I enjoyed the exhibit, especially as my friend and film buff, Gayle Novak, joined me for it. She’s an excellent film historian, starting in childhood, having grown up with a movie theater just down the street and no in-home TV to distract her. My experience was opposite—no nearby theater, but a TV set in the living room from my earliest days. Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, got a TV show in the 50s and I was a devoted fan. Writing this, I detoured to youtube, and sure enough, this clip turned up, accompanied by photos from another favorite, Little House on the Prairie.
Along with the Gene Autry Show, I loved The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show, The Lone Ranger, Broken Arrow, The Range Rider, Wagon Train and others, none of which are in this exhibit, though I remembered them all as I went through the museum. All together, they offered me a kind of time travel, set a half century or more earlier, in a very different environment from the one I had in Hammond, Indiana. Of course they reflected 1950s-era mythologies of the Old West and family life. They must have shaped my early understanding of gender roles—with men doing the exciting stuff and women left back at the ranch. Unconsciously I absorbed the idea that the population was essentially white. There were “noble Indians” and “dangerous Indians” in those early days, a mythology masking the taking of the West from Native Americans.
As Gayle and I walked through the exhibit, it was the video clips the drew most of our attention, especially the films of the late John Ford. In childhood, while I sat in front of the TV, Gayle was in the movie theater, watching his films. There’s a retrospective of Ford’s films in the DAM exhibit. A well-deserved one, both for the magnitude of his work (5 decades, 100 films), but also for his artistry. As the museum program notes, “Ford was inspired by the landscapes, characters, and dramas of nineteenth-century painters. In part by studying classic western American artists, Ford developed an artistry that elevated him to what he termed a “picture maker.’”
At the beginning of the exhibit, 19th century paintings were the focus, and Gayle was quite familiar with that genre as well. Our attention was drawn to George Catlin’s 1832 painting of Four Bears, Second Chief in Full Dress. Catlin claimed to be the first white man to paint Plains Indians. We might guess there are fewer cultural stereotypes in his work than what we see in the work of later generations, yet he was also viewing “the other”, the “exotic” ceremonial dress of Native chiefs. He painted hundreds of portraits, many of which are now in The Smithsonian.
C.M. Russell, a prolific late 19th century painter, is also represented in the exhibit, and a museum guard, noting Gayle's knowledgeable comments to me, advised us not to miss the colors in his painting in the next room. Yes, wonderful color, and it clearly shows the hazards of travel in the Old West, though I found myself idly wondering how they got so many people in one stagecoach.
As we continued through the exhibit, I remembered how TV eventually gave me access to Ford's work after networks got the rights to broadcast classic films in the mid-50s. The titles blur in memory; no doubt I followed along with the stories, only dimly aware of who the director was and the cinematic genius he revealed in his work. Yet, last week as I watched the clips selected for this exhibit, I saw what a breath-taking scene composer Ford was. In particular, scenes from The Searchers (1956), considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) show this artistry. I wondered if back in the day, my unconscious also picked up a sense of good picture composition as I watched them. If so, thank you, John Ford. The beginning of this clip from The Searchers illustrates his genius with composition.
Two great morality Westerns with lonely, courageous heroes— High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), are given their due. This theater marquis for High Noon reminded me of those pre-digital days when we watched everything on a big screen, in relative silence, with hundreds of others. Gayle and I watched video clips, along with one of Giant (1956), which featured the iconic James Dean just before his tragic early death. This film, based on a novel by Edna Ferber, deals with racism and the politics of wealth and oil in Texas. A foreshadowing of the 1960s, waiting in the wing.
Ford’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) was his elegy to Native Americans. It was a Hollywood version of an actual event, The Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-9, in which the Cheyenne, forcibly removed south, attempted to return. I missed this one at the theater, 1964 being the year I graduated from high school and got ready to enter college. During the 60s, the Western genre turned to new interpretations of history. I saw Little Big Man (1970) with college friends and applauded the elevation of Native Americans and critique of the U.S. Cavalry. The Vietnam war was raging, and anti-military critiques found a very receptive audience.
That same year, 1970, a book gave me my first understanding of the massive injustice done to Native Americans by White settlers—Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. By the late 60s, the American Indian Movement was organized to redress these continuing injustices. One of the founders was the late Russell Means, and you can see Andy Warhol’s famed politicized portrait of him in this exhibit. The magazine covers below ("Return of the Red Man" and "A Choice of Heroes") acknowledge the cultural changes going on with revisionist history and a reframing of heroism.
The counterculture Easy Rider (1969) used the same landscapes as earlier Westerns, but replacing cowboys with drug-dealing bikers traveling cross country, finding a mix of tradition, communes, free love and lots of violence. I remember seeing this film then, as a young woman who had never traveled cross country, indulged in free love or tried marijuana, probably with the same sense of wonder and puzzlement I felt as a Midwestern child looking at The Old West. The Easy Rider bike, shown in front of a video clip, is enshrined in the exhibit.
The exhibit continues with a tribute to the genre of “spaghetti Westerns”, typified by The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as “Blondie”, the bounty hunter. Leone was noted for his use of violence, tension and stylistic gun fights, and though the genre was disparaged then, this film has stood the test of time it seems. Somewhat stunned by the scale, Gayle and I stood in a circular space, surrounded by large video screens, each with a tough gunslinger, positioned in a Mexican standoff, ready to draw and shoot. Seeing Eastwood, I remembered his award-winning Unforgiven (1992), which he directed and dedicated to Leone. It was probably the first “anti-Western” I saw, one which challenged all of the old myths of heroism and justice, replacing them with a scathing critique of violence and human cruelty.
The exhibit ends with a display of various sometimes-puzzling postmodern works, including a tipi furnished with Victorian furniture and featuring a satirical western skit on video. Perhaps some examples from the sci fi and fantasy genre (Star Wars and The Hunger Games, for example) would have been a better way to finish. Those films are places where young people today find cultural representations of all the old themes—justice, morality, freedom and their evil dystopian twins—human folly and cruelty--in the context of the early 21st century.
Most interesting & well written series 0f posts...Thanks for sharing.
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ReplyDeleteMost interesting? I can agree, but i read it for a new knowledge:)
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I enjoyed this column. I remember those television westerns -- my father watched them constantly, probably because they reminded him of his childhood on the late frontier in North Dakota. I also enjoyed seeing Dale Evans. I made up stories adding women to the casts of the all-male shows. Maverick was my favorite by far. I enjoyed James Garner's easy manner and his lack of violence.
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