VM100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Manifest Destiny, Gambling, James Fenimore Cooper
1 Jul 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
VM100
Semester #1 Lecture 11
Prof. Michael Selig
The Western (yee haw)
-Vengeance for the “good”
-Western film antecedents
-Relationships with Native Americans
-Spectacle of violence
-Heroic subject as man of violence
Mary Rowlandson’s The Captive (1682)
-First bestseller in the new world
-Story of damsel in distress
Dime Novel (1860+)
-Ned Bunline
Western Novels
-James Fennimore Cooper
-The last of the Mohicans (1826)
-Owen Wister
-The Virginian (1902) first million selling Western
Non-fiction accounts
Francis Parkman’s “The Oregon Trail” (1849)
Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” (1872)
Wild West Show
-Late 1880s to mid teens
-Buffalo Bill
Early Western Films
-Edison company’s cripple creek bedroom (1899)
-The Great Train Robbery (1903)
-No individual heroics
-Spectacle of violence
-Moralistic resolution- “evil” is punished
The “Eastern Western”
-Pastoral landscapes (US frontiers)
-Sympathetic of Native Americans
-The Red Man’s View (1909) and Rose of Salem Town (1910) both by Griffith
-The Vanishing American (1925)
-Zane Grey
-Richard Dix actor
-The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913)
-Griffith
-William S. Hart
-Stark realism
