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In April and May 1911, Motion Picture News ran a page titled “Film Charts” in which the Independent films released weekly in New York City were categorized into four “tracks.”1 Two of those, dramatic and comedy, had long been used by the new industry to broadly distinguish certain types of film product; a third, educational, was a more recent invention, born out of the general effort to “uplift” moving pictures, and included both fiction and nonfiction films. The fourth track, western, was the most specific and, in the handicapping metaphor of the charts, had entries that ran “the fastest kind of a race.” They “abound,” as the News put it, “in the life, snap, and vigor that mean so much to M. P. audiences.” This is a vivid yet far from anomalous indication of just how important westerns were not only to the Independents but also to the US moving picture industry as a whole. Just two months earlier, for instance, an exhibitor in Zanesville, Ohio, who also toured a “floating theater seating 1000” on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, reported that wherever he showed films his audiences wanted “Wild West pictures.”2 At the same time, thousands of miles away in England, the trade weekly Bioscope published a feature article about Essanay’s “cowboy pictures,” not only to express its own enthusiasm but to satisfy the alleged demands of its readers because the company’s “Western subjects . . . [had] become so popular” there.3 Indeed, “so numerous” were westerns both here and abroad, Billboard noted, in reviewing Selig’s The Outbreak (March 1911), that it now took “extraordinary strong situations” as well as marvelous scenery and “fine horsemanship” to make them interesting.4 These wide-ranging yet complementary texts offer a point of entry for reassessing the western at a crucial juncture in its development as a production and marketing strategy and as an “American product” highly suitable for internal consumption as well as export, especially to Europe.5 Specifically , this chapter and the next focus on the volatile years of 1910–13, when Chapter 2 The “Usable Past” of Westerns Cowboy, Cowboy Girl, and Indian Pictures, Part 1 61 westerns proliferated despite repeated criticism in the trade press, when the competition between the MPPC and Independents became particularly fierce, and when changes began to occur—for instance, the distribution and exhibition of multiple-reel and then feature films, as well as the emergence of movie personalities or stars (see chapter 6)—that would transform the industry , in short, the moment when, as Rick Altman puts it, a range of possibilities for the genre was being “explored, sifted, and codified.”6 This chapter sketches out several important stages of that exploration and codification, drawing on certain manufacturers’ production strategies, commentary on those strategies as well as specific films in the trade press, and an analysis of extant archive prints. Then, after highlighting the 1912 crisis in production and distribution, the next chapter uses the popularity of westerns abroad as well as at home to frame several perspectives for analyzing variations on the emerging genre’s “imagined community of nationality .” It also glances at the “constellated communities” (the term is Altman ’s) that the westerns’ “usable past” may well have served—what, in Herbert Blau’s prescient words, was “commonly remembered and adhered to, or thought of as better forgotten,” and what was not.7 Finally, it reconsiders the western’s alleged decline in 1913–14. The overall aim in both chapters is to argue for the unique significance of the western—a crucial instance of what Miriam Hansen has called, yet without naming this “genrein -the-making,” the “new sensibility” of “action” that so characterized American modernity or modern “Americanism”8—to a discussion of the intersection of those long-contested cultural artifacts of historical consciousness —genre and nation—in US cinema of the early 1910s. Attack/Counterattack The “life, snap, and vigor” cited by the News had been associated with westerns as “quintessential American subjects” at least since 1909, and particularly those that Moving Picture World dubbed the “school of action” westerns allegedly aimed at the “masses.”9 It was this kind of “wild and wooly” picture in which Selig and Essanay specialized and which Independents like New York Motion Picture exploited with its Bison films to secure a niche on the US market . The trade press generally was not adverse to them. The World noted that, when Selig made a...

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