Cutting Horse

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive series about filmmaker Larry Clark. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

U.S., 2002

An epic clash between rival ranches run by rival families locked in a generational struggle over Western lands, Cutting Horse evokes, for all its independent production credentials, A-list roadshow Westerns pictures of the 1950s. If that seems like a surprising lineage from the director of Passing Through and As Above, So Below, Larry Clark operates here in full revisionist mode, framing his story through the reminiscence of a Mexican American landowner and the allyship he finds in a stoic Black horse trainer, haunted by his past, who returns home seeking redemption. In that, Tyler (Albert Harris) stands in a direct line of descent from Clark’s earlier alienated seekers Eddie Warmack (Passing Through) and Jita-hadi (As Above, So Below) in his struggle to make a place for himself and his community in the face of ruthless, racist opposition.

35mm, color, 124 min. Director: Larry Clark. Screenwriter: David Heintz, Larry Clark. With: Albert Harris, Cesar E. Flores, Robert Earl Crudup.