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This thesis examines Clint Eastwood’s late directorial style through a detailed analysis of his films produced between 2014 and 2024, particularly focusing on American Sniper (2014). I position the film within a variety of broader cinematic and cultural contexts and provide three lenses through which to view it: its generic lineage in Western and war film traditions, its placement in what I call Eastwood’s “American Heroism cycle” – a spiritual quadrilogy comprised of it, Sully (2016), The 15:17 to Paris (2018) and Richard Jewell (2019) – and that unofficial series’ significance in this most recent, likely final stage of Eastwood’s directorial career. Utilizing frameworks from authorship and genre studies as well as theories of late style proffered by Theodor Adorno and Edward Said, this study argues that Eastwood’s late works manifest a unique artistic tension characterized by ideological incoherence and narrative ambiguity.
Central to this analysis is American Sniper’s provocative reception, its subsequent widespread misinterpretation and its place in a subgenre here called “cinema du scope,” sniper cinema highlighting complex intersections between violence, media and perception. Further, this study examines how American Sniper, incoherent as it might be as a standalone film, takes on new meaning in the context of the American Heroism cycle. Finally, this thesis explores how Eastwood’s extended cinematographic partnerships – with Bruce Surtees, Jack N. Green, Tom Stern and Yves Bélanger – parallel thematic evolutions in his work and reflect broader changes in cinematic style and industry practice. I contextualize Eastwood’s films within the fraught and longstanding late style discourse, suggesting that his and other similarly aged filmmakers’ (Woody Allen and Roman Polanski chief among them) ongoing productivity represents a distinct contemporary artistic phenomenon, here termed “cockroach art,” characterized by sustained creative activity in the face of cultural obsolescence and industry exile.
By focusing on the past 10 years, the most idiosyncratic and the least analyzed, of Eastwood’s practice, this study is a necessary addition to published scholarship on the filmmaker. By applying the hitherto predominantly fine arts phenomenon of late style to cinema, this study is an overdue bridge between media studies and art history. By formally examining the unfairly maligned and grossly misunderstood late works of an incomparable American artist, this thesis is an addendum and corrective to recent detrimental trends in film history and cultural criticism.