By Benito Rakower, Ed.D.
Benito Rakower, Ed.D., will teach an eight-week course this winter titled, “Eight Signature Films by Five Legendary Directors.” The course will begin on Friday, Jan. 18 from 1:30- 4 p.m. The first film to be shown will be “My Darling Clementine.”
The American “cowboy” is America’s contribution to the mythology of the male hero. The archetype is Homer’s Achilles who cast his long shadow over the doom of Troy and the splendor of Western literature. The darling of the goddess Athena and the son of the goddess Thetis, Achilles epitomized brief glory, pride, and tragic grandeur.
This marvelous and poetic Western, brings the Homeric conception of man into conflict with a new concept of man embodied in the American “cowboy.”
Victor Mature, as “Doc” Holliday, is the American East, with its close ties to European culture – Shakespeare, Harvard, and worldly status. Wyatt Earp is the American frontier, the new territory, and the struggle against Nature, the wilderness, and “savage” humanity. Putting it simply, a primitive beginning, the development of society, the threshold of civilization. Almost the entire history of America is contained in this film as John Ford intended.
To learn more about and register for Dr. Rakower’s eight-week course, click here.
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