Table Of Contentwesterns
Previously published in the AFI Film Readers Series
edited by Charles Wolfe and Edward Branigan
Masculinity
Peter Lehman
Violence and American Cinema
J. David Slocum
The Persistence ofH istory
Vivian Sobchack
Home, Exile, Homeland
Hamid Nancy
Black Women Film and Video Artists
Jacqueline Bobo
The Revolution Wasnt Televised
Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin
Classical Hollywood Comedy
Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnick
Disney Discourse
Eric Smoodin
Black American Cinema
Manthia Diawara
Film Theory Goes to the Movies
Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary Radner
Theorizing Documentary
Michael Renov
Sound Theory/Sound Practice
Rick Altman
Fabrications
Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog
Psychoanalysis and Cinema
E. Ann Kaplan
westerns
films
through
history
edited by
janet walker
~~ ~~o~;~;~~~up
New York London
Published in 2001 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10017
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an inf orma business
Copyright © 2001 by the American Film Institute
Typography: Jack Donner
All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information stor
age or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
"Life-like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures: Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Early Cinema" by
Joy S. Kasson has also appeared in Buffalo Bill's Wild ~st: Celebrity, Memory, and
Popular History (Hill & Wang, 2000). Reprinted by permission of Hill & Wang.
An earlier version of "Cowboy Wonderland, History, and Myth: 'It Ain't All That
Different Than Real Life'" by William G. Simon and Louise Spence appeared in the
journal ofF ilm and Video, Vol. 47, Nos. 1-3 (Spring-Fall). Reprinted by permission.
An earlier version of "Drums Along the L.A River: Scoring the Indian" by Claudia
Gorbman appeared in ~stern Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and
Appropriation in Music, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh. (University
of California Press, 2000). Copyright © 2000 The Regents of the University of
California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press.
"The Burden of History and John Sayles's Lone Star' by Tomas F. Sandoval, Jr. appeared
in Bad Subjects, Issue 28 (October 1996).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Westerns: films through history I Janet Walker, editor.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-92423-5- 0-415-92424-3 (pbk.)
1. Western films-United States-History and criticism.
I. Walker, Janet, 1955- II. Series.
PN1995.9.W4 W44 2001
791.43'6278-dc21 00-051708
contents
acknowledgments vii
introduction: westerns through history 1
janet walker
part one. historical metafiction: the 1990s western
1. generic subversion as counterhistory: 27
mario van peebles's posse
alexandra keller
2. a tale N/nobody can tell: the return of a repressed 47
western history in jim jarmusch's dead man
melinda szaloky
3. the burden of history and john sayles's lone star 71
f
tomds sandoval, jr.
part two. historiophoty: buffalo bill, the indians,
and the western biopic
4. cowboy wonderland, history and myth: 89
"it ain't all that different than real life"
william g. simon and louise spence
5. life-like, vivid, and thrilling pictures: 109
buffalo bill's wild west and early cinema
joy s. kasson
6. buffalo bill (himself): 131
history and memory in the western biopic
corey k. creekmur
part three. film history: widening horizons
7. how the west was sung 151
kathryn kalinak
8. drums along the l.a. river: scoring the indian 177
claudia gorbman
9. beyond the western frontier: 197
reappropriations of the "good badman''
in france, the french colonies,
and contemporary algeria
peter j. bloom
part four. history through narrative
10. captive images in the traumatic western: 219
the searchers, pursued, once upon a time in the west,
and lone star
janet walker
contributors 253
index 255
acknowledgments
An AFI Film Reader on the western has been a recurring dream of the
wonderful editors of this series, Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe,
and I am honored to have been invited to imagine a way of realizing it.
I could not have done so without the generous help of many people.
Thanks are due to Chuck and Edward in their series editor hats and as
brilliant commentators on my own contributions to the book. Their
knowledge of the western and western history and their willingness to
share it is boundless. Of course, the book wouldn't exist at all without
the contributors, and I owe them a great debt for all the solitary and
collaborative work it takes to make a volume. Special thanks are due to
K. Kalinak whose intellectual acuiry and generosiry were ever evident
during this process, who edited the editor, and whose longstanding
friendship is a source of happiness.
I can't help but take a historical view of acknowledgments, which
means mentioning the inspiration of Janey (The western Films ofj ohn
Ford) Place, my first film teacher, who was very influential indeed.
Thanks also to my colleague Anna Brusutti, whose lectures to beginning
film students I think of whenever I see Charles Bronson's eyes in close
up; I appreciate her many insights into the western and the extended
loan of her copy of Spaghetti westerns. I would also like to thank Robert
Burgoyne for encouragement and support, and for the energizing, pro
gressive conversation about history, heritage, and Thunderheartthat took
place from Greenfield Village, Michigan, to Santa Barbara to Chicago.
For able research assistance I would like to thank the highly competent
film cognoscenti, Lauren Edwards and Jennifer Baumgartner. Jennifer
continued to assist me even after graduating and becoming a profes
sional archivist, and I am grateful for her skill, her generosiry, and the
great cover still she found. For editorial assistance I thank Cynthia
McCreery for her way with texts, fictional and otherwise, and Juan
Monroy for his digital dexteriry. I am also grateful to the National
Endowment for the Humanities for a summer stipend that aided the
writing of my own contribution, and to Constance Penley, chair of Film
Studies at the Universiry of California, Santa Barbara, who enabled me
to arrange my teaching schedule to accommodate the work on this vol
ume. Thanks are due to Bill Germano at Routledge for his ethusiasm
and faith that the volume would appear, to the hard-working and effi
cient Damian Treffs, and to wonderful production editor Julie Ho.
A student in a film history course I conducted traveled to the
UCLA Film and Television Archives to view a print of the early sound
western In Old Arizona; listening carefully to the now scratchy sound
track, the student was stunned to hear a familiar musical theme, a tune
his grandfather had whistled for as long as he could remember. I would
like to thank that former student, now turned film editor, Aram
Nigoghossian, for his perceptions about how the past returns in west
erns. Also I would like to thank the students of "The Western:
'Cowboys' and 'Indians,"' for joining the expedition into territory that
was for some familiar but for others unfamiliar, either because movie
westerns at the end of the century are fewer and farther between or
because I insisted that one could love westerns and still approach them
from a feminist and antiracist perspective. I am afraid I might forget
one of you if I try to name you, but our conversations and your papers
remain in my memory; thank you all for what you taught me. By name
I would like to thank the film studies graduates who served as readers
for the course and contributed their lively opinions and their judicious
comments: Jamie Gluck, Lisa Brende, and, once again, Cynthia
McCreery.
Finally, thanks are due to Steve Nelson, who brought Signs and
Meaning and Horizons "West to our marriage, and who is always willing
to rent another western when nothing else appeals; and to Ariel
Nelson, who encouraged my tendency to see westerns historically as
well as mythologically, saying "you're right, Mom, if they were just
myths they'd have gods and imaginary creatures and all that." Thank
you both for constancy and joy.
V111
introduction
westerns through history
janet walker
The insight that "the western is history'' is everywhere and nowhere. In
"The Evolution of the Western" (1955), Andre Bazin declared that "the
western is rooted in the history of the American nation."1 Jim Kitses was
even bolder in 1969, and it is from him that I borrow the untamed
metaphor of my first sentence,2 but I could just as well have borrowed it
from one of Richard Slotkin's chapter headings in Gunfighter Nation
(1992), "The Western is American History."3 Absent from these latter
two examples is Bazin's notion of the western's organic rootedness. The
western does not "spring from," nor "grow out of" history. No sense of
boundaries nor of separate entities is couched. The western is history.
three paths in a conceptual topography
Discussions of the western, from any perspective, generally begin with the
acknowledgment that it is a historical genre by virtue of its constituent
films being set in the past, and in particular, overwhelmingly, between the
end of the Civil War and the "closing of the frontier" in 1890.4 And
