Screening 4: More Thoughts on The Searchers

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifAs promised, below are some links to arguments made about the film that in some way address the significance of race in the film. Feel free to comment here on your thoughts regarding this issue.

1) Roger Ebert's review
2) The Wikipedia entry on the film's "Themes" section
3) A piece by a film critic entitled "They ain’t white. Not any more. They’re Comanch’": Race, Racism and the Fear of Miscegenation in The Searchers"
4) Another review from a writer on blogcritics.com

What these pieces have in common is an interest in contextualizing the kind of racism found in the film in a way that makes sense given the cultural, social, and industrial context in which the film was produced and consumed. These authors do not agree on the meaning of the film or the role of racism in it, but they do all start by separating the racism portrayed by the characters in the diegesis from any sense of the film as a whole as racist.

This is an important element for budding film scholars to address and be aware of: the characters represented in a work do not always (perhaps even rarely) present an ideology consistent with the film as a whole. Instead, films as narratives present all kinds of characters in specific circumstances so their behavior can be understood by the viewer within a broader context. This kind of approach to film study is an important perspective to begin understanding now as your careers as critics and theorists are beginning.

(As an aside, collapsing the distance between the text's ideology and the ideology of one of its characters--even the protagonist--is the mistake many detractors of media violence make all the time: that because the protagonist is very violent, that the film as a whole text condones or encourages such violence. This is often not the case.)

Nonetheless, these distinctions are quite subtle and open to interpretation as any set of symbols is, which is why we see the four authors above struggling with the precise way to contextualize the block of symbols we call The Searchers.

Having read these four pieces and watched the film, what do you think?