicles the fierce fight for control of the new world between various military groups, religious movements like the Utah Mormons & indigenous people against the general backdrop of the conflict over the appropriation of the land of Native Americans& the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre.
We'll also explore to what extent the genre and its serial codes and conventions affect the viewer’s watching habits and shape his or her tolerance for the representation of pain, murder, and torture. If ultraviolence is gendered, can it be said that this particular strain of violence is no longer the sole characteristic of men, but of idiosyncratic women as well, in recent opuses? We’ll highlight how these contemporary works foreground institutional and psychological violence as well as the intrinsic connection between violence and political power. The two shows will be placed in the general serial context to analyze their specific modes of inscription of these issues, as well as their aesthetic and formal strategies. The narrative centrality of the female protagonists will be also be explored using a historical approach taking as well into account the peculiar context of production of these new forms of westerns.  

Se familiariser avec les œuvres, courants et enjeux majeurs du paysage sériel américain contemporain.

• Aborder la production artistique dans ses rapports au contexte historique et culturel de différentes périodes et aux usages qui en sont faits. Se pencher sur la représentation à l’écran et son évolution récente des minorités, et en particulier de la communauté afro-américaine.

• Renforcer les outils de l’analyse de l’image, tant dans une visée généraliste (être capable de décrypter l’image animée, d’en comprendre les codes iconographiques et sémiologiques et les usages, pouvoir en proposer une discussion en anglais), que dans l’optique de la préparation aux concours de l’enseignement.

SESSION 1 : Écrit de 3h = 100% 

SESSION 2 : Écrit de 3h = 100%

Anglais C1 et équivalent.

Savoir analyser et commenter une série télévisée et sélectionner ses extraits les plus significatifs.

Connaître le vocabulaire technique en anglais et en français.

Maîtriser le contexte historique tout en prenant en compte la dimension esthétique, symbolique et formelle de l'œuvre. 

Bibliography (to be completed in class):

Bandy, Mary Lea and Kevin Stoehr, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 2012.
Gilpatric, Katy, “Violent Female Action Characters in Contemporary American Cinema”, Sex Roles (2010) 62:734–746.
Hale, Mike, “Netflix’s ‘Godless,’ a Western With a Little Bit of Everything”, The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/arts/television/godless-netflix-tv-review.html
Hine, Robert, John Mack Farragher & Jon Coleman, The American West: A New Interpretative History, second Edition. New Haven: Yale UP, 2017.
Kitses, Jim. Horizons West. London: BFI, [1969] 2004.
Nevins, Jake, “Godless review – Netflix's wonderfully wicked western fires on all cylinders”, The Guardian, 22 Nov 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/nov/22/godless-review-netflix-wonderfully-wicked-western-fires-on-all-cylinders
Onion, Rebecca, “What American Primeval Gets Right—and Wrong—About the Darkest Chapter in Mormon History”, Slate, Jan 10, 2025. https://slate.com/culture/2025/01/american-primeval-netflix-mormon-brigham-young-true-story-utah-war-mountain-meadows-massacre.html
Rollins, Peter C. and John E. O’Connor (eds.). Hollywood’s West: the American Frontier in Film, Television, and History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.
Wildermuth, Mark. Feminism and the Western in Film and Television, London: Palgrave, 2018.

DVD & books / articles available at BU