In the summer of 1993, a cycle of five westerns directed by Anthony Mann played at the Arlequin cinema in Paris. I trace my interest in westerns to this time and place, although the rendezvous with the genre nearly didn't happen. I had no abiding interest in Hollywood westerns, and the few I had seen struck me as corny relics relegated to late-night television re-broadcasts. I was in France to study theatre, and any serious interest in cinema was fuelled primarily by ‘foreign’ films I’d seen at campus film society screenings or in art houses. Nevertheless, I indulged a friend who wanted to see an old American western called Winchester ‘73. I was surprised to find a long queue of spectators snaking down the sidewalk at two o’clock in the afternoon, and even more so by the film. It was strange and edgy, visually stunning, and emotionally pitched as high as opera. Certain characterisations fulfilled sceptical expectations (Rock Hudson in red-face speaking ‘Hollywood Injun’ English), but the film's moral universe was more complex than I had anticipated: the ‘hero’ is revealed to be a neurotic and anxious figure obsessed with killing his brother, and by the end the fetishised title firearm, photographed as if it were the star, had led the narrative far from a ritual celebration of violence. I returned to see the film a second time, along with the rest of the cycle. Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar was playing nearby; I saw it, too. I was hooked, and joined the ranks of cinephiles who discovered the ‘genius’ of Hollywood in the left-bank cinemas of Paris.

The crowded screening on the rue de Rennes was not simply a symptom of Hollywood's relentless invasion of French screens. The experience of an American spectator discovering the Hollywood western in a Paris screening of film by an auteur admired by generations of French filmmakers, critics and audiences vividly evinces a transnational sphere of cinematic practices: it is neither an antagonistic French affront to its Hollywood rival, nor a hegemonic cinema experienced in the same manner the world over.