The Western as Spectacular?

?Of course it is not only a particular kind of hero or story which characterizes the Western film. At the heart of its appeal is not just narrative but spectacle. It's the sight of a chase on horseback, of an Indian attack on the wagon train or a gunfight which thrills the spectator.

The huge success of The Qreat Train Robbery was surely based in the main on its non-stop spectacular action, the train hold-up and final shoot-out, filmed in convincing locations. Visual spectacle was one of the mainstays of nineteenth-century theatre. Plays, many of them set in the West, provided scenes of large-scale action which included horse-riding, gunfights, fires and even train crashes. The Western in the cinema could provide the same, only more so. William Frederick 'Buffalo Bill' Cody also began his show-business career on
the stage, and his 'Wild West', a circus-style entertainment which drew on many aspects of Western life and legend, may he seen as a combination of dime novel and stage spectacle. The show celebrated the accomplishments of the cowboy, such as roping and riding skills and fancy shooting. It exhibited real live Indians and buffalo. And it contained embryonic narratives such as an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage, episodes which came closer than ever before to the cinematic Western. In a parallel development, rodeo, gathering popular appeal at the end of the century, also played its part in packaging the riding and roping skills of the cowboy into a form of commercial entertainment. Visual media made their own contribution to a public image of the West. Photography was ideal for conveying the splendours of the western landscape and for portraiture. It was also the most important technical progenitor of the cinema, though its direct influence on the early Western film was limited by the relatively slow speed of the first negative plates and by the cumbersome nature of the equipment. As a result photography, though invaluable as a record of how the West looked, was inferior to painting as a medium in which to portray the exciting scenes of action which were at the centre of the film Western's early and sustained popularity. Until the last third of the 19th century, most paintings of the West had aimed at producing an accurate record of the country and its inhabitants, both indigenous and immigrant. Artists like George Catlin and Seth Eastman specialized in ethnographic studies, portraits, landscapes and pastoral scenes. Then, with the growth of the means of mass reproduction, especially chromolithography, and the success of large-circulation magazines such as Harper's Weekly, came a new demand for stirring scenes of action and adventure. Thanks to artists such as Frederic Remington, painting reinforced the tendency in popular literature and drama towards making the Western synonymous with exciting narrative. Thus out of the myriad of experiences, thoughts and imaginings produced by the incursions of the whites into the wilderness there had been fashioned, by the time the cinema was ready to be born, a repertoire of available forms and formats. Anyone who chose to speak about the West found themselves directed along well-defined channels. Certain images or ideas were readily available. Others, not worked over in any of the forms outlined above, were literally unimaginable. To give an obvious but important example, two main concepts of the Indians had become current by the end of the 19th century. According to one, they were noble savages, at an earlier stage of material development than the whites, but still innocent of the corruptions which civilization brings. In the other view, Indians were viewed as inherently inhuman, and so uncivilizable; they were a threat which had to be eradicated. A third concept was theoretically possible: that Native Americans (an unthinkable phrase for the time) had a civilization of their own, one which was, albeit technologically backward, not inferior to white civilization, just different. But this was an idea which could not be fitted into the mental framework of the age. If some ways of thinking and some forms of experience were excluded by the dominant discourses of the period, there was nevertheless by 1900 a huge array of material, richly evocative, on which Western narratives could draw. A whole gallery of types and situations had been created, with their various possibilities for development into the heroic figures which stories of the West seemed to demand:?? explorers,?? mountain?? men,?? pathfinders,?? Indians,?? scouts,?? miners,
soldiers, outlaws, gamblers, farmers and many more. Of course the primitive Western film could not instantly avail itself of all the possibilities contained in the plethora which literary, dramatic and visual media had developed. It was to be some time, for example, before the full possibilities of the Western landscape were realized. Certain established characters, such as Davy Crockett, were to prove less central to the movie Western than more recent inventions such as the cowboy. The reasons for such shifts in emphasis are never easy to determine, but some of them result from the internal dynamics of the movie Western itself and from the institutional pressures of the film industry. To these we must now turn. ?