Final showdown of the anamorphic kernel

Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West is perhaps a more elegant and effective/affective version of what Zizek is talking about. that which is background (harmonica's memory of his brother's murder) bubbles forth into the foreground in the final showdown between harmonica and the man in black. as the viewer, one is directly confronted with the raw kernel of the narrative (the memory, the event which defines the structure of the narrative), forcing a (radical) reconsideration of the structure (and also shattering the dramatic tension built up by keeping the kernel in the background, thus ending the movie, and perhaps, as was Leon's intention, the entire genre of the western). the elaborate choreography of the scene can be understood in ritualistic terms as a sort of cinematic preparation for the unveiling of this (totemic) kernel...


and another fascinating moment in the film, as described by Henry Fonda:


and a great BBC documentary on the film
"The traditional gunfight in Hollywood Westerns is linear, in the sense that you have goodie at one end of the main street, like in High Noon, and baddies walking down the street. Leone was much more interested in circles rather than lines: one character comes forward, choreographed to the music, every second of it, another character comes forward, we get a close up of one, a close up of the other, they walk around each other like two dogs waiting to have a scrap. It is like a dance, a sort of military two step."