‚Our‘ Appalachia: Cinematic Ecologies of Landscape
The rise of the Western during the beginnings of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1910s coincides with the demise of another popular landscape genre: the Appalachian Mountain Melodrama. While the Western became the quintessential American film genre that combined national narratives of the frontier with on-location filming in a region that allowed for year-round productions, the Appalachian mountain films have come to be associated with narratives of a lost frontier and an internal colony waiting to be civilized. Examining two early cinematic responses to this national narrative on Appalachia –– Henry King’s drama Tol’able David (1921) and Buster Keaton’s comedy Our Hospitality (1923)–– this talk will address landscape as a dynamic agent of cultural power that mediates economic, political, ethnic and gender relations to our environment.
Veranstalter
Vortragende(r)
Christian Quendler is Professor of American Literature, Film and Media and Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of three monographs, among them The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema (Routledge 2017), and principal investigator of the research project “Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes of the Alpine Model,” sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund.
Kontakt
Matthias Klestil (matthias [dot] klestil [at] aau [dot] at)
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