Past and present of the American myth: a study of the Western space and its narratives in Kelly Reichardt´´´s cinema

Abstract

This text analyzes the way in which the American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt uses the Western genre to propose new visions of the American myth that the genre itself was responsible for establishing during the 20^th Century. A study focused on the analysis of the space of the Western and its stories is proposed, arguing that the landscape is one of the fundamental semantic elements that open the genre to alternative possibilities. First Cow and Certain Women will be the two films from which the text is articulated, as they allow us to analyze how the American myth/dream was established in the past and what remains of it in contemporary America. The syntactic and semantic approach to the chosen examples allow for a detailed exploration of the elements that make up the Western and how they are treated in Reichardt's films.