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This is an analysis of the Western genre between 1969 and 1980, a period characterized by the release of a select number of 'revisionist' Westerns like The Wild Bunch (1969), Little Big Man (1970) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Made by filmmakers associated with the Hollywood Renaissance, these Westerns are celebrated for openly critiquing the ethos of the mythic American West and appropriating the genre’s conventions for social commentary. This study argues that the veneration of this canon of films has resulted in a distorted and incomplete picture of the Western at the time, which has consequences for cultural histories that read Westerns as a reflection of American society. Drawing on an extensive viewing of Westerns released in and around the period in question, this project seeks to uncover the complexity and multiplicity of the Western of the time. It reconsiders the genre’s relationship with American history and politics, including the plight of the American Indian and America’s military involvement in Vietnam; examines the changing representations of frontier heroes Wyatt Earp and Jesse James; draws attention to a number of neglected or misinterpreted movies and trends, including the later Westerns of actor John Wayne; and dispels the idea that the disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980) was responsible for “killing” the Western. These analyses reveal not only connections between canonical and lesser-known works, but also continuities between these and older Westerns – an ongoing, cyclical process of regeneration that transcends established divisions in the genre’s history. In doing so, the project works revise our understanding of the Western of this period, and to add to our knowledge of the genre as a whole.

Like all filmic modes documentaries are ideological artistic constructions and according to Bill Nichols (2001: 38) they carry more influence than fiction because we assume that documentary sounds and images are authentic. According to John Ellis (2005: 1) documentaries work because they generate in us a belief of truth that what we see on the screen can be trusted. Through its ability to elicit trust from its audiences, the documentary has set itself apart from the fiction which has also been termed “fabrication” (Renov, 1993: 7). Unlike fiction, the documentary does not stage, fabricate or create life but simply represents it (Nichols, 2001: 20). Fiction therefore becomes the antithesis of documentary and documentary becomes the antithesis of the fiction and all that it is known for: fabrication and falsification. Carroll Noel agrees that (1996: 255) the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy is used to “commend or disparage items as true or false.” Drawing from the complimentary film component as a case study and a framework of theoretical ideas, this paper suggests that without such perceived conditions of difference and associations of truth the documentary film by itself might be no more truthful than fiction. What separates these two forms is the way we look at them.

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University of Technology, Sydney. / The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold: to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history, not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s. I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Women's Film Fund. From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.

University of Technology, Sydney. / The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold: to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history, not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s. I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Women's Film Fund. From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Kansas, 2007. / Advisers: Max Utsler, Patty Noland. Includes bibliographical references.

Diss.--Göttingen, 1996. / Bibliogr. p. 531-551.