Matthew Thomas Payne’s audiovisual essay “Who Ever Heard …?  Genre, Gender, and Repetition in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is an elegant and compact inquiry into repetition as a fundamental structuring element intertwining cinema, the Western genre, and modes of gender performance.  Repetition is of course at the heart of cinema as a technical apparatus, and a crucial if not constitutive feature of narrative, perhaps most distinctively elaborated through the editing patterns established by Hollywood (as Raymond Bellour has most influentially demonstrated); if these fundamental repetitions escape attention through the flows of the film itself or our engagement with story, repetition is often foregrounded at another level through genre, commonly dismissed as simply repetitive by critics but appreciated by fans who enjoy the musical model of repetition with variation – a formal pattern Payne employs effectively by turning the hard slap of Liberty Valance’s whip into the video essay’s sonic beat.   (More broadly, Ford’s film has been understood as both a significant variation within both the Western genre as well as his own oeuvre.) 

Illuminating these interlocking levels of repetition – from those disavowed by the cinematic apparatus to those anticipated as the conventions of genre – would be a rewarding critical exercise in itself.  But Payne’s manipulation of Ford’s scene, again, lends his material a strong backbeat, while polyphonic “lyrics” are derived from the snatches of dialog that here become chants through the rhythmic repetition that renders language ritualistic.  As his title and motivating quotation emphasize, in this Western, questions (as well as guns) are loaded.  Indeed, Payne’s demand that we listen to Hallie’s rhetorical question again and again confirms  that her expression of a traditional gender norm through a question that expects no answer  condenses cultural assumptions about proper gender roles that have seemed foundational to the Western, if not Hollywood cinema overall.  However, if the Western is often accused of reducing hypermasculine male characters to clearly opposed heroes and villains, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance provides three representatives of American masculinity, brought together in this scene in a feminized “domestic” space rather than on the uncivilized frontier, and at a moment when gender roles are felt to be unbalanced through an emasculated man serving food (steak, of course) to other men.  Payne’s video places these characters and their roles in relief by simultaneously linking and isolating them on a grid, enhancing our ability to analyze what Ford dramatizes.

This distance, combined with the pedagogical function of repetition, helps reveal how in this scene whips and guns remain implicit threats, while verbal threats are displaced into statements about meat; as Payne’s strategies emphasize, cowboy boots are the primary tools of physical violence in this scene.  Payne’s nine-screen pattern allows him (and us) to play a clever game of addition and subtraction, as well as continuity and substitution, that remains remarkably easy to follow and that skillfully modulates sounds to simultaneously overlap and come to the fore.  This careful organization of the screen (and soundtrack) subtly alludes to other spatial modes of repetition – games like tic-tac-toe or chess, or the panel construction of comic books – as well as the temporal models I’ve already noted of beat-driven music or vocal chanting that renders verbal communication as ritual.  But the video essay’s real achievement is to suggest that these fundamental formal repetitions may extend to and sustain residual ideological patterns in which women cook and serve the Western beef that men eat and find ways to fight over.