A Subversão da Fronteira: o spaghetti western como crítica ao ideal de progresso.

Abstract

The present work was made over the perspective that the spaghetti westerns, Italian western films produced for the popular cinemas between the 1960s and 1970s, represent the frontier myth on cinema as a parody, in a way that subvert the basic premises of the classical American western and, doing that, perform the frontier myth ironicaly, sustaining itself on a rhetoric that is a rebut to the ideal of progress. Instead of the formalist film analysis, we propose an interpretation of the films researched trough their appropriation by the public, concurring with the theoretical proposal of the reception theory and the parody theory. The spaghetti westerns are here analyzed as a carnivalized vision of its referent, refreshing it for the public, following the large number of social convulsions and crisis that emerge in the western world in the middle of the 1960s.