“Westerns,” André Bazin wrote in 1953, “are our Odyssey.” Their characters are “tragic and epic heroes.” If the western is so easily allegorized, if its stories of frontier justice, wars, and westward movement are so frequently read as stories about colonial conquest in 1950s France, it is not just because of its subject but also, perhaps, because the genre reproduces the classical logic and narrative coherence established in Aristotle’s Poetics. Twenty years after Bazin, Jean-Luc Comolli made the case that some American westerns, especially the classic westerns of John Ford, were “riddled with cracks” and “splitting from an internal tension” that revealed and destabilized the films’ colonialist ideology.

In this paper, focusing on several key moments in the reception of the western by French film critics, from the 1950s to the 1970s, I will try to show three things. First, that the reception of the western in France is invariably tied to the memory of French classicism as the nation’s dominant rhetorical and aesthetic mode. This is Bazin’s reading, and he isn’t alone: throughout film criticism of the 1950s we find that the classicism of the genre guarantees a stable reading as an allegory of colonialism. Second, as French film critics put into question the imperial logic of their nation, it is precisely to the western that they once again turn. This time the western is no longer seen as an embodiment of classical rules, but as the genre that can, at times, reveal the cracks, the fissures, the contradictions, and the illogic of both classicism and the French empire. Finally, though I am principally interested in commentary on film in this paper, and will use as a source film journals such as L’Ecran français, Cahiers du cinéma, and Cinémonde, I will briefly present two films that exemplify these contradictory positions. The first is René Chanas L’Escadron blanc (1948) about French colonial soldiers in the Sahara. The second Godard’s Weekend (1968). I will conclude, in agreement with Jacques Rancière, that politics—in this case the transformation of France’s colonial memory—happens when works of art rearrange our relation to the perceptible.