Excavating an Image: Cinema and the American West

Abstract

“Excavating an Image: Cinema and the American West” revives the study of classical Hollywood westerns to argue for their renewed importance for understanding the role of the natural environment in the visual culture of the modern United States. I argue that the classical western—reframed through contemporary scholarship in the environmental humanities, film theory, and art history—crystallizes cinema as a cultural form that produces nature as an image, an environment, and an effect of modernity’s machinations. I interpret the western (or particular western films) as building upon and influencing an expanded ecology of forms dedicated to remediating the natural world—forms to be found in landscape paintings, survey photographs, postmodern earthworks, as well as contemporary landscape films. Thus, while a project of environmental film scholarship, the dissertation also maintains that the western invites scholars to think cinema in tandem with other environmental forms found in the history of painting, photography, and the visual arts more broadly. Further, the dissertation foregrounds the extracted resources necessary for the production of these cinephotographic images, bridging the environmental aesthetics of the western with a corresponding environmental history of the modern West. Excavation refers then to the histories brought forth by the dissertation: those of the environment as it inheres in the cinematic image as well as those of the visual and its accumulated strata of techniques for envisioning the landscape. In an era of profound ecological crisis (the so-called Anthropocene), my dissertation excavates the western to discover in it those visual-material strata that form the damaged ground of our specular present.