New Directions in National Cinemas

Endurance of the Global Western Film

Hervé Mayer, David Roche

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253060778
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

While Western films can be seen as a mode of American exceptionalism, they have also become a global genre. Around the world, Westerns exemplify colonial cinema, driven by the exploration of racial and gender hierarchies and the progress and violence shaped by imperialism.

Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film traces the Western from the silent era to present day as the genre has circulated the world. Contributors examine the reception and production of American Westerns outside the US alongside the transnational aspects of American productions, and they consider the work of minority directors who use the genre to interrogate a visual history of oppression. By viewing Western films through a transnational lens and focusing on the reinterpretations, appropriations, and parallel developments of the genre outside the US, editors Hervé Mayer and David Roche contribute to a growing body of literature that debunks the pervasive correlation between the genre and American identity.

Perfect for media studies and political science, Transnationalism and Imperialism reveals that Western films are more than cowboys; they are a critical intersection where issues of power and coloniality are negotiated.

PART I

US-AMERICAN WESTERNS FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

OUR JOURNEY BEGINS IN THE US-American West. It begins where it appears to have all started—the frontier myth, the Western. A logical beginning, but one that the following chapters mean to contest or at least qualify by demonstrating that the national myth and the genre it spawned were transnational from the start.

The journey will take us from the conquest of the West, the US-Mexico border and the Mexican Revolution of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century borderlands of Mexico and Texas; from the silent epics of the 1920s on through the classical and contemporary era; from Hollywood to independent cinema; from the Western to the post-Western; from John Ford, the man who “ma[de] Westerns,” to a young Tejano director whose first feature film was screened in festivals, then released on Amazon Prime.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 demonstrate how a transnational approach can shed new light on famous works—how the international marketing of a film celebrating US nationhood (The Iron Horse of 1924) complicates our understanding of it as engaging exclusively with national concerns; how foreign politics can creep into what is sometimes considered to be John Ford’s most patriotic work (the “Cavalry Trilogy” of 1948–1950); and how a 1950s Mexico Western that seems like a textbook example of Cold War interventionist propaganda (Vera Cruz, 1953) actually situates liberalism on the side of Mexican revolutionaries and, thus, raises troubling questions concerning the status of US democracy. Chapter 4 then dwells on a film (Tejano, 2018) that was released well after the transnational turn and presents an exemplary case of contemporary notions of frontera and hybrid identity. Each chapter insists on the notion of circulation—of goods, vehicles, people (characters), ideas, movies, ideology, and identities; on the dynamic relationship between national (and even regional) and international stakes; and on the imperialist foundations of the genre that endure in spite of its mutations, allowing it to resonate in various contexts and be packaged and marketed as such, and constituting a framework through which the representation of colonial histories can be interrogated.

Our transnational journey into the US-American Western is facilitated by the stories of characters who cross or have crossed these borders themselves; it begins, paradoxically perhaps, along the transcontinental railroad, aboard that symbol of conquest and US-American national identity that is the iron horse.

ONE

TRANSNATIONALISM ON THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924)

PATRICK ADAMSON

IN THE 1949 EDITION OF his The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema, British film critic and documentary pioneer Paul Rotha recalls John Ford’s epic of the US-American transcontinental railroad, The Iron Horse (1924), as a film “fit to rank with any in the class of reconstructed fact”: “I remember with feeling the long line of railwaymen’s camps on the progressing track; the spirit and adventure of the pioneers; the clever rendering of the manoeuvres of the encircling Indians; and above all, the far-stretching landscape across which the steel track was to run” (Rotha, The Film Till Now 198–99). As personal as his response might be, Rotha’s emphasis on mass movement, scale, and an overall impression of “spirit” aligns it with what was then the dominant interpretation of the film—one advanced with regularity by his contemporaries in the documentary film movement. As he put it, this “naturalist” Western offered rare “edification” by presenting a “theme of grand endeavour . . . to greater purpose than mere fiction” (Documentary Film 80). The “father of documentary,” John Grierson, was likewise taken with this inspiring and instructive case of “national projection” and adopted the film as an often cited exemplar for his own ambitions: the conveyance of “fundamental and universal themes” to the “common people” (qtd. in I. Aitken 85). The Iron Horse left a noteworthy impression on the pair for the force with which it was seen to take the defining nineteenth-century ambitions and achievements of the United States and project them not only for a new generation of US-Americans but for the world.

Projecting images of national life overseas became Grierson’s stated occupation in the late 1920s, when he established a film unit at the Empire Marketing Board. Rotha soon joined him there. Tasked with using film to promote the interests of the British Empire, the officers of the unit “made their first beginnings by an analysis of what had been done in the way of national projection in other countries”: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927); The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923), another landmark epic Western that strongly influenced Ford’s The Iron Horse itself; “and sundry Soviet pictures” such as Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) (Documentary Film 97). In Grierson’s words, these represented “all the documentaries and epics worth a damn” (“E.M.B. Film Unit” 49). Whether they embedded fictional melodrama within their “authentic” frontier settings or served overtly propagandistic ends, their mass reach and concomitant influence over popular understandings of their subjects proved to him that cinema “could be an adult and positive force in the world” (qtd. in Deacon 151)—in short, the instrument of uplift and even enlightenment that would form the basis of his documentary ideal.

This chapter is occupied with the genealogy of such sentiments, examining Ford’s film through what was, by this stage, already a long-standing intellectual tradition: that cinema, as a universal language with international distribution networks, might be used to effect globalized historical understanding, self-visualization, and even harmony.¹ As we shall see, however, these democratizing pretensions served ends at once internationalist and imperialist, whereby “understanding,” in this prominent reading, frequently entailed a standardization of knowledge and the promotion of a hegemonic perspective on history and humanity. What proponents cast as a laudable undertaking—overcoming and supplanting the parochial obstacles to communication hitherto posed by the world’s multiplicities of language, tradition, and culture—can today be identified as cultural imperialism.

The Iron Horse, the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, is today the best remembered of a silent-era cycle of epic Westerns that procinema writers singled out as heralding such an educative and prosocial future for their medium. Indeed, it was in reference to this emergent cycle that, in 1923, Edward S. Van Zile effused: “To-day I find the screen achieving wonders in conserving, for the sake of posterity, the memory of epic, epoch-making deeds of derring-do that not only glorify our past but inspire us with hope and ambition for the future” (196–97). Because they narrated key nation-building episodes and visualized central aspects of the frontier experience, productions like The Covered Wagon, The Pony Express (James Cruze, 1925), and The Vanishing American (George B. Seitz, 1925) were credited with reviving and bringing newfound legitimacy to a genre that many critics had already deemed passé and stagnant because of excessive violence and scenario recycling (Hampton 339–40). In contrast to the lowbrow programs and serials that had begun to dominate Western production, these were distinctly middlebrow spectacles—including road shows and lavish in their production and promotion. Above all, these prestige efforts apparently offered credible interpretations of an instructive history, their viewing being deemed a matter of civic education. Unlike most Hollywood films, they were seen to exemplify the industry’s capacity for mass edification, purveying knowledge about the past—or, at least, familiarizing audiences with the nation’s foundational myths.

Given its evident nation-building and community-forging capacities, it is unsurprising that scholars have tended to frame this mode of filmmaking in terms of its exploitation of contemporary nativist sentiment (Kenaga 9, 25–26). It was certainly the case that Hollywood studios were, at this point, engaged in a concerted attempt to appease suspicious morality critics, whose attacks on the film capital’s “foreign” power brokers had intensified following a spate of star scandals in the early 1920s. Moreover, this was a decade marked by mounting ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration policy. US-American identity was increasingly defined in terms of inherited and historically established hegemony. In privileging key moments of nineteenth-century westward incursion, films like The Iron Horse echoed their day’s dominant interpretation of this heritage: heroes push “civilization” across a continent and overcome human and environmental obstacles to birth a modern nation, the experience thereby conferring its people’s exceptional qualities.

And yet, this chapter demonstrates that the focus on domestic audiences favored in most analyses of the film elides a key context for its production, promotion, and reception: the popular historical Western of the period was cultivated with cosmopolitan, internationalist identifications and regularly positioned by film writers and intellectuals as a force for democratic social progress on the world stage. The advancement of the epic Western as a vehicle for spreading understanding and, in turn, democracy returns us to The Iron Horse’s significance for key figures of the documentary film movement. As foundational as the language of national projection and cultural development was to their enterprise, Grierson and Rotha, in particular, identified a close affinity between post–World War I efforts in international reconstruction and film—a medium with a unique capacity for linking humanity across distance and difference (R. Aitken 658). Grierson rejected the idea of “foisting” an introspective national myth on others, favoring the projection of a “larger international self” that dramatizes “international relationships and dependencies” (qtd. in R. Aitken 655): “It is the only genuinely democratic institution that has ever appeared on a world wide scale” (“Parting of the Ways” 1843). Rotha argued similarly that having “democratic” films “shown here and abroad” would foster “in the long run . . . a universal acceptance of the democratic philosophy” (qtd. in R. Aitken 655). The Iron Horse became a core work for the pair because it represents an interpretation of the US’s past as its “larger international self,” implicated within a larger ideal of democratic advancement—one inspiring and enlightening for domestic and overseas audiences alike. Its sweeping images of human movement and endeavor unify heterogeneous crowds—Union, Confederate, Irish, Chinese, Italian, and so forth—reflecting and encouraging self-visualization within a narrative that is both national and transnational: that of the railroad tracks, cutting across ethnic and sovereign divisions to emphasize common values and shared progress. As a model of historical process, it is one that is in line with a tendency typified by contemporary intellectuals such as Randolph Bourne, who called for the diminution of nationalized perspectives in favor of a “trans-national” understanding of the singularity of the US: that its diverse population and ever-growing global connections would make it the “first international nation” (156).

The global use for cinema imagined here indicates why Ford’s film figured so regularly in what Ryan Jay Friedman calls the “utopian-universalist” discourse on cinema, which reached a crescendo in the mid-1920s (1). The proponents of this popular interpretation asserted that the motion picture is the ultimate educational instrument: industrially efficient, singularly impactful, and, above all, universally understandable. By democratizing knowledge and foreshortening disparities on a global level, it could act as a force for harmonious social progress. The rest of this chapter examines how a utopian-universalist notion of uninhibited and democratic communication underscores Ford’s first Western epic and the discourse that surrounded it. It is shown that international considerations were an imperative of both the film’s recurring collective images and its commercial exploitation: the vision of historical process presented is one drawn beyond the confines of the world’s singular nation; and the strategies used to further its reach into global markets reflect the significant impact that the conception of Hollywood cinema as a force for world harmony had on this landmark Western epic.

Finally, I contend that to consider The Iron Horse as a transnational historical film is to confront it at its most contradictory: as an imperial narrative paradoxically endowed with democratic potential. The championing of Hollywood cinema as a force for global cooperation betrays some fundamental conceits of the rhetoric of progressive universalism within which it is couched. First, the conflation of national and universal history is shown to perpetuate a developmentalist worldview that centers US-American perspectives on human relations. And, second, what is today identifiable as cultural imperialism is advanced as a benign process: the world’s histories and languages being reconciled through Hollywood’s “universal” alternative, a sharing of knowledge effecting cultural and social uniformity. A universalized language might serve the interests of future global cohesion, but only by extending an imperial perspective on the meaning and direction of history, along with its attendant ideologies and stereotypes.

FRONTIER HISTORY AND THE “MOVING PICTURE”

The incursion of settlers along the Oregon Trail, the meeting of the rails in Utah—histories of US-American migration and expansion have long been readily translated into the generic iconography of the Western because of their essentially visual dimensions. When he first presented his famous frontier thesis in Chicago in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner was able to draw on an established pictorial tradition that linked national progress in spatial and temporal terms—mass progression across the continent—to the teleological advancement of democracy over time (Walsh 3). Specifically, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Hervé Mayer and David Roche
• Part I. US-American Westerns from a Transnational Perspective
• Part II. European Westerns and the Critique of Imperialism
• Part III. Westerns in a Postcolonial or Postempire Context
• Coda: We Will Not Ride Off into the Sunset / Hervé Mayer and David Roche
• Index