Constructing and deconstructing the founding myths of the American West in cinema. Four iconic Western shots. Stagecoach, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West

Abstract

This study seeks to understand, through analysis of four shots taken from four different westerns, the syntactic and historical evolution of a genre, its discourse and its ideology, via the apparent immutability of its semantic elements - narrative, formal and iconographic. Based on a comparative analysis of four shots taken from Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), The Searchers (Ford, 1957), The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1942) and Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968), the study incorporates several approaches: generic, formalist and pragmatic. It starts with the genre and some of its dramatic and aesthetic conventions and determines, its impact in specific sociocultural contexts and the means of its transformations based on what American historiography underwent in terms of radical changes.