History Department  & American Studies

Dr. Kamerling’s 9am CORE 210 SECTIONS · MINI-UNIT

"Print the Legend":  Citizenship, Culture, and the Construction of National Identity in The Western Film

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Unit Overview: Near the end of the classic John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man confronts an ethical dilemma. Should he print the truth of a story he uncovered about a famous gunfight or should he print the legend of that battle, now mythic in its details and collective meanings. The reporter indicates his solution, observing that, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." On one level at least, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is about how legends and myths get made. In the scene described above, Ford indicates that our popular notions of how the west was won differs substantially from the truth.

By making a movie about who really shot Liberty Valance and by exploring the tensions that exist between reality and myth Ford no doubt believed that he was communicating a greater understanding of the reality behind western settlement than he was himself trafficking in myth making. However, Ford was not a professional historian, he was a filmmaker. His interpretation of western settlement owed more to his own preconceived notions, popular and mythic in their own right, than they did to any scholarly analysis of the subject. The reporter’s remark, "print the legend," is ironic because Ford, in substantial ways throughout his long career as a filmmaker of westerns, helped fashion popular American myths about The West and its meaning in American history.

The process of myth-making in Liberty Valance, both intentional and unintentional, illustrates the problematic and complicated role that movies play in shaping our collective understanding of the past. Often our first contact with important events and people in our national history comes through film. These cinematic interpretations of the past offer important cues about how we should think about our history. Certain genres; the western, the gangster film, the war movie, because of their popularity, their uniformity, and their number ultimately help fashion popular myths about our past. Such myths often possess a stronger hold on our collective imagination and appear more real to us than any scholarly exploration of such topics.

Contemporary Hollywood films serve the purpose that religious paintings played in medieval times. Like the medieval church, movie theaters today function as our popular houses of worship. And like medieval church paintings, movies instruct a largely ignorant public on how to understand and think about our past – about our cherished national individuals and events, and they tell us what people and incidents of the past we should consider important. In this way, then, movies often tell us how to use the past in order to understand who we are as a nation, instructing us, ultimately, on how we should think about ourselves.

However, this cinematic historical pedagogy often lacks any scholarly rigor. The rules which guide a filmmaker’s selection of subject matter differs substantially from the concerns which guide the professional historian’s research into the past. The historical events filmmakers choose to focus on tend to be events that are the most easily adaptable to film, events that have an inherent dramatic narrative. Stories of obvious conflict possess more appeal to the filmmaker than more complicated historical events. Furthermore, movies tend to be celebratory, offering positive, reaffirming interpretations of national history and identity. In order to fully understand the role movies play in the process of historical construction, we must examine them critically, analytically, and fully.

Readings: The readings for this unit come in the form of articles that I have photocopied and placed on reserve in the library. I have made three copies of all reserve readings so that access and availability are not an issue. All readings are placed in a three-ring binder titled, "Film and History Readings," under my name. On the syllabus reserve reading is indicated by the symbol ®.

Schedule of Readings and Assignments
 

Date	Readings and Assignments
Mon 11/8	Reading: ~ John Belton, CH11, “The Making of the West” ~ Alan Brinkley, "Where Historians Disagree:  The Frontier and the West" Homework:      ► DUE:  Study Questions for Belton reading      ► DUE:  Study Questions for Brinkley reading
Wed 11/10	Wrap-up reading and discussion from Monday's class ~ in-class:  media literacy
Thurs 11/11	Viewing:  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance       ► 9am, Sykes 24     ►Study Questions for TMWSLV
Fri 11/12	~ in-class:  discuss The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & media literacy
Mon 11/15	Reading: ~ David A. Cook, "The Vietnam Western," from CH9, Lost Illusions:  American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam Homework:     ►   DUE:  Study Questions for Cook reading
Wed 11/17	No Class
Thurs 11/18	Viewing:  Blazing Saddles       ►See on your own
Fri 11/19	~ in-class:  discuss Blazing Saddles & media literacy
Thanksgiving Break PLAY LIST - watch as many of the following movies over Thanksgiving Break as you can 1.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 2.  Jeremiah Johnson (1972) 3.  Dances with Wolves (1990) 4.  Blackrobe (1991)  5.  Unforgiven - MUST WATCH (1992)  6.  Smokesignals (1998)
Mon 11/29	Review for exam
Wed 12/1	In-Class exam over material covered in mini-unit
Thurs 12/2	Begin Final Unit Dana Auditorium - Lecture by Dr. Kobre