Victor Lanning is employed by eastern capitalist Richard Stanton to buy the Shasta Lumber Co. He conspires with Pete Carson to set forest fires so that he can purchase the company at a lower price and keep the remaining cash for himself.

The first time I saw a 16 mm print of Western Firebrands, the projector’s carbon arc hissed like the very forest fires it depicts, and I felt the temperature of the room pitch upward—proof that cinema, even silent, can scorch. What unfurls is less a linear yarn than a tinderbox of colliding appetites: land lust, erot...


Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Charles R. Seeling

Bruno Ziener
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" The first time I saw a 16 mm print of Western Firebrands, the projector’s carbon arc hissed like the very forest fires it depicts, and I felt the temperature of the room pitch upward—proof that cinema, even silent, can scorch. What unfurls is less a linear yarn than a tinderbox of colliding appetites: land lust, erotic jealousy, and the perennial American itch to wring profit from nature’s marrow. Director Jack Natteford, scripting his own fever dream of greed, stages each reel as an elemental..."
Jack Natteford
United States


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