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Home | Arts & Entertainment | Movies pose a local and momentarily significant challenge.' Cawelti perhaps underestimates the extent to which the Western depends on a fruitful tension between wildness and civilization, rather than recording the victory of one over the other. But he is right to stress the importance of the conflict. His description of what lies at the heart of the Western clearly has much in common with the theories of the most influential historian of the West, Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the peculiar character of American society could be explained by the existence of the frontier, defined precisely as the point at which savagery meets civilization. The influence of other concepts of nineteenth-century history and politics, such as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny or the protest of the Populist movement, can also be charted in the Western. For example, Peter Wollen has uncovered in John Ford's films an antinomy between the West viewed as a garden or as a desert. These conceptions were traced back to the'ir roots in nineteenth-century economic geography by Henry Nash Smith in his book Virgin Land. In his critical study Horizons West Jim Kitses sets out a whole series of oppositions which he finds operating in the ideology of the Western. Fundamental is the clash between the Wilderness and Civilization. From this derives a series of structuring tensions: between the individual and the community, between nature and culture, freedom and restriction, agrarianism and industrialism. All are physically separated by the frontier between the West and the East. These differences may be manifested in conflicts between gunfighters and townspeople, between ranchers and farmers, Indians and settlers, outlaws and sheriffs. But such are the complexities and richness of the material that the precise placing of any group or individual within these oppositions can never be pre-determined. Indians may well signify savagery, but sometimes they stand for what is positive in the idea of'nature'. Outlaws may be hostile to civilization; but Jesse James often represents the struggle of agrarian values against encroaching industrialization. Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com
Encyclopaedia Of Wild West Films Everything about westerns: History of the genre, Directory of films, Actors' biography
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