Westerns : films through history / edited by Janet Walker.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Walker, Janet, 1955-

Series:

AFI film readers

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Western films--United States--History and criticism.

Western films.

United States.

Physical Description:

viii, 264 pages : illustrations, music ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2001.

Summary:

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:

Introduction: westerns through history / Janet Walker 1

Part 1. Historical metafiction: the 1990s western

1. Generic subversion as counterhistory: mario van peebles's posse / Alexandra Keller 27

2. A tale N/nobody can tell: the return of a repressed western history in jim jarmusch's dead man / Melinda Szaloky 47

3. The burden of history and john sayles's lone star / Tomas F. Sandoval, Jr. 71

Part 2. Historiophoty: buffalo bill, the indians, and the western biopic

4. Cowboy wonderland, history and myth: "it ain't all that different than real life" / William G. Simon, Louise Spence 89

5. Life-like, vivid, and thrilling pictures: buffalo bill's wild west and early cinema / Joy S. Kasson 109

6. Buffalo bill (himself): history and memory in the western biopic / Corey K. Creekmur 131

Part 3. Film history: widening horizons

7. How the west was sung / Kathryn Kalinak 151

8. Drums along the l.a. river: scoring the indian / Claudia Gorbman 177

9. Beyond the western frontier: reappropriations of the "good badman" in france, the french colonies, and contemporary algeria / Peter J. Bloom 197

Part 4. History through narrative

10. Captive images in the traumatic western: the searchers, pursued, once upon a time in the west, and lone star / Janet Walker 219.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0415924235

0415924243

OCLC:

45195525