Events - Event View

Many of you know Nina Kleinberg from her appearances at Amherst Cinema, including her 2015, 2023, and 2024 presentations of The Making of Casablanca: Film School in 90 minutes, her 2016 series Out of this World on 1950s science fiction, her 2019 series Print the Legend on classic Westerns (from which this presentation is adapted), or her Science on Screen presentation on Singin’ in the Rain.

In this talk, Nina will discuss the history of Western movies, where the stories came from, and what these stories told audiences about themselves.

In the 35 years after the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Americans and immigrants from Europe and Asia moved into the Western States in search of wealth, peace, and a new beginning. They found wide-open spaces—and  Native Americans who had lived there for thousands of years.

For much of the 20th century, Westerns were the most popular genre of film (and later on television,) both in the United States and abroad. What was it about the West that brought audiences into the theaters? What stories did Hollywood tell about the allure of the Frontier? How much of these stories was based on truth, and how much on the comforting myths used to justify westward expansion into Native land?

** Nina suggests watching several films before this talk, including The Great Train Robbery (1903), Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956)**

In the late 1960s, Nina attended film school at the University of Southern California. She then spent most of the 1970s working in the film industry in Los Angeles, mostly as an editor. Although she went on to a different career, she never gave up her love of film history and the film-making process.