Go West, Young Man!

2003 marks the hundredth anniversary of the making of The Great Train Robbery, the very first western film. Dutch film makers Peter Delpeut and Mart Dominicus were inspired by this fact to make a nostalgic road movie in search of the remains of this once so powerful film genre.In Go West, Young Man! Delpeut and Dominicus undertake a cinematographic journey to the icons of the western. What they find are the leftovers of a fading tradition. They travel through the American West, where the western directs their gaze almost automatically: the last cowboys in Nevada, the desolate landscape of Wyoming, which involves a peculiar way of life, according to writer Annie Proulx. They visit old film sets with flaking paint and go to famous locations that still evoke the dramatic impact of classics in this genre. For instance, they go to The Grand Tetons, the grandiose setting for Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and of course to Monument Valley, the backdrop for many films by John Ford. And they meet William Fraker and accompany him on his return, for the first time in years, to the set of his film Monte Walsh, the ultimate Western about the end of the cowboy era. (Monte Walsh is also being shown in this programme, see the next entry.)Go West, Young Man! is a lively and often humorous homage to a grand film genre that inevitably ends as a bitter-sweet requiem.