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Abstract
An approach to the Western that explores its meanings as a landscape art, this dissertation focuses on the specificity of the filmic image. Drawing upon New Regional History, contemporary art history, historiography and theory, and the burgeoning field of landscape studies, this dissertation pushes beyond the overdetermined metaphorical use of "the frontier" to explain the cultural importance of the Western film genre. Insofar as Western location shooting is bound artistically and economically to the region of the West, grounding the concept of "frontier" in physical geography and twentieth-century history enables a piecing-together of severed connections between heretofore "mythic" land of the film Western and contemporaneous historical and economic struggles over actual American lands.
Westerns are set in a variety of geographic spaces, but arid lands are remembered as the Western's most popular location. Seeking to understand how arid lands become the privileged image for the West from the 1950s through the 1970s, this dissertation focuses on the representation of the desert in post-World War II Westerns. Through close textual analysis of The Searchers and The Wild Bunch, films which explicitly foreground their locations, the dissertation shows that for certain Westerns, the location is a site constitutive of the very possibility of meaning of the stories filmed there, the ground or horizon only against which the figures of the characters, their identities and interactions, are able to take shape.
Approaching each film from the visual presentations of its arid landscapes acknowledges and addresses individualized aspects of films whose cultural significance conforms to, but cannot be reduced to, the broad demands of the Western genre, through: (1) exploration of the differences between each film's formal and stylistic characteristics; (2) discussion of the films' formal strategies in the context of their different post-war times of production; (3) drawing connections between each representation of the desert, the shifting meanings of "wilderness" and "nature," and the changing status of "man" in the world that these conceptual shifts indicate.
