Film Studies Speaker Series: Patrick Adamson (Associate Lecturer in Film Studies, St Andrews)

In the final half-decade of the silent era, the Western film — widely seen to be on the decline — returned to the production schedules of Hollywood's major studios on an unprecedented scale. Against the backdrop of persistent debates about the social influence of genre and industry alike, the release of Paramount's Oregon Trail epic The Covered Wagon (1923) inaugurated a cycle of prestige historical Westerns acclaimed not only for their rare “authenticity” and their revival of the frontier filmmaking tradition but for being the foremost evidence of a laudable new purpose for cinema: popularising America's “defining” history — the story of its constructive nineteenth-century frontier past. Reaching audiences across linguistic and cultural divides, they demonstrated, in a time of mainstream nativism and concerns about the perceived moral slippage of the Jazz Age, a role for Hollywood as the purveyor of a new type of American history, enlarged by cinema's medium-specific reach to provide the “melting pot's” diverse filmgoers with inspiring, unifying lessons in the very “making” of their nation.

Used to familiarise people en masse with their heroic nation-building forebears, the motion picture was to help build a greater future. This talk will explore how the sudden popularity of such films gave rise to the articulation of not only lesser-known foundation myths — often ones drawn from local and vernacular traditions, such as that of the first postbellum cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in North of 36 (1924) — but also more marginal, even oppositional, perspectives. The Covered Wagon set an example that was put to the imagining of an array of Americas, from the multicultural, transnational roots of John Ford's epic of the transcontinental railroad The Iron Horse (1924) to the knowing, irreverent skewering of the nation's inflated pioneer mythology in Cherokee comedian Will Rogers' Two Wagons—Both Covered (1924).

Patrick Adamson is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and editor at Open Screens. His research has been published in Film History (2019), Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film (2022), Motifs (forthcoming, 2024), and Film Journal (2024). He received the “Best Doctoral Student Article or Chapter” award from BAFTSS in 2020 and the “Best PhD Dissertation on English Language Cinema” award from SERCIA. His monograph Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood is to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2025.