The Wild West & Hollywood: Charles Portis “True Grit” (book 1968, film 2010)
Film and Talk with Scott Stelle, d.a.i. Tübingen. The Western as a populist genre continually fascinates audiences nationally and abroad, even as it has been dismantled. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the expanding frontier as the border between civilization and an unpopulated wilderness — a place where national destiny was enacted and America's self-image originated. The boundary-line between order and lawlessness contains a mythological dimension associated with the familiar and unfamiliar, shifting regions, seduction and transgression. This quarter we shall explore iconographic elements of the genre, like the stagecoach, homestead, sheriff and gunslinger as well as “revisionist” westerns of the 60s, which presented Indians as noble savages and cowboys as antiheroes.
In English
Location: d.a.i. conference room
Admission: free for members, donations welcome
