Anthology Film Archives

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EXPERIMENTAL WESTERNS, PART 1: AVANT-GARDE WESTERNS

July 3 – July 26

July 3-26, 2026

Throughout this summer Anthology will be exploring the (for better and for worse) quintessentially American genre of the Western. Once ubiquitous in U.S. culture, adopted and adapted by cinemas throughout the world (most famously in Italy but in reality throughout almost every corner of the globe), left for dead towards the end of the 20th century, but stubbornly and perpetually revived, revised, coopted, and critiqued, the Western has proven uniquely resonant, astonishingly elastic, and profoundly productive for filmmakers and artists of many different stylistic sensibilities and political persuasions.

As Anthology’s (cracked-mirror) contribution to this year’s widespread cultural reckoning with the nation’s Semiquincentennial, Anthology has organized a two-part series devoted to the remotest frontiers (so-to-speak) of experimentation and revisionism that have taken place within the Western genre over the decades. The first part of the series – taking place throughout July – focuses on those relatively rare but fascinating instances in which genuinely avant-garde filmmakers have engaged with the genre: countercultural parodies or subversions like GREASER’S PALACE, Adolfas Mekas’s THE DOUBLE-BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY, Warhol’s HORSE and LONESOME COWBOYS, or the last section of Bruce Baillie’s QUICK BILLY; found-footage works such as Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s COWBOY AND “INDIAN” FILM, Peter Tscherkassky’s INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE, Holly Fisher’s BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST, or Craig Baldwin’s WILD GUNMAN; and films that evoke the genre by focusing on the landscapes or figures of the West, including Kevin Jerome Everson’s TEN FIVE IN THE GRASS, James Benning’s DESERET and UTOPIA, and Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER 2.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS ON PART 2: ACID + INTERNATIONAL WESTERNS.

Special thanks to Ramin Afshari (Walt Disney Studios); Miguel Armas (Light Cone); Craig Baldwin; Dennis Bartok & Billy Ray Brewton (Deaf Crocodile Films); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Bret Berg, Jenny Nulf, and Tiernan O’Rourke (American Genre Film Archive); Michal Brezovský (National Film Archive, Prague); Elizabeth Childress (Walter De Maria Archive); Rebecca Cleman, Karl McCool, and Jooyoung Park (Electronic Arts Intermix); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Kevin Jerome Everson; Erin Farrell (Film Movement); Holly Fisher; Anthony Flores (Gladstone Gallery); Walter Forsberg; Matthew Gray (Warhol Museum); Maggie Greenwald; Agnes Iski (National Film Institute Hungary); Brett Kashmere & Zachary Epcar (Canyon Cinema); Lloyd Kaufman & Jaden McKnew (Troma); Lydia Kinloch (Oscilloscope); John Klacsmann; Blackhorse Lowe; Kristin MacDonough & Emily Martin (Video Data Bank); Edda Manriquez (Academy Film Archive); David Marriott & Ei Toshinari (Arbelos Films); Edward McCarry (Cinema Guild); Madeleine Molyneaux (Picture Palace Pictures); Philippe Mora; Sarah Moustakim (Institut Français); Sandrine Neveux (Villa Albertine); Adison Norbury; Sheila Paige; Julia Petrocelli (Film-Makers’ Cooperative); Ben Rivers; Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL); Germana Ruscio (Cinecittà); Ben Russell; Frieder Schlaich & Viviana Kammel (Filmgalerie 451); George Schmalz (Kino Lorber); Hiltrud Schulz (DEFA Film Library); Eglė Šinkūnaitė & Jana Mikulevič (Lithuanian Film Centre); Michelle Lee Svenson; Wanda vanderStoop (Vtape); Kazu Watanabe (Grasshopper); and Todd Weiner & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive).

In July, our neighbors at Metrograph will be hosting “The Worldwide West”, a related series surveying Western offshoots across international cinema. For more info visit: https://metrograph.com/

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