But almost thirty years before The Matrix, there existed something called Leone time, where, without any camera tricks or special effects, the action is slowed down to a point where even someone spitting on screen becomes an elaborate ritual.
#Once upon a time in the west cast full
When Wachowski Brothers’ film The Matrix released in 1999, people were amazed by a new technology used in the film called bullet time in which the action is slowed down to such an extend that we can see the full trajectory of a bullet as it is fired from a gun till it reaches it’s destination. Attention is paid to every small detail as Leone squeezes the very last morsel out of every scene.
#Once upon a time in the west cast movie
A Leone scene isn’t just another movie scene. His films are specifically designed in such a way that the viewer feels the passing of time. Things happened so fast that he never got time to digest it. He did this intentionally because one of the issues he had with the American films was that they moved very quickly. Leone’s films move at a slow, deliberate pace and he is more interested in the gradual build up rather than the ultimate pay-off, which happens very suddenly and quickly. Though Leone is more closely associated with Akira Kurosawa, the pacing of his films are very similar to that of another Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. Because it would take a while for things to happen. The biggest virtue a film viewer needs to posses in appreciating the cinema of Leone is Patience. But the populist nature of those films prevented the critics from fairly assessing his work during their time and he would have to wait a while before he received his fair share of critical appreciation.Īnd talking about ‘ Waiting for a While‘, Waiting is an important component in viewing Leone’s films. His three Dollars films were highly stylized, operatic melodramas, which were unabashedly populist entertainment and was lapped up by audience all over the world. He turned the archetype of the moral Western hero into a ruthless killer who is concerned only with his own survival. His worldview was un-apologetically amoral and pessimistic. So when it came time to make his own westerns, he took the basic themes and characters from the Hollywood westerns and then transported them to a bleak, arid, surrealistic landscape. He loved those movies to death, but he did not agree with their ‘politics’ and their optimistic worldview. Leone grew up admiring the American westerns of director John Ford. His mother was a silent movie actress, while his father was an actor\director from the same era. Leone came from a family with deep roots in the Italian film industry. His Dollars Trilogy infused fresh blood into a dying genre and made a star out of Clint Eastwood. Leone came on the scene when the appeal of the traditional Hollywood western was waning. Though I am not exactly sure about that, Leone certainly was the first director to bring Postmodernism to the genre of Westerns. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called Sergio Leone the first postmodernist film director. Once Upon a Time in the West was, from start to finish, a dance of death, all of the characters in the film, except Claudia are conscious of the fact they will not arrive at the end alive…”. “the rhythm of the film was intended to create the sensation of the last gasp that a person takes just before dying.
Like the title suggests, its an exaggerated, fairy-tale for adults, set in the old West. Director Sergio Leone’s magnum opus, Once upon a time in the West(1968), starring Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, is considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made.