It's the first Catholic Western. Christ's return to the bleak, desolate prairie. And is this not the secret desire of all men? A new incarnation of Christ. Our Savior appearing this time in concrete, tangible form. Christ already lives in us, but to show him in a violently mundane context...
It may seem a desperate gamble. Blasphemy almost, I agree. But I know an artist such as you, whether a believer or not, will understand that structuralist cinema can recapture sublime poetry through primal images that are spare, eloquent in their poverty - syntagmatic, as my friend Roland Barthes would say. Something between Dreyer and Pasolini with just a hint of John Ford, of course. As long as it reflects the death throes and decay of our capitalist system...a Western can claim to be militant. That's what Lucaks would say.
We'll create historical characters sociologically contextualised. Thus, our two outlaws represent irresponsibility and anarchy. The busty girl is the illusory escape into the irrational. The prairie is beyond history and the bisons are man's struggle for subsistence. The film will be in color. Harsh colors, rough costumes, to reconcile the holy landscape with the prairie.
Sort of Piero della Francesca and Fred Zinneman ...
