engleski

Switching Heroes and Savages - A Comparative Analysis of America's Societal Perceptions as Portrayed in Selected Westerns

For a genre whose development spans almost as long as the cinema’s, it is hard to do an analysis of how it changed in only fifty pages. But an attempt was made to show how the society from which the Western genre originated determined its evolution. How it came from being a simple revival of an idea of the West, to a genre only using its typical iconography to deal with society’s issues. To make an attempt at such an inquiry, it is first necessary to present the historical facts on which Western films base their stories. Furthermore, the historical facts about the development of the genre make the later analysis of the films easier to understand. Since directors greatly influence the films they make, short biographies of the three directors, whose films were used in the analysis, were given- John Ford, Arthur Penn and Kevin Costner. For the most important part of the paper, the analysis, four films have been chosen as to make a comparison of how the most important characters in the genre – the hero, the woman and the Indians – changed through an almost a century of the genre’s existence and development. Four films that were chosen were each created, approximately, twenty years apart thus giving us a picture of different eras of the society from which they derived. The first two films that were used, Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), were directed by John Ford. As a representation of the 1970s Little Big Man (1970) by Arthur Penn was used and the last one analysed is Dances with Wolves from 1990 by Kevin Costner. Observing only these four films, it is obvious that the genre came a long way from the 1930s till the 1990s. While in the first film the hero, is a simple, morally upright guy, by the fourth film he completely changes his character. The same goes for women and especially Indians. Women were at the very beginning, in a way, only a supplement to the hero’s character to later becoming an essential part of the films. The portrayal of the Indians, however, changed completely and they came from being faceless savages to the ones that are superior and ‘civilized’.

Western, iconography, woman, Indian, hero

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