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Reviewed by:
  • Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938
  • Laura Horak (bio)
Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938; DVD distributed by the National Film Preservation Foundation/Image Entertainment, 2011

When frontier outlaw Al Jennings made a film in 1914 glamorizing his life story, US marshal Bill Tilghman decided to make his own film condemning frontier banditry and restaging his most famous arrests. The film was called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw (1915). When outlaws held up a bank near the site where Tilghman was filming in late March 1915, he halted production to pursue them and then returned to filming. “Seldom have the frontier West and the film Western been more inseparable,” Scott [End Page 181] Simmon writes in the program notes to this exceptional collection. While Jennings’s film is unfortunately considered lost, fifteen minutes of The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw have survived, as has another film starring Jennings, The Lady of the Dugout (1918). Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938 presents these two films alongside a wide-ranging smorgasbord of fictional, promotional, educational, and amateur films, travelogues, and newsreels about the American West. The collection vividly illustrates the intermingling of reality and representation that characterizes this particular, highly contested space.

Many of the films in this collection claim an authentic relationship to the frontier—real outlaws play outlaws, real lawmen play lawmen, real cowboys play cowboys, and real Native Americans play Native Americans. Furthermore, the distinctive landscapes make their own truth claims—the camera was really there, in iconic tourist destinations such as Yellowstone and Yosemite as well as more anonymous patches of California desert and ranchland (no “New Jersey scenery” here!). And yet, as the collection’s excellent program notes and commentary tracks make clear, even these “real” outlaws, lawmen, cowboys, and Native Americans were experienced performers who had long presented carefully selected and adjusted versions of themselves, in Wild West shows, dime novels, memoirs, and tourist stops. Even in the most seemingly straightforward actualities, cameramen and performers adapted and dramatized Western spaces and practices for the camera, and every shot and intertitle excluded more information than it contained.

Treasures 5 is the latest addition to the prized Treasures from American Archives series by the National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by the US Congress to support American film preservation. Like volumes 1–4, Treasures 5 is a paragon of historical film presentation. Whereas many archives and silent film distributors focus on releasing (and rereleasing) a small set of proven titles on DVD, Treasures only presents films that have never been commercially released and mostly films without any star drawing power (the Clara Bow, Tom Mix, and Broncho Billy films in the collection are the exception). The musical accompaniment is varied and strong, enlivening the films in thoughtful and effective ways. The program notes include important information about the preservation and transfer process, including the nature of the original material, what archive it came from, the frame rate used, funding sources, and filming locations. Apparently a “Film Preservation Blogathon” in February 2010 funded both The Sergeant (1910) and The Better Man (1912), making one hopeful for the power of crowd-sourced fund-raising in this age of imperiled arts budgets. Like on the first three volumes of the Treasures series, Simmon curated the films and Martin Marks curated the music. Every volume of this series has been expertly put together, but given Simmon’s longstanding expertise in the Western—his book The Invention of the Western Film was published in 2003—this seems like the collection he was born to make. Indeed, it does not disappoint.

Treasures 5 highlights the active and sympathetic role of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and women in early film Westerns. Although racism, racial hierarchy, and racial contest still run throughout the films, the films present welcome alternatives to the structure of racial melodrama so familiar from the classic Western, in which Native Americans or Mexicans threaten a white woman, who is saved at the last minute by a white man. On the contrary, several films show white husbands to be incompetent or unworthy, leaving space for white women, Mexican men and women, and outlaws to save the day. In...

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