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  • The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century
  • Nicola McDonald
The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Scott Simmon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 393. $85.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper).

Identifying origins, cultural moments of birth or invention, is a fraught exercise; it inevitably tells us as much about ourselves and our obsessions as it does about the past. And so, although Scott Simmon mentions George W. Bush only once and only at the end of his nuanced and ideologically sophisticated study of the western's invention on film, the specter of the Texas rancher with his cowboy ethics, frontier justice, and wild west rhetoric (especially but by no means exclusively post-9/11 when most of this book was written) haunts its every page. The western, as a meaningful vehicle for contemporary cinema, may indeed be dead (although its demise has been predicted ever since film's first decade), yet its mythologies remain a vital, even primal, force in American culture. And this is why Simmon's work on the origin of the genre and the development of its "classic" imperatives is so compelling.

What The Invention of the Western Film demonstrates so persuasively, from start to finish, is the extent to which the genre cannot, despite the popular currency of its familiar clichés, be reduced to the kind of easy certainties—the good, the bad and the ugly—that Bush, his allies, and critics readily exploit. The ideologies that shape the western and that it in turn promulgates are, from the evidence of its first half-century, as divergent as Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, both of whom famously drew on the authority of its competing representations of the frontier and (white) America's manifest destiny. The invention of the western film can be dated with, for this kind of exercise, surprising precision to 1894. In that year, Thomas Edison, better known as the inventor of the light bulb, opened his first kinetoscope parlor and shortly thereafter released one of his first films: a twenty-second piece called Sioux Ghost Dance. Edison's brief images of bare-chested and beaded Sioux, played in his New Jersey studio by real Native American actors on a morning break from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, recall the 1890 battle at Wounded Knee, where the Sioux, following the killing of their chief Sitting Bull at a spiritual revival named for its "Ghost Dance" ceremony, were massacred in what became the last major confrontation of the Plains War. The finality of that battle was not lost on the American public; at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association, which coincided with Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundred years since America's "discovery," Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the frontier closed. The era of America's westward expansion is over; the Indian is dead (or on tour); and so film steps in to fill, and reinvent, the gap. The absurdities that subtend this very short and very first western, nowhere more evident than in its complex rendering of recent history, provide a kind of leitmotif for Simmon's reading [End Page 733] of a genre in which nothing other than its explicit racism (Simmon's starting point, not his conclusion) is ever fixed.

The Invention of the Western Film is divided into three, chronologically progressive sections. Part one, focussing on the westerns directed by D. W. Griffith between 1908 and 1913, explores the aesthetic and political distinctions between the eastern-western, filmed in the "pastoral" landscapes of, predominantly, upstate New York before the industry's exodus to Hollywood, and the first far-westerns which struggle to capture and render meaningful the vast, constructed emptiness of a west that, like the films themselves, is witness to the decimation of its Native inhabitants.

Part two starts up in 1929 with the arrival of sound and the polarization of the history-obsessed, feature-length A-western (of which at most fifty were produced) and the more than one thousand second-billed B-westerns whose unintentional surrealism...

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