Extract of other Events

Born to a Mexican mother and white father and raised by the Chiricahuas, Hombre (1967, Paul Newman) is a revisionist Western that critiques the genre’s hero. It sought to show Native Americans in a positive light, however, it reflects cultural appropriation and imperialist nostalgia where Hombre takes on the good qualities of Indianness while the dominant white male Hollywood gaze gets to play Indian. I argue for a cinematic topography, one that shifts the focus toward a haptical cinema, touching, and in touch with the landscape. To do so I first examine the role of Old Tucson Studios in creating the Western colonial imagination.  I then shift to the Ptolemaic distinction of geography and topography, the cartographic paradox and, how topography is related to landscape and cinema. Following this, I use Eisenstein’s image event and Bazin’s image fact explain how the film’s cinematic topography unfolds differently than its cinematic cartography. With these foundations in place, I proceed to a case study of the topography of Hombre in the novel and film paying attention to the appropriation of race and how the hero embodies a Sonoran Desert topographer.

Lecture on Thursday, 16 c.t., Senats-Saal Nat.-Fak.