HOLLYWOOD AND THE WILD WEST Professor Wise University of North Texas Spring 2016 Roy Rogers filming in Lone Pine, California, 1938 This class provides a rigorous introduction to the critical study of western films from an historical perspective. We will study how the genre s art and performance have helped create and subvert popular understandings of western history, and how the genre s consistent popularity attests to its flexibility in interpreting complex historical relationships between freedom, violence, race, gender, and social inequality. So too, we will explore how imaginations of the American West as a wild place have opened possibilities for understanding nonhuman actors such as animals, the weather, or the earth itself as significant agents in historical transformations, a characteristic of western films that can powerfully disturb and naturalize viewers cultural and political expectations. Students will learn to uncover, identify, and analyze from a critical perspective the meta-narratives of western history that have framed these historical visions in both past and present.
Hollywood and the Wild West PROFESSOR MICHAEL D. WISE EMAIL: michael.wise@unt.edu OFFICE: Wooten Hall 259 HOURS: Tuesday, 1:00-3:00 PM NUMBER/SECTION: HIST 4261.005 LOCATION: Wooten Hall 219 TIME: Tuesdays, 6:30-9:20 PM Required Texts (available for purchase in the bookstore) Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004). James Welch, Winter in the Blood (New York: Penguin, 2006 [1974]). Grading Criteria Attendance and Participation 10% Written Discussion Responses 15% Comparative Review Essays 45% Weekly Film Journal 30% 100% Blackboard Lecture notes, reading assignments, and other electronic course materials will be available as PDF files on the Blackboard Learn website. Grades will also be available on the blackboard site. Attendance and Participation Students are expected to attend all class sessions and to complete reading assignments and other assigned coursework before class. Because this class meets only once per week, I will enforce a strict attendance policy. Only one absence is permitted, and two or more absences will result in an F. Class Format Class sessions will consist of a mixture of lecture and discussion along with film viewing. Under these circumstances, a glowing laptop or smartphone screen is distracting to your peers, so please refrain from using electronic devices during class.
PART ONE Classic Westerns January 19 Course Introduction Film: Cecil B. DeMille, The Squaw Man (1914). January 26 The Backlot Western Film: Stuart Heisler, Dallas (1950). Read: *David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-6. *Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). February 2 On Location Film: John Ford, The Searchers (1956). Read: Phil Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 3-108. February 9 Small Group Discussion #1 Read: *Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1968 [1936]). *Larry McMurtry, Place, and the Memories of Place, in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). PART TWO Violence and Freedom February 16 Black History Month Lecture (Exact Time and Location TBD) Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner s Bench (2015) February 23 Revisionist Westerns Film: Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Read: *Richard Maxwell Brown, Violence, in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 392-425. DUE: Comparative Review Essay #1
March 1 Revising the Spaghetti Western Film: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained (2012) Read: Three reviews, write down their titles and the publication in which they appeared, and the name of each reviewer, and one or more of your favorite sentences from each review. March 8 The Awkwardness of Guns Film: Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man (1995) Read: *Jonathan Rosenbaum, Acid Western, Chicago Reader, June 26, 1996. March 22 Wild West Rolls East Film: Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider (1969) Read: *Howard Hampton, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, in Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, eds., The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 249-256. March 29 Small Group Discussion #2 Read: *Slavoj Zizek, On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), excerpts TBD. PART THREE Sex, Family, and the Settler Society April 5 The View from Behind a Bonnet Film: Kelly Reichardt, Meek s Cutoff (2011). Read: *A.O Scott, Out on the Frontier, Bringing All that Baggage With Them, New York Times, April 7, 2011. *Lydia Allen Rudd, Notes by the Wayside en route to Oregon, 1852, in Lillian Schlissel, ed. Women s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Shocken Books, 2004),187-198. April 12 The Gayness of Manly Work Film: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain (2005). Read: *Richard White, Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? : Work and Nature, in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). *Richard White, Brokeback Mountain: A Western, Montana: The Magazine of Western History 56:2 (Summer 2006): 65-66. DUE: Comparative Review Essay #2
April 19 Multigenerational Western History Film: John Sayles, Lone Star (1996). Read: *Alan P. Barr, The Borders of Time, Place, and People in John Sayles s Lone Star, The Journal of American Studies 37:3 (2003): 365-374. April 26 Small Group Discussion #3 Read: James Welch, Winter in the Blood, all. May 3 The Past and the Self Film: Alex Smith and Andrew Smith, Winter in the Blood (2013) No Reading DUE: Weekly Film Journals May 10 DUE: Comparative Review Essay #3