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Matthew Carter, Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative Neil Campbell, Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West

2015; European Association for American Studies; Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/ejas.10850

1991-9336

Melenia Arouh,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

It is often said that the Western film is dead.This might mean a plethora of things, depending on who is making the morbid pronouncement.For producers, it means that the superhero-lovingaudience is not interested anymore; for culture critics, it means that the colonial myth of the West has lost its allure; and for film scholars it means that the genre is going through the downward slope of its evolutionary cycle.But, surprisingly enough, this state of fatality is not new; apparently the genre has been meeting its maker since the 1950s.Yet, for a genre six feet underground, this remains a very active type of film both in theory and practice.Westerns are still being made today (The Proposition (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), True Grit (2010), Django Unchained (2012)), the myth of the Westerner still haunts Hollywood masculinity (for example, the hero of American Sniper (2014) fills the boots of a contemporary Westerner), and theorists are still preoccupied with the legacy, past, and present, of these films.Within this very active context