Westerns Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Marginalia is a multilingual bibliographic bulletin (format PDF) of international secondary sources about popular fiction and films : science-fiction & fantasy, fantasic and gothic fiction, horror, spy stories, comics and animation,... more

Marginalia is a multilingual bibliographic bulletin (format PDF) of international secondary sources about popular fiction and films : science-fiction & fantasy, fantasic and gothic fiction, horror, spy stories, comics and animation, westerns, war stories and films, erotica, historical novels and films, adventures, children’s Literature (free 4 issues yearly, available on demand).
Contact: Norbert Spehner : nspehner@sympatico.ca

Bibliographic bulletin of secondary sources about popular literature and film: science-fiction, fantasy, gothic, mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, westerns, comics, etc....

in KANSAS HISTORY 42.3 (2019): 217-219.

Designed to preserve and promote western heritage and culture, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede has become entwined with, and politically and economically expedient for, Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Performances at the Stampede... more

Designed to preserve and promote western heritage and culture, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede has become entwined with, and politically and economically expedient for, Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Performances at the Stampede relieve guilt about the expropriation of Indigenous territory and conquest of the natural world, and produce an affective climate of “crude optimism,” an optimistic attachment to fossil fuel production and consumption despite the brutal realities of extractivism.

This conference is a follow-up to a symposium entitled “Politics of the Western: a Revisionist Genre” organized by Hervé Mayer (EMMA EA741) at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 on December 8, 2017. The aim of this conference is to... more

This conference is a follow-up to a symposium entitled “Politics of the Western: a Revisionist Genre” organized by Hervé Mayer (EMMA EA741) at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 on December 8, 2017. The aim of this conference is to question the film genre of the Western as being essentially American by focusing on the transnational dimension of Western narratives and images, as well as the circulation, reception, and production of Westerns outside the United States.
The genre has been widely read within the confines of a national culture and cinema in the U.S. André Bazin and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout (1953) famously labeled the Western “the American cinema par excellence,” and film genre studies since have consistently resorted to a “sociohistorical analysis” to read the genre as the cinematic expression of an American identity (Le Bris 2012). In recent film studies, the Western genre is still widely explored, understood, and constructed as an American genre despite overwhelming evidence of foreign production and global circulation since the invention of cinema. In doing so, studies of the Western strengthen the construction of an American exception that the genre—and the myth of the West it is grounded in—itself promoted. In order to emancipate studies of the Western from discourses of American exceptionalism, this conference proposes to connect film genre studies with the recent field of transnational cinema. Transnational cinema generally refers to films that cross national borders, as stories, productions, and sometimes both. But the concept of transnationalism can be interpreted more widely as a repositioning of film studies, in which the “study of national cinemas must then transform into transnational film studies” (Lu 1997, emphasis in original). This “critical transnationalism” approaches film from the viewpoint of international networks of production and reception rather than from national film traditions, exploring the complex economic, political, and cultural negotiations between transnational and national along with questions of “postcoloniality, politics and power” (Higbee and Lim 2010).

The plot of The A-Team is straightforward and repetitive: fugitives from the government for a crime they did not commit, members of a former Vietnam War special-forces unit roam America as mercenaries, using over-the-top, cartoonish... more

The plot of The A-Team is straightforward and repetitive: fugitives from the government for a crime they did not commit, members of a former Vietnam War special-forces unit roam America as mercenaries, using over-the-top, cartoonish violence to protect small business owners from exploitation. The team’s positioning as roving gunslingers using interventionist violence to regenerate ideal communities directly references the Western. However, while the self-reflexive artificiality of the team’s violence ridicules the Western, the righteousness of the team’s perpetual success paradoxically embraces it. This paper argues that The A-Team challenges the Western only as a means to reaffirm it, negotiating post-Vietnam American society’s conflicting desires to reject and recuperate the past—in this case, the myth of “regeneration through violence” that Richard Slotkin argues underpins both the Western and America’s national identity.

The American wilderness has been loaded with an ambivalent religious symbolism since the first puritan settlers. In the Xixth century, the idea of an Alliance between God and men in the wilderness of the New World was translated into a... more

The American wilderness has been loaded with an ambivalent religious symbolism since the first puritan settlers. In the Xixth century, the idea of an Alliance between God and men in the wilderness of the New World was translated into a nationalist discourse of territorial expansion. Until the 1960s, Western films supported this imperialistic Protestantism. But the Vietnam War both discredited America’s godly mission in the world and the ability of its heroes to hear God’s voice in the wilderness. This paper focuses on the reactions of American cinema to this crisis of faith. It first analyzes the transcendentalist temptation of road movies after Easy Rider, films trying to revive the lost connection to America’s original and sacred land, before moving to mapping the shift of the Western genre from a Protestant to an Indian sacred wilderness after Little Big Man. The post-Vietnam American wilderness is an indigenous God and modern Frontier characters need to share in Indian spirituality if they want to achieve both American and heroic status.

Faced with the need to produce anti-Soviet films during the early Cold War but eager to avoid any overt political message, Hollywood used of genre as a means of assuaging external political pressure from the House Committee on Un-American... more

Faced with the need to produce anti-Soviet films during the early Cold War but eager to avoid any overt political message, Hollywood used of genre as a means of assuaging external political pressure from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) without compromising its profitable status as an entertainment industry. Westerns, science fiction films, and gangster pictures allowed the tensions between American and non-American to be presented in a manner that was unequivocal and easily comprehensible to film audiences seeking entertainment. However, the politicization of genre led to important revisions in the narrative patterns and common characters of these types of films. This is especially the case for Westerns, which saw (1) the frontier transformed from the Fredrick Jackson Turner’s ‘line of most rapid and effective Americanization’ upon which depended ‘the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions’ into a defensible national boundary; (2) the ‘military metaphor’ of government by national institution supplant the figure of ‘the Westerner’ as the guarantor of American liberty and justice; and (3) the ‘code of the west’ that prized honesty and integrity in the absence of formal laws is replaced by the need for – and justification of – undercover investigators and secret agents. The early Cold War Western thus provides an interesting case study of how external pressures on the US film industry creates a demand for certain types of narratives based on pre-existing generic formulas while at the same time altering those formulas.

This paper uses Neil Campbell’s definition of post-Westerns as films ‘coming after and going beyond the traditional Western whilst engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values’ (Post-Westerns, 2013) in order... more

This paper uses Neil Campbell’s definition of post-Westerns as films ‘coming after and going beyond the traditional Western whilst engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values’ (Post-Westerns, 2013) in order to expand it to a transnational, post-colonial context and focus on two films made by Australian director Ivan Sen (Mystery Road [2013] and Goldstone [2016]) that can be considered Australian post-Westerns. These two films make references not only to American Westerns, but also to the less known genre of Australian Westerns or ‘bushranger films’, and they use, on the one hand, an aboriginal protagonist as reminder of the ‘black tracker’ typical of Australian Westerns, and on the other, the Australian outback to question the country’s identity and foundational myths. By establishing a complex dialogue both with American Westerns and their Australian counterpart, Ivan Sen articulates a discourse which refutes the country’s foundational myth as a terra nullius, and proposes a new sense of national identity that is inclusive of the Indigenous experience.

Few in Hollywood knew that James Young Deer, general manager of Pathé Frères West Coast Studio from 1911 to 1914, was really an imposter. After all, Young Deer had earned a reputation as the first Native American producer and had worked... more

Few in Hollywood knew that James Young Deer, general manager of Pathé Frères West Coast Studio from 1911 to 1914, was really an imposter. After all, Young Deer had earned a reputation as the first Native American producer and had worked alongside D. W. Griffith, Fred J. Balshofer, and Mack Sennett. For decades, he eluded film historians. But after ten months of poking through dusty archives and faded vital records, the identity of this mysterious filmmaker finally came to light.

In this paper, I attempted to understand the underlying reasons for the existence of a Sovietised attempt at the quintessentially American genre of the 'Western' film. By dissecting several distinct film of the 1960s and 1970s, I hope to... more

In this paper, I attempted to understand the underlying reasons for the existence of a Sovietised attempt at the quintessentially American genre of the 'Western' film. By dissecting several distinct film of the 1960s and 1970s, I hope to have shown that the Soviet Western is revealing in its demonstration of convergence and connection between the American and Soviet experience of history.

This article concerns a relatively neglected Hollywood Western, rarely addressed in critical discourse but vividly remembered by cinephiles, both lay and professional. A Man Called Horse, released in 1970, is an adaptation of a short... more

This article concerns a relatively neglected Hollywood Western, rarely addressed in critical discourse but vividly remembered by cinephiles, both lay and professional. A Man Called Horse, released in 1970, is an adaptation of a short story by Dorothy Johnson, first published in Collier's magazine in 1950. Johnson is best known as the source author for another cinematic Western adaptation, John Ford's canonical The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). 1 A Man Called Horse belongs to a much older genre that has been subsumed into the Western, the so-called Indian captivity narrative. In this story form, a settler of European extraction is kidnapped by indigenous people, lives among them for a time, and is eventually redeemed to white civilization. Evincing an ambivalence endemic to the Western genre, the captivity narrative fluctuates between an exoticizing fascination with the primitive and an ideological imperative that the protagonist withstand the temptation to "go native." According to a longstanding theory, genre narratives foster social cohesion by imaginatively resolving intractable contradictions within dominant ideologies (Cawelti, Adventure 35-36). In the case of the captivity narrative, at least if the protagonist is male, his temporary encounter with this savage way of life is thought metonymically to rejuvenate his decadent culture, as is exhaustively elaborated in Richard Slotkin's frontier myth trilogy.

In this essay I explore the Korean blockbuster, a film genre that enjoyed popularity in South Korea as a local translation of the Hollywood blockbuster. In examining this hybrid cinematic form, I focus on the cultural dynamics informing... more

In this essay I explore the Korean blockbuster, a film genre that enjoyed popularity in South Korea as a local translation of the Hollywood blockbuster. In examining this hybrid cinematic form, I focus on the cultural dynamics informing the genre's ambivalent-at times even contradictory-aspirations to globalization and localization, with both trends accelerating in Korea. As a particularly poignant blockbuster film, The Good, the Bad, the Weird (dir. Jee-woon Kim, 2008) may well showcase and expand this complicated equation, particularly through its apparent adoption of several genres, including the Manchurian Western. As a Korean sub-genre that was popular in the 1960s, Manchurian Westerns stage Manchuria of the 1930s, in which the Korean people's fight for the nation's liberation from Japanese occupation played out in part, thus inevitably converging on the theme of mimicry and post-colonialism that has emblematized the Korean blockbuster's genre-defining desire. In an attempt to understand the intercultural dynamics that inform this hybrid genre, I rely on contemporary post-colonial theory and film genre theories. I illustrate how this film-and the Korean blockbuster more generally-interplays with ever-changing notions of Korean national boundaries and Koreanness today.

From:
I. Ritzer / P.W. Schulze: Genre Hybridization. Global Cinematic Flows, Marburg 2013

Doğu ve Batı, hayata bakış açısından iki farklı uçta duruyor. Doğu toplumları ve aydınları daha ziyade tümdengelimci bir yaklaşıma sahipken, Batı toplumları tümevarımcı bir yaklaşım sergilerler. Bu, doğal olarak onların edebiyat ve... more

Doğu ve Batı, hayata bakış açısından iki farklı uçta duruyor. Doğu toplumları ve aydınları daha ziyade tümdengelimci bir yaklaşıma sahipken, Batı toplumları tümevarımcı bir yaklaşım sergilerler. Bu, doğal olarak onların edebiyat ve felsefelerini etkilemektedir...

The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of so-called “dime novels”. While before the Civil War, popular fiction was dominated largely by urban themes, the late nineteenth century dime novels contributed to the... more

The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of so-called “dime novels”. While before the Civil War, popular fiction was dominated largely by urban themes, the late nineteenth century dime novels contributed to the enormous popularity of the Western. In 1877 the first Deadwood Dick story was written by Edward L. Wheeler and published by Beadle and Adams. Eventually, Deadwood Dick became one of the best-known protagonists of the Western in the late nineteenth century. By making him an outlaw, Wheeler paved the way for such quintessential Western heroes as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. The paper focuses on the origins of dime novels and more closely, it investigates the importance of Deadwood Dick stories for the Western genre.

In an interview with AMC Network’s blog, Vince Gilligan stated that he likes to think of Breaking Bad (Gilligan, 2008 – 2013) as a post-modern western. (Gilligan, 2008, blog post). Even though it can be seen as a gangster narrative as... more

In an interview with AMC Network’s blog, Vince Gilligan stated that he likes to think of Breaking Bad (Gilligan, 2008 – 2013) as a post-modern western. (Gilligan, 2008, blog post). Even though it can be seen as a gangster narrative as well, this study aims to expand Gilligan’s statement about his creation by investigating generic similarities between Breaking Bad and Western movies. This thesis intends to define what constitutes the inner and outer forms of Western genre films, by using Rick Altman’s Semantic / Syntactic Approach to Film Genre (Altman, 1984). By taking The Great Train Robbery as a generic prototype, the study makes a survey of repetitive semantic elements used in genre films, such as long shots of the desert landscape, outlaw heroes, train robberies, gunfighters and climatic shootouts with genre specified weapons. In order to analyze the syntax of the genre, the study investigates repetitive ways of structuring the Western, such as border, captivity and detective/outlaw narratives. Through looking at these stock narratives reliance on dual protagonists (or dualistic structures), the thesis aims to locate the previously defined binary oppositions of the genre such as wilderness / civilization and savagery / humanity. By analyzing border narratives as an outcome of the frontier myth, the thesis discusses the outlaw hero as a mediator between the two sides of the border. This study aims to search these previously defined semantic and syntactic elements in Breaking Bad, in order to locate the meaning attributed by the Western generic strain.

The 1960s were deemed to be a dark age of Philippine cinema. The local film industry was at its downfall with bomba or sex films and Hollywood films filling up the theatres. With the heavy influx of foreign films, the industry found its... more

The 1960s were deemed to be a dark age of Philippine cinema. The local film industry was at its downfall with bomba or sex films and Hollywood films filling up the theatres. With the heavy influx of foreign films, the industry found its survival through the imitations of foreign genre films, such as the themes of samurai, secret agent, intimate melodramas, and the Western. Known to be the most flexible genre, the Western, with its cowboy and mountain-valley themes, was one of the most duplicated in the local film industry. The study situates the Western genre in Philippine cinema. It articulates the process of how the local film industry appropriated and accommodated the genre within its native context. Utilizing Roland Robertson's framework of glocalization, the study seeks to analyze the process of how the global phenomenon of the Western genre was transposed to the locality of the Philippine cinema, focusing on the two known local Western films Daniel Barrion (1964) and Ang Pagbabalik ni Daniel Barrion (1968). It further discusses aspects of the American Western that were appropriated within the Philippine condition and reality, which reflected indigenous themes and native concepts. This cinematic process subsequently created new ramifications on the genre, making the localized Western genre called the Filipino Western. Ultimately, the study mainly attempts to examine this largely neglected genre.

L'articolo analizza le forme attraverso cui l'autore spagnolo, Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, padre putativo del registro tremendista nella Spagna post-franchista, si avventura nella narrazione di un genere, il western, originario di... more

L'articolo analizza le forme attraverso cui l'autore spagnolo, Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, padre putativo del registro tremendista nella Spagna post-franchista, si avventura nella narrazione di un genere, il western, originario di un'altra cultura, l'americana, utilizzando le esagerazioni stilistiche e di contenuto tipiche del tremendismo, come la sessualità aberrante, l'animalizzazione, la violenza e la crudeltà.

In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth century West is used in the films True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven (1992) as a kind of “safe space” where societal notions of the antithetical nature of age and masculinity in twentieth century... more