A BAMPFA Film Series Reconsiders the American Western

Leila Weefur started to notice a shift about five years ago.

Conservative culture was on the rise. Conservative politics were, too. Before long, Weefur watched while archetypes in popular culture followed suit: Yellowstone was a hit. Louis Vuitton released a wild-west collection. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Post Malone went country.

Weefur, a Stanford lecturer and member of The Black Aesthetic collective, began reflecting on being raised in Oakland by a Black Panther mother, who’d often call a young Weefur to her side during climactic scenes in Western movies on TV. For her, American Westerns weren’t just entertainment, but ways of seeing into America’s complex history.

With the upcoming film series Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After ‘The Searchers’ at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, now it’s Weefur’s turn, as curator, to show others what they’ve been missing. And if you’re surprised to see a John Wayne film (The Searchers) at a Bay Area museum — with its racist main character and depiction of Native Americans — you’re not alone.

“Some people have had questions around why I’m showing one of the most difficult and troubling Westerns to observe,” Weefur tells KQED. “And it’s because we really needed it to stand in contrast to everything that came after it.”

The Searchers’ inclusion is perhaps emblematic of another cultural shift in the arts: a willingness to acknowledge and sit with what some might dismiss as “problematic” art.

“We really dampen, or cancel, or try to bury a lot of dark history — to pretend like we have moved on, or like we’ve emerged as a society,” Weefur says. The truth is, we haven’t.

After opening with The Searchers, Landscapes of Myth features lesser-known movies like Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit (“a reclamation of the troubling representation of Indigenous folks in John Ford’s films,” Weefur says) along with award-winning titles like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog.

Weefur is especially excited to show two short films: The Horse, about a rural Black boy tending to his horse, and Gaucho Gaucho, from Argentina, with its poetic, black-and-white cinematography. Other highlights include Buck and the Preacher (Sidney Poitier, 1972), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010).

A constant through each is the big, gorgeous, expansive land, which fulfills a leading role of its own in any good Western. In a curatorial statement, Weefur refers to Western landscapes as “a feminine presence, vast and unconquerable, standing in defiance of this rigid masculinity.”

For seven weeks in Berkeley, at least, the vast and unconquerable draws a little more near.

‘Landscapes of Myth: American Westerns After ‘The Searchers’’ runs Jan. 10–Feb. 28, 2025, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.