A Home in the Wilderness
Visual Imagery in John Ford's Westerns
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8905411 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Budd (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1976 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 62-62 |
| Publication date | 1976-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225450 |
| OpenAlex | W2335645805 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
It has frequently been noted that the Western genre as a tradition in film and literature is based on a series of related oppositions-civilization and savagery, culture and nature, East and West, settlement and wilderness. These abstract themes and concepts are given definite form in individual films. Every director who has constructed a distinctive Western world in his films has made images with which to visualize and particularize the meanings latent in these abstract elements. In many of the films of Budd Boetticher, for example, towns and settlements are virtually absent, fertile oases in the desert providing the only resting places for travelers. In the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah the walled-in squares of Mexican villages are transformed from places of peace and refuge into traps, locations for the most extreme outbursts of violence. And Sergio Leone makes his sleepy little towns into labyrinths, every door and window potentially hiding a gunman. The cinematic world of each of these directors is delineated by recurrent images, images which make visual a particular version of the general Western oppositions, which select from and inflect the range of possibilities present in the genre. In the Westerns of John Ford, civilization is embodied primarily in the family and the community, and characteristically located in homes, cavalry forts, stagecoaches, covered wagons, or other shelters. This study examines a visual tradition in which home and shelter is juxtaposed with its opposite, the desert wilderness, within single images. The tradition is a recurrent complex of images which, in various ways, relates home space to wilderness space, bringing them into visual confrontation within the frame. The encounter of home and wilderness is more than a theme in
Art · Art history · Humanities · Visual arts · Wilderness · Cinema and Media Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Media, Gender, and Advertising
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,21 |
| Citation span | 1998 - 2023 (26) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |