The birth of the western is inseparable from the political history of the American west. A land to conquer, a land of hope and the promise of inexhaustible resources motivated a desire to access a new world at the beginning of the 19th century. All kinds of pioneers who came to found the United States of America therefore came face to face with the first inhabitants of the New World.

The film industry developed this imagery as in The Heart of an Indian Maid. Just like a dime novel, a sort of ancestor of the airport novel with a melodramatic title recounting the adventures of the edges of the territory, the film draws on the folklore of a fantasy world. The director engages in work that simplifies the image of the Indian so that everybody can identify with the entire American Indian civilisation.

Scenes from the life of Cowboys and Indians were recorded from 1894 on the Kinetoscope* invented by Thomas Edison (1847-'1931). These first &ldquowesterns&rdquo were very short and only lasted a few seconds. Nonetheless it's The Great Train Robbery made by Edwin S. Porter (1870-'1941) in 1903 that is considered to be the first western. &ldquoWestern&rdquo is in fact the adjective used to describe comedies or melodramas that take place in the West, like those by D. W. Griffith (1875-'1948) who in turn made Fighting Blood (1911) and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914). A few years later in 1917 we can already recognise the attributes peculiar to the great westerns of John Ford (1894-'1973) in Bucking Broadway miraculously found again in 2002.

The original music for this film was composed in 2010 by Denis Ramos in the context of the 2009-2010 partnership with the CNSMDP (Paris Conservatory of Dance and Music).

*The Kinetoscope is an appliance allowing films to be viewed directly and individually, exploited from 1894. It is presented in the form of a big box equipped with an eyepiece allowing you to see inside. The film unwinds continuously behind a circular shutter equipped with a narrow slit, which reveals each image for a fraction of a second only, then masks the unwinding until the next image occupies the same position. The illusion of movement is obtained thanks to the phenomenon of the persistence of vision. You can see examples of films made by Kinetoscope at our website: A 1896 Fairground Programme