| 4:00 p.m. | Go West, Young Man! Peter Delpeut, Mart Dominicus (The Netherlands, 2003) |
In this affectionate, elegiac travelogue, Delpeut and Mart Dominicus set out to "travel the land of the cowboy film before it's too late." Driving across the American West, the filmmakers blur reality and mythology with the outsider's purposeful naïveté; on the site where Shane was filmed, they wonder out loud why the place doesn't match the pictures. Interviews expand on the film's themes: John Milius comments on the Monument Valley of The Searchers, "a place in our mind"; William A. Fraker, revisiting the set of his film Monte Walsh, reflects on the end of the West and the end of the Western. In their quest for "vast unending landscapes that give us a sense of boundless freedom," the filmmakers' vision is clearly selective: theirs is not the West of factory farms and suburban sprawl. The only glimpse of a freeway overpass comes in the last minutes of the journey, as the West fades out at Los Angeles.
—Juliet Clark
• Photographed by Stef Tijdink. (79 mins, In English and Dutch with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Pieter van Huystee Film & TV)
