Artist and Curator Leila Weefur Curates Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After the Searchers Film Series at the Walker
This November, the Walker Cinema presents Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After The Searchers, a film series curated by Leila Weefur, a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator. Tracing the genre from its earliest classics to contemporary reinterpretations, the series reimagines the boundaries of the Western. Join us for screenings of films such as Johnny Guitar and Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit (Searchers), along with a special Q&A featuring filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson (Ten Five in the Grass) in conversation with curator Leila Weefur.
Speaking to their vision for the series, Weefur explains:
“This series traces how filmmakers have reclaimed the Western, transforming it from a genre that reinforced colonial violence into one that offers intergenerational, anti-colonial, and transnational perspectives. Throughout these films, the landscape itself becomes the protagonist; a feminine presence, vast and unconquerable, standing in defiance of rigid masculinity. At the Walker, audiences will see how directors like Kevin Jerome Everson, Zacharias Kunuk, and Nicholas Ray use the visual language of the Western to tell stories that have always existed outside of the traditional American folklore.”
The release of director John Ford’s The Searchers in 1956, which defined the genre for decades, solidified the use of cowboys, bounty hunters, and outlaws as motifs. This series traces an arc from the earliest Westerns to contemporary reinterpretations by filmmakers who dare to reimagine the genre’s boundaries. “Landscapes of Myth: Westerns after The Searchers” challenges commonplace conventions of the commercial Western film, giving us new opportunities to bask in adventurous suspense essential to the genre.
Landscapes of Myth: Westerns after The Searchers
Curated by Leila Weefur
November 7–29
Walker Cinema
The Searchers by John Ford
Friday, November 7, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors) Free for students
Walker Cinema
For Ethan Edwards, a confederate Civil War veteran portrayed by John Wayne, peace is fleeting, and he soon has a new mission: to rescue his niece from the Comanche. Vengeful, racist, and unrelenting, Edwards has no home but the contested landscapes he traverses along his quest. The Searchers crafts an essential reflection of white settlement and masculinity, frontierism, and representation, and serves as a record for examining the myths of the American West and prejudices that still need to be overcome today. The film, presented in a new 4K restoration, remains a pinnacle example of the Western genre and simultaneously exists as a troubling document of the genre director John Ford helped define. 1956, US, DCP, 119 min.
Artist, writer, and series curator Leila Weefur will introduce the film.
Ten Five in the Grass: Kevin Jerome Everson in Conversation with Leila Weefur
Saturday, November 8, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors) Free for students
Walker Cinema
Ten Five in the Grass is an exploration of the Black rodeo circuit in Virginia. Through a blend of documentary realism and poetic imagery, Kevin Jerome Everson captures the grit, skill, and community spirit that define this vibrant subculture. His camera lingers on the ritualistic preparations of riders adjusting stirrups, steadying horses, and transforming mundane gestures into choreographed movements that speak to generations of expertise. The film builds meaning through duration and repetition, as dust clouds rise from arena dirt, metallic gates clang, and bodies move against landscape. Everson allows the physicality of the sport to articulate its own significance, revealing how this familial tradition reclaims Western iconography through embodied knowledge and collective memory. 2011, US, digital, 32 min.
The film is preceded by Charles Burnett’s The Horse (1973). A delicate picture of the complex bond between a young Black boy and an ailing horse in the rural American South, Burnett’s short film is a sociopolitical reminder of the inevitability of death and its threat of imminence in Black life. 1973, US, digital, 13 min.
A conversation with artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and series curator Leila Weefur follows the program.
Ten Five in the Grass appears courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures.
Maliglutit (Searchers) by Zacharias Kunuk
Friday – Saturday, November 14–15, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors) Free for students on Fridays
Walker Cinema
Set against the wide expanse of the arctic, Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuit reclamation of the revenge Western follows a man’s pursuit of his kidnapped family. Where John Ford’s central character in his troubling classic The Searchers pursued racial vengeance, Maliglutit’s central character, Kuanana, uses violence to serve restoration—correcting and restoring the order of a world and a society that can only function with cooperation. Punctuated by the cyclical breathing of Tanya Tagaq’s throat singing, the film counters the colonial archetypes of the West, foregrounding the landscape as a living presence rather than a frontier obstacle. 2016, Canada, DCP, in Inuktitut with English subtitles, 94 min.
Johnny Guitar by Nicholas Ray
Friday – Saturday, November 21–22, 7 pm
$8 ($6 Walker members, seniors, and students: free for students on Friday)
Walker Cinema
Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon worker who wears pants, carries guns, and rejects feminine submission. She is saddled with ambition grounded in Manifest Destiny, awaiting the railroad that will convert her land into capital. Meanwhile, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) leads a lynch mob against Vienna, fueled by jealousy disguised as civic righteousness. Through tilted angles and operatic closeups, Johnny Guitar abandons classical Western framing for expressionist frenzy, revealing how the genre’s masculine mythologies always contained their own subversion. In this deconstruction of the traditional Western, gender roles implode, yet McCarthyist paranoia bleeds through every frame, and westward settlement continues to drive its characters’ inner motivations. 1954, US, 35mm, 111 min.
Major support to preserve, digitize, and present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.
Buck and the Preacher by Sidney Poitier
Saturday – Sunday, November 28- 29, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors) Free for students on Fridays
Walker Cinema
Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut employs the genre’s traditional narratives to challenge notions of freedom for African Americans in the post–Civil War West as they face relentless pursuit by racist bounty hunters. Buck (played by Poitier), a former Union soldier turned trail guide, and the Preacher (a con artist played by Harry Belafonte) lead a group of freed slaves to safety in the West. A trembling suspension between the two men builds as they cat-and-mouse their way across the dusty trails of Durango, Mexico, creating an unsettling allegory about the tenuous and often conflicted alliances that Black individuals had to forge in the face of systemic oppression. Presented in a new 4K restoration. 1972, US, DCP, 102 min.
ABOUT LEILA WEEFUR
Leila Weefur is a Liberian American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer world-making. Weefur has worked with institutions including Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Their writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is an assistant professor of photo/media at the University of Washington and a member of curatorial film collective the Black Aesthetic.
ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER
Known for presenting today’s most compelling artists from close to home and around the world, the Walker Art Center features a broad array of contemporary visual arts, music, dance, theater, and moving image works. Ranging from concerts and films to exhibitions and workshops, Walker programs bring us together to examine the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities. The adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States, holds at its center the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen as well as some 60 sculptures. Visit walkerart.org for more information on upcoming events and programs.