Westerns: Films Through HistoryJanet Walker Western films from The Great Train Robbery to The Searchers to Dead Man have persistently influenced our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the profound historical and historiographical functions of the western film genre and to contemplate the extent to which the western is history. With new and original perspectives on the important relationship between the western film and American history, leading film scholars survey the ways in which history has taken dramatic license just as film has taken historical license. Demonstrating how westerns embellished, mythologized, and erased the frontier past, the contributors explore the mythic. Wild West envisioned by Buffalo Bill Cody, the revisionist aims of recent westerns like Posse, Lone Star, and Dead Man, and how the genre addresses key issues of biography, authenticity, race, and representation. |
Contents
the 1990s western | 25 |
the return of a repressed | 47 |
the burden of history and john sayless lone star | 71 |
widening horizons | 151 |
scoring the indian | 177 |
part four history through narrative | 219 |
contributors | 253 |
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African African-American Algeria American films Apache Atamane audiences authenticity Bill's Wild West biopic blackface Blake Broken Arrow Buddy Deeds Buffalo Bill Buffalo Bill's Wild Buntline Callum character cinema Civil Cody Cody's contemporary cowboy critical culture Custer Dances with Wolves Dead discourse dream Dynamite Jack Dynamite Moh essay fact father fictional film western film's filmmakers flashback Frank Frederick Jackson Turner French frontier genre Harmonica Hayden White hero historian historiography Hollywood horse Ibid identity janet walker Jeb's John Ford's Jubilo Kasson kathryn kalinak killed landscape legend Lone Star memory minstrel song minstrelsy movie myth N/nobody narrative Native Americans past Peebles performance Pilar played political popular Posse postmodern present racial representation revisionist Richard Slotkin role Salsbury scene score Searchers sequence shot Sioux Sitting Bull spectators stagecoach story suggests Susanna theme traumatic western University Press violence West's western film western genre Wild West Willemen William Wyatt Earp York