Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923 (2021). His essays have appeared in scores of journals and been translated into five languages. He received the 2014 SCMS Distinguished Career Achievement Award and the 2017 Jean Mitry Award.
Abel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Our Country/Whose Country?: Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism, and reported the following:
Page 99 of this book introduces a half-dozen two-reel William S. Hart films (1914-1915), whose spaces, characters, and stories would prove characteristic of his short films and features. Hart’s westerns were set in the last stages of settler colonialism, in landscapes defined by deserts and mountains, gulches and canyons, full of sage brush and cacti, seemingly empty (Indians usually were absent) except for small, roughly built frontier towns with crowded saloons and dance halls. For an extreme expression of those landscapes, see the intertitles that open The Silent Man (1917): “Primordial desolation, a huge waste . . . . a trackless solitude.” A production photo of that film’s opening is reproduced at the top of the page. Hart’s character often was an outlaw, yet sometimes a figure of authority, if not always respectable, who controlled or sought to control the inhabitants and resources of an emerging, predominantly white male community. His rivals were white men, from gamblers and womanizers to other outlaws; and most of the women also were white, the prime agents of his transformation into a “good bad man.”Learn more about Our Country/Whose Country? at the Oxford University Press website.
Surprisingly, of the several hundred pages in my book, page 99 serves nicely to introduce a browser to what the book is about. That would not be the case, however, in my other books on American silent cinema.
Page 99 offers a neat summary of the similarities and differences in westerns before and after 1914, initially in those of William. S. Hart. Earlier short films tracked white settlers moving westward across the North American continent in the face of resistance by Indigenous peoples and Mexicans. “American Progress” (a painting reproduced on the front cover) assumed the continent was an allegedly “empty land” of plains, mountains, and deserts in need of “civilizing” —that is, rich in resources for exploitation. Indian pictures were prominent, with characters ranging from warriors and “Noble Savages” to victims of white violence and “in-between” figures like “mixed-descent” families or the sacrificial “Indian maiden”—all guiltily nostalgic figures of the “Vanishing American.” Cowboy films were frequent too, featuring the heroic “good bad man” exemplified by Broncho Billy, an outlaw transformed by a woman. By 1914, Hart’s westerns were set in the last stages of settler colonialism, in landscapes—from scattered ranches and stagecoach waystations to mining company sites and small, roughly built frontier towns—now rarely harassed by Indians or Mexicans (Blacks were hardly visible). In short films and then in features, Hart reinvented the “good bad man” as a stoic figure of virile masculinity, skilled with a gun in confronting white villains who threatened to control frontier towns. A production still from The Silent Man (1917) shows Hart as a miner crossing a “trackless” desert towards a town where he will seek vengeance for being fleeced of his gold. Other westerns from the mid and late 1910s featured white male stars such as Harry Carey, Tom Mix, and Douglas Fairbanks, whose often comic or tongue-in-cheek stories staged a transformation of “American Progress,” in which the white supremacy of westward expansion was settled once and for all. Overall, the book argues that early westerns constitute a singularly significant collection of cultural artifacts that, through the lens of settler colonialism, reveal the very ideological foundations of our country.
--Marshal Zeringue
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