Quotes - The Essential Flashcards
Difference between formula and genre
FORMULA
“a well-known often repeated narrative pattern”
GENRE
the narrative patterns, the themes of historical development and artistic achievement that body of texts implies.
Cawelti
The ambivalence of the West
“cultural tradition defined the West as both an actual place with a real history and as a mythic space populated by projective fantasies.”
Richard Slotkin
Gunfighter Nation
Colonizing the West through movies
“in the end [the movies] colonized this space and altered it to suit their needs and preferences.”
Slotkin
The Western as another world
“the western is not merely a milieu or a way of life but another world or at least another country, as such it has its own language, its own vocabulary, syntax and accents.”
Edward Buscombe
The BFI Companion
Guns
guns constitute the visible moral center of the Western movie
Robert Warshow
“Movie Chronicle: The Westerner”
A killer of man
This ambiguity arises from the facts whatever his justification he is a killer of man.”
Robert Warshow
The Immediate Experience
The Iron Horse title card about accuracy
“faithful and accurate in fact and details”
Nature in the Iron Horse
“seemingly impassable barrier of prairie, desert and mountain”
first title card of Jesse James
“an uncertain and lawless age”
importance of the Frontier theory
“The frontier theory… provided an explanation for American exceptionalism.”
Martin Ridge, “The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis”
Ford about the land
“I think you can say that the real star of my westerns has always been the land.”
Ford, Cosmopolitan, 1964
masculinité
masculinité - manhood
virilité morale - manliness
virilité physique - masculinity
union
“The West provides the space in which the Union can be reunited”
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood Westerns and the 1930s: The lost trail (2001)
nostalgie
“imperialist nostalgia”
Renato Rosaldo, , Culture and Truth: The remaking of social analysis (1993)
