Episode Details

The Cold War Cinema team returns with special guest Aspen Ballas to discuss John Ford's 1956 western The Searchers. Aspen is a PhD student of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research primarily focuses on aesthetics of race and class, and the relation between genre, medium, and politics.

Synopsis of the film: Texas, 1868. A lone figure approaches a windswept homestead, against a dusty blue sky and flaming red buttes and cathedral-like mesas. Returning from the fight for the Confederacy, Ethan Edwards arrives home to his brother Aaron, Aaron's wife Martha, and to their children Ben, Lucy, little Debbie, and their adopted son Martin Pawley. But this is rough country, and a Comanche raid leaves the Edwards family torn asunder–Aaron, Martha, and Ben dead, and Lucy and Debbie taken captive. For seven years, Ethan and Martin search the vast wilderness, motivated not only by family bonds, but in Ethan's case, bloodlust and wild, racist hatred–a search not only to find Lucy and Debbie, but to enforce racial and sexual purity and to define Americanness itself…

On this episode we discuss:

• The American mythmaking in The Searchers and in westerns generally.
• John Ford's attempt to critique anti-Indigenous racism, and the limitations of such a critique in the context of Hollywood filmmaking of this era.
• Militant Liberty, a top-secret psychological warfare program created by the Pentagon to promote anti-communist themes in Hollywood movies during the Cold War. John Ford was an eager participant in the program.
• The broader US imperialist context of the film's release and the historical background of the setting.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode:

Aspen: The Face on Film by Noa Steimatsky; Raoul Peck's docuseries Exterminate all the Brutes (2021)

Paul: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel

Tony: Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land by Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Jason: Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema: Studies in Ford, Wilder, Coppola, Scorsese, and Others by Carl Freedman

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