Black assault on the western, genre from which they were erased

Cinema linked to Black Lives Matter accepts and adopts any generic concept. In films and series produced in the last seven or eight years, black American or British filmmakers such as Jordan Peele, Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, Nia Da Costa, Steve McQueen, Gerard Bush and Remi Weekes have made their claims based on related fictions. with the fantastic story, the terror -the ‘Black horror’ is already assimilated-, the melodrama, the thriller or the comedy: titles like ‘Let me out’, ‘We’, ‘Candyman’, ‘Lovecraft Territory’, ‘Infiltrated in the KKKlan ‘,’ The Beale Street blues’, ‘The underground railway’, ‘Widows’,’ Small ax ‘,’ Antebellum ‘or’ Other people’s house ‘demonstrate how Traditional themes and genres can be reviewed from a view exercised from the culture and problems of black communities.

In this way, as happened in the 70s with the ‘blaxploitation’ -which in addition to action films also adapted fantastic white and European myths such as the vampire in ‘Black Dracula’, that of Frankenstein in ‘Blackestein’ and that of Jekyll and Hyde in ‘Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde’-, so-called popular genres get a political load that, due to the same condition of films or series for all types of spectators, they can be more effective when reaching a greater number of people and outside the traditional channels of explicitly political cinema or the more restricted ones of militant cinema.

The western is not, for years, the most successful of the genres. But it was for decades one of the most popular, both in the United States and in Europe. It is logical, and necessary for an absolute normalization, that the cinema of the West now finds its stories, plots and characters of black race. The exercise of vindication is even more forceful. Because before there were black musicals -‘Carmen Jones’-, racial melodramas -‘Imitation of life ‘,’ Guess who’s coming tonight’-, many police films -headed by ‘In the heat of the night’-,’ thrillers blaxploitation ‘and a’ star system ‘typical of black comedy, with performers like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. But Westerns with black cowboys, gunmen or ‘sheriffs’ are few, although enough to mark a certain angry tendency that is usually swallowed up by the system.

Eliminated

It has always been said that classical western misrepresented the true history of Native Americans, offering a reductionist image of Apache, Sioux, or Comanche peoples. Well, it was even worse with the black jeans. The West Hollywood cinema eliminated these characters in one fell swoop. According to studies carried out in the past decade, about 20% of the cowboys who worked on ranches and frequented rodeos were black; There were even stars like Bill Pickett, who invented a new technique for taming oxen. For many years, segregation established rodeos for blacks and rodeos for whites, but the relationship between ‘cowboys’ of both races on the ranches was moderately cordial, although the dirty work fell on the blacks.

Recent cinema has wanted to turn white characters into black heroes or anti-heroes, a substitute formula that is not the most successful. Denzel Washington embodied in the ‘remake’ of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ of 2016 the character that Yul Brynner had represented in the original 1960 film. But neither this change nor the behind-the-camera presence of Antoine Fuqua gave the new film a different look when it came to racial issues. The timid normalization came from the change of actor, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to create new black characters instead of replacing pre-existing white ones. The same had happened in 1999 with ‘Wild wildwest’, in which Will Smith played a former combatant turned into a kind of secret agent: the film was a very free version of the 1960s series ‘Jim West’, whose protagonist he was white (Robert Conrad) and less histrionic than the former prince of Bel Air.

First

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It was John Ford, one of the essential directors in the evolution of the western world, who for the first time turned a black character into the dramatic center of a Western film in ‘The Black Sergeant’ (1960). Mario van peebles, son of the independent filmmaker Melvin van Peebles, who recently passed away, proved it in 1993 with ‘Forsaken’, a film starring a gang of outlaws made up of former black soldiers. The ‘great recycler’ would arrive later, Quentin Tarantino, who did not make a black western, but turned a freed slave into a decisive gunman, and also gave him the name of a ‘spaghetti western’ hero, in ‘Django Unchained’ (2012). Nia Da Costa -the director of the recent version of ‘Candyman’- proposed in’ Little woods’ (2018) a modern western with an interracial history. There was also room for comedy: in ‘Hot Saddles’ (1974), directed by Mel Brooks and with Richard Pryor as co-writer, a man sentenced to hang becomes the first black ‘sheriff’ in the country.

In this context, the successful Netflix appearance of ‘Harder will be the fall’ – nothing to do with the 1956 film of the same title, a drama about boxing with Humphrey Bogart- it could be another turning point in the elusive relationship between the black community and the gender of the American West. Produced by rapper Jay-Z, it is directed by Jeymes Samuel, who in 2013 already rehearsed black western with ‘They die by dawn’. On camera, Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, Zazie Beetz and Damon Wayans Jr. A western with a classic revenge theme that is a full-blown vindication.