Students interested in spending their afternoons saddling upwith big-screen cowboy legends like Alan Ladd, Clint Eastwood andJohn Wayne while receiving college credit hours are in for asurprise this summer.
Starting May 17, the College of Communication and Fine Arts willoffer a one-time only summer course on Western cinema forundergraduate and graduate students.
Steven Ross, who will be teaching the three-week course,successfully pitched the idea of a class that would offer studentsan in-depth look at the authority of the Western film in popularculture.
"I've been waiting to do a class like this for a long time,"said Ross, a film professor at The University of Memphis since theearly '80s.
"A class on Western films is a very appropriate setting foracademic study."
Ross is particularly excited about the idea of enlighteningstudents on such a paramount aspect of American culture.
"Westerns have created such a large part of the self image ofAmerica as well as the myth of the American identity," he said."They've influenced everything from Wall Street to politics."
The course, officially titled Film Genre/The Western, will meetMondays through Thursdays and could possibly be held in a publicmovie theater off of campus.
"The films we will be viewing are best seen on a large screen,"said Ross.
For this reason, Ross and others are hard at work determiningwhether a leasing agreement can be made with local theaters.
"We hope that we will be able to hold the class in a MalcoTheater. They want to help us out, so we've been discussing variousleases," said Ross.
The class, the first of this specific kind, will featurereadings, lectures and a classic frontier film everyday.
While a common thread does exist between each of the movies Rossplans to show, he insures that all of the films will vary in themeand message.
"A film like The Seachers is in many ways an allegory for theBrown v. The Board of Education case, which happened a few yearsbefore the film's release," said Ross. "It talks about a nationfacing itself in a new way."
Another Western, The Wild Bunch, reflects the questionablepolitics and social atmosphere during a dynamic period in Americanhistory, Ross said.
"It was a Vietnam era film about America crossing borders andperhaps making things worse," he said. "Many Westerns are reallyabout the politics of the moment."
Other films scheduled for viewing are Rio Bravo, Shane, HighNoon and of course a few of Sergio Leone's glorified "SpaghettiWesterns" starring Clint Eastwood, Ross said.
"These are always amusing because they were written by anItalian, starred Americans and were filmed in Spain," said Ross. "Icall them Baroque Westerns because they are just so stylized."
Students interested in taking Film Genre/The Western this summermay register for the course on Tigerweb.
"This is a film study class I think people from any major wouldbe interested in," said Ross.
