Touche pas à la femme blanche (Marco Ferreri, 1974) : entre western « gauchiste » et farce d’agit-prop

This children’s Western transposes the historic battle of Little Big Horn to the colossal and controversial destruction of the Paris Les Halles food market in order to treat its characters in a farcical way. This initial anachronism elevates its protagonists to the grotesque abstraction of their function, turning the historical fable into a narrative of political agitation that illustrates the possibility of the oppressed defeating their oppressors when they unite and organise themselves collectively. The film thereby responds to the belief that a “leftist Western” was impossible. This is what Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin had declared in Wind from the East (1969), of which Ferreri was a producer.