John Ford i pejzaż amerykańskiego pogranicza. Przypadek „Dyliżansu”, „Poszukiwaczy” i „Jak zdobyto Dziki Zachód”
John Ford and the Frontier of American Borderlands. The Cases of “Stagecoach”, “The Searchers”, and “How the West Was Won”

Author(s): Aleksandra Krajewska
Subject(s): Visual Arts, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: landscapes in films by John Ford; frontier landscape; American landscape paintings vs cinema
Summary/Abstract: In the history of the United States a prominent place is occupied by the frontier (the frontier) as a meeting point of the white settlers and what were to them virgin lands. The legendary tales of settling the West, in particular their visual depictions, have become – with the passage of time – an important part of the American Founding Myth. Their traces are found in Hudson River paintings and in those produced by Rocky Mountain School, but also in the Western films aesthetics that drew upon the former. Based on the example of John Ford’s westerns’ aesthetics, the author of the article conducts an analysis of cinematic depictions of American frontier land melted into the landscapes featured in classical Hollywood productions about the Wild West. The departure point for her considerations is the overview of the New World’s basic institutions in Stagecoach. In The Searchers, in turn, what comes to the foreground are Ford’s interests in the art of painting, for he transform Monument Valley into nothing short of a mythical land. A kind of summation of the path traversed by the American Landschaft, from the realm of nature to the centre of western civilisation, is the blockbuster How the West Was Won, being both an apogee and the twilight of the narrative on the United States’ divinely‐given mission.

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