Eastwood: Pale Rider (1985)

Clint Eastwood's first and only western of the 80s bears some resemblance to High Plains Drifter - it's about a stranger who defends a remote frontier community from a band of corrupt miners, and it takes place in the same sparkling, rarefied reaches of the upper atmosphere. If anything, though, it's more rarefied - shooting on location in the Boulder Mountains, Eastwood draws on the alpine vistas of The Eiger Sanction to create a western bathed in snowy, pastel light, seamlessly transplanting his 70s western sensibility onto 80s film stock. More breathlessly Edenic than any of Eastwood’s previous films, it’s full of landscapes that feel newly formed, barely emerging from the smoke and mist of creation. Watching it evokes the wonder of the frontier, the breathtaking momentousness of gazing upon something only previously seen by God, as if the very act of rapturous attention were a kind of completion and consummation of creation. So it's no surprise that this is also Eastwood's most wondrous parable, or that time gets deeper, closer to a dream, as the woods and mountains recede - it's a western driven by altitude as much as latitude, gazing down through strata as much as across horizons. Yet there are still traces of his earlier, more violent Western sensibility as well – at moments, it feels that this might be the end of time as much as the beginning, as if these glimpses of original, uninhabited creation were in fact the first, distant apocalyptic harbingers of things coming full circle. If there is any weakness, it's that this sublimity can make the human narrative seem a bit earthbound by comparison, but Eastwood takes what could have been a stultifying alternation between amethyst vistas and pitch-dark interiors and turns it into a film that's continually poised at that iconic door in The Searchers - it understands that dialectic between claustrophobia and expansiveness more perfectly than any Western since. Besides, the darkened scenes are where Eastwood shines, if only because they occlude him - he has less screen time than in any of his other films, and yet his presence suffuses every frame. And that's where the film's transcendence ultimately lies - in Eastwood's absolute perfection of self-direction, absolute fusion of directing and acting; he commands this film like God in the world, present everywhere but visible nowhere.