Westerns: Films through History

by Janet Walker (Editor)

Overview

The cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, schoolmarms and barkeeps of Western films have wholly transformed our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. In Westerns , leading scholars unpack the ways in which the form has embellished, mythologized, and erased past events. 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. Included is an introduction by Janet Walker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415924245
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/12/2001
Series:	AFI Film Readers
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Janet Walker is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Couching Resistance: Women, Film and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry and co-editor of Feminism and Documentary.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Westerns through History, Janet Walker
Part I Historical Metafiction: the 90s Western
1. Generic Subversion as Counter-History: Mario Van Peebles's Posse, Alexandra Keller
2. A Tale N/nobody Can Tell: Rethinking the Myth of the West in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, Melinda Szaloky
3. The Burden of History and John Sayles's Lone Star, Tomas F. Sandoval, Jr.
Part II 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 and Louise Spence
5. Life-like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures: Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Early Cinema, Joy S. Kasson
6. Buffalo Bill (Himself): History and Memory in the Western Biopic, Corey K. Creekmur
Part III Film History: Widening Horizons
7. How the West Was Sung, Kathryn Kalinak
8. Drums Along the L.A. River: Scoring the Indian, Claudia Gorbman
9. Beyond the Western Frontier: Reappropriations of the "good-badman" in France, the French colonies, and contemporary Algeria, Peter J. Bloom
Part IV 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
Contributors
Index