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The Revival Western And, Kevin Thomas Mckenna

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I create a dialogue between films credited with reviving the Western film genre in the early 1990’s. I examine spatial representations in a group of films I label “the revival westerns”: Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), and George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone (1993). Through the use of extreme long shots, characters demonstrating a confined sense of place, and continuity editing, the revival westerns erect a concentrically scaled conception of space and place and maintain a linear temporality. However, I offer Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) as an intervention that reassembles these spatial and temporal notions. Dead …