During the 1950s the genuinely American genre of the western movie started to dominate American cinema. Western movies recalled the nineteenth-century fascination with the American West and they reiterated the meeting of "civilization" and "wilderness" as the major American epic. In this course we will first address the presence of the west in the cultural imaginary of the U.S.A. over the past two centuries, reading texts on cultural key concepts like "Manifest Destiny" and the "Frontier" and examining representations of the west by painters and novelists. With this background in mind, we will turn to American cinema and examine how the imagination of the west was transferred to movies from 1903 to the present.
Please note that this class will count as two SWS, although individual meetings may take up to four hours – depending on the length of the films we will be viewing and discussing. A reader containing all course texts will be available from the copy shop at Rekhammerweg 4 after the fist seminar session. |
