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Johnny Guitar (VOSTF)
Location
Main screening room
Date
May 19th, 2024
Admission
Suggested viewing age: 10 and up
Duration
110 min
Cycle
History of cinema

This recurring cycle is an opportunity to watch or re-watch classics from cinema history, or films representative of certain national cinematographies, trends or eras, on the big screen.

Preserved in our collections

Johnny Guitar
Directed by
Nicholas Ray
Language
VOSTF
Origins
USA
Year
1954
Duration
110 min
Genre
Drama, western
Format
Digital
Synopsis

Vienna, the owner of a saloon of exceptional value because it is located on the future railroad line, attracts the animosity of the local ranchers. Following the death of her brother, Emma Small, jealous of Vienna's independence, launches a cabal against her. Johnny Guitar, a cowboy musician who had just been hired at the saloon, tries to intervene.

Johnny Guitar

The film will be presented with French subtitles.

A standout Westernfeaturing an uncommon confrontation between two women that shifts the motif of rivalry onto primarily psychological terrain. With its feminist undertones, romanticism, musicality, and vibrant colors, Johnny Guitar is often cited as one of the most beautiful films in the history of American cinema.

Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Described by the Harvard Film Archive as "Hollywood's last romantic" and "one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers," Ray was considered an iconoclastic auteur director who often clashed with the Hollywood studio system of the time, but would prove highly influential to future generations of filmmakers. His best-known work is the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean. He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963, including They Live By Night (1948), In A Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Bigger Than Life (1956), and King of Kings (1961), as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death. His compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well regarded and he was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, "... there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Explore

Johnny Guitar is a work born of the purity of the great classic westerns, whose "clear line", often inspired by the foundations of Greek tragedy, has revealed one of its simplest and most profound possibilities in cinema, revealing the hallucinatory spectacle of the meeting point between the morality of beings and the territories they tread upon with their feet.
Simon Galiero
2008
About Johnny Guitar
Cast
About Nicholas Ray
Filmography
Open