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Article: PLAYING AT BEING INDIAN: SPECTATORSHIP AND THE EARLY WESTERN.
- Article from:
- Journal of Popular Film & Television
- Article date:
- September 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A crowd of painted Indians, recruited from the Bowery, and tougher than any Indian ever dared to be ... do[es] not constitute a Western.
--"The Vogue of Western and Military Dramas" (272)
A nickelodeon screening of an "Indian" melodrama almost one hundred years ago might have seemed both novel and reassuringly familiar to audiences at the time; novel, since "Indian" films were suddenly en vogue at the time, and this may have been the spectator's first taste of the exciting new genre, and familiar, since many of the films' narrative and icono-graphic tropes would have been instantly recognized from nineteenth-century painting, photography, theater, ...