[Commlist] CFP: The Western and Postwar America

/Lonely are the Brave/: The Western and Post-war America

An Online Conference: 15-17, June 2021


The western was once seen as a key genre for understanding both 
Hollywood and the culture of the United States more broadly, but studies 
of the genre are few and far between today (Corkin, 2004; Nelson, 2015; 
Wallin and Godfrey, 2019). Significantly, most work on the western does 
not actually focus on the whole generic corpus of the western as on a 
particular cohort of pictures from the 1950s and 1960s, a period that 
was seen at the time as a major departure from earlier eras (see Bazin, 
1971; Cawelti, 1971 and 1976; Kitses, 1969; Maltby, 1995; Schatz, 1981; 
Wright, 1975). Many examples were distinguished specifically from the 
westerns of the past through the processes of promotion and publicity: 
these westerns were consciously seen as ‘upscaling’ the genre, and many 
were prestige films that were presented as serious, significant and even 
as ‘Class A productions’. If later critics would stress the mythic 
qualities of these films, promotion and publicity at the time often 
stressed their realism, psychological complexity and social commentary 
(often through an implied contrast with the westerns of earlier 
periods). Significantly, despite the often quoted ending to John Ford’s 
/The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance/ (1962) – ‘When the legend becomes 
fact, print the legend’ – this film actually spends it time detailing 
the ‘facts’ at the expense of the ‘legend’ (see also for example /Fort 
Apache/, which has a similar structure).

       Furthermore, despite the association with stars such as John 
Wayne, many of these films were made by liberal, and even leftist 
filmmakers (see, for example, Krutnik, Neale, Neve and Stanfield, 2007; 
Buhle and Wagner, 2015; and Boddy, 1998, who makes a similar point about 
the television western of the period). The post-war period was one in 
which those on the left, right and centre all framed themselves as 
anti-totalitarian guardians of liberty, while the western’s relation to 
manifest destiny could either be used to justify the worst examples of 
Cold War expansionism; covertly reinterpreted in terms of the 
anti-fascist popular front of the 1940s that called for America to act 
as a champion of liberation around the world; or overtly challenged 
through a rejection of ‘the blessing of civilisation’. In other words, 
while many accounts present the mid-1960s as a turning point in the 
western, which marks the transition from the classic to the revisionist 
picture, there are serious problems with and contradictions within this 
account. For example, although John Ford’s /Cheyenne Autumn/ (1964) is 
often seen as a marker of this process, and as the director's atonement 
for his handling of Native Americans in earlier pictures, Ford’s films 
had continually questioned the treatment of the Indians since, at the 
very least, /Fort Apache/ (1948), and westerns of the 1950s commonly 
framed racism as social problem, as seen in /Broken Arrow /(1950)/; 
Seminole/ (1953); /Broken Lance/ (1954); /Apache /(1954)/;/ and 
even/ The Searchers /(1956).

       In short, the supposedly ‘classic’ period of the western might 
not be quite as we remember it – it might not be the ‘classic’ period at 
all but, in fact, a prolonged revisionist period whose politics and 
presentation require re-evaluation. The proposed event will cover the 
period that roughly coincides with hegemony of New Deal liberalism, one 
that begins with the war against fascism and comes to an end with the 
election of Ronald Reagan and the era of neoliberalism. For convenience, 
we suggest a period from /The Ox-Bow Incident/ (1942) until /Heaven’s 
Gate/ (1980) which, of course, is also a period that dates from the war 
years, when Hollywood enjoyed a surge in cinema-going, the crisis of the 
studio system that followed the war and the end of the production 
code.We are looking for papers that revisit this period and offer new 
accounts of its production, its texts and its reception.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·Studios and the making of the post-war western

·Exporting the post-war western abroad

·Reinterpreting the post-war western abroad

·The marketing of the post-war western

·The critical reception of post-war westerns

·Authoritarianism in the post-war western

·The post-war western and conformity

·Dilemmas of individualism

·Modernity, technology and industrialisation

·The Western and the World: Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism 
and narratives of empire in the Cold War era

·/Called a Peacemaker but I didn’t know why/: contradictions of 
peacekeeping in the period

·Law-making and Lawbreaking

·Narratives of conflict and reconciliation

·Regeneration through violence or the repudiation of violence

·Varying/evolving modes and depictions of violence

·Gender in the post-war western

·Generic distinctions – superwesterns, anti-westerns and epics of 
American history

·Not just John Wayne – stardom and stars in the post-war western

·The value(s) of land and the bounding/unbounding of cultural and 
literal landscapes

·Discourses of realism: psychology, social commentary and the ‘adult’ 
western,

·Conflicting masculinities in the post-war western

·Western heroes as mediators/the loss of their symbolic value

·Relations to other media, such as literature, visual arts, popular 
music, radio, television, theme-parks and video-games

Proposals should be sent to the organisers by 1 February, 2021.


Mark Jancovich and Helena Bacon


(M.Jancovich /at/ uea.ac.uk) <mailto:(M.Jancovich /at/ uea.ac.uk)>


(helena.bacon /at/ uea.ac.uk) <mailto:(helena.bacon /at/ uea.ac.uk)>

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