The Westerns
The Genre As a Whole I will be researching how old style westerns have influenced modern day superhero movies from their editing, writing, and their aesthetic appeal. I will be going through the history of westerns as well as discussing what makes a western a western, how they’ve changed through the years, and why they’re still relevant. I will then talk about superhero films and how they have started, their brief history, how they’ve changed, and how westerns have influenced them as a genre. How it started. Westerns have been around in novels before film in books such as “The Lone Ranger” The American Film institute describes films as "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier." …show more content…
The common traits of westerns entail the setting such as The Wild West, The Southern states, Saloons, Ranches, and open Prairies to name a few. It also entails the time period, which is typically the late 1800’s. Then there’s the costumes and characters. You have the heroic cowboys, who are typically rugged yet handsome. The bad guys, who are typically rugged and ugly. The anti-heros, who are usually wanderers/drifters looking for trouble or trouble finds them. And you have the Native American stereotypes that act like savages and attack the heroes of the adventure. The Native Americans are always portrayed as being primitive with their tomahawks and their bows and arrows while the cowboys have pistols, rifles, forts, and seem well organized. According to FILMSITE, The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization, or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. Specific settings include lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the saloon, the jail, the livery stable, the small-town main street, or small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization. They may even include Native American sites or villages. Other iconic elements in westerns include the hanging tree, stetsons and spurs, saddles, lassos and Colt .45's, bandannas and buckskins, canteens, stagecoaches, gamblers, long-horned cattle and cattle drives, prostitutes (or madams) with a heart of gold, and more. Very often, the cowboy has a favored horse (or 'faithful steed'), for example, Roy Rogers' Trigger, Gene Autry's Champion, William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) Topper, the Lone Ranger's Silver and Tonto's Scout. Another convention of the genre according to Northrop Frye as told in Barry Keith Grant’s “Film Genre Reader” are the 5 narrative tendencies in westerns. These are the Myth, Romance, The High Mimetic mode, The Low
The Genre As a Whole I will be researching how old style westerns have influenced modern day superhero movies from their editing, writing, and their aesthetic appeal. I will be going through the history of westerns as well as discussing what makes a western a western, how they’ve changed through the years, and why they’re still relevant. I will then talk about superhero films and how they have started, their brief history, how they’ve changed, and how westerns have influenced them as a genre. How it started. Westerns have been around in novels before film in books such as “The Lone Ranger” The American Film institute describes films as "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier." …show more content…
The common traits of westerns entail the setting such as The Wild West, The Southern states, Saloons, Ranches, and open Prairies to name a few. It also entails the time period, which is typically the late 1800’s. Then there’s the costumes and characters. You have the heroic cowboys, who are typically rugged yet handsome. The bad guys, who are typically rugged and ugly. The anti-heros, who are usually wanderers/drifters looking for trouble or trouble finds them. And you have the Native American stereotypes that act like savages and attack the heroes of the adventure. The Native Americans are always portrayed as being primitive with their tomahawks and their bows and arrows while the cowboys have pistols, rifles, forts, and seem well organized. According to FILMSITE, The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization, or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. Specific settings include lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the saloon, the jail, the livery stable, the small-town main street, or small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization. They may even include Native American sites or villages. Other iconic elements in westerns include the hanging tree, stetsons and spurs, saddles, lassos and Colt .45's, bandannas and buckskins, canteens, stagecoaches, gamblers, long-horned cattle and cattle drives, prostitutes (or madams) with a heart of gold, and more. Very often, the cowboy has a favored horse (or 'faithful steed'), for example, Roy Rogers' Trigger, Gene Autry's Champion, William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) Topper, the Lone Ranger's Silver and Tonto's Scout. Another convention of the genre according to Northrop Frye as told in Barry Keith Grant’s “Film Genre Reader” are the 5 narrative tendencies in westerns. These are the Myth, Romance, The High Mimetic mode, The Low