This seminar revisits the ways Hollywood has constructed, mythologized, revised, and perpetuated ideas about the American nineteenth century across more than a century of filmmaking. We will look at cinema as what Duncan Bell calls a mythscape, a space where national memory, frontier ideology, racial formation, and popular spectacle are forged. To better understand the roots of cinematic spectacle in 19th-century popular entertainment, you will also learn about panoramas, dioramas, magic lantern shows, dime museums, and "freak" shows. From those popular spectacles, visual and performative traditions emerged that shaped the Hollywood Western, historical epics, and heritage films. Myth and history will be our guiding themes in this seminar. We will ask how films about westward expansion, Native dispossession, Civil War memory, industrialization, and slavery remediate earlier entertainment forms and construct frontier narratives as national myth. You will watch ten films, from the silent epic The Covered Wagon (dir. James Cruze, 1923) through revisionist films such as The Revenant (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015) and Hostiles (dir. Scott Cooper, 2017). The methods of this seminar will allow you to situate Hollywood’s nineteenth century within longer histories of spectacle and national belonging.
- Dozent/in: Marcel Hartwig