Westerns
版主按：
下面的英文材料是新概念四册第21课的文化背景资料，后面的中文部分是笔者修改过的课文第1、2段的中文译文，供各位朋友参考！
Westerns, works of fiction, radio or television programs, or motion pictures that have the American West as their subject matter. In searching for a subject unique to their young nation, some American writers of the 1800s turned to the land itself—the vast, largely untamed territory that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. As settlement moved westward from the eastern seaboard, the West came to symbolize the qualities associated with that land—open, wild, and full of opportunity. Artists of all kinds found this symbol so evocative that a new genre emerged in literature and the arts: the Western. Over time the Western became identified with the basic values and struggles of the American experience.
Americans have been revisiting and revising the Western experience for more than 150 years. Once seen as the story of hope, the simple life, equality, and open space, the Western today has become a cultural crossroads where diverse viewpoints meet, and as such continues to shape and reflect American cultural identity.
Much early writing about the West had its roots in Manifest Destiny, a 19th-century belief that the conquest and settlement of the American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by people of European ancestry was not only inevitable but also an expression of the will of God. Thousands of settlers moved West, especially following the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), when much land west of the Mississippi River became open for settlement.
The Leather-Stocking Tales, a series of five novels by James Fenimore Cooper, can be seen as a precursor to the Western. The series, which included The Last of the Mohicans (1826), was among the first successful fiction to feature an American frontiersman living among Native Americans in an American wilderness setting, in this case wilderness scout Natty Bumppo in the forests of the Northeast.
Early Western films affirmed the idea of Manifest Destiny and treated many of the same themes as the popular western fiction from which they were often adapted. Film was used to record a mythical vision of the American West as early as 1898 in a short feature called Cripple Creek Barroom. In 1903, however, Edwin S. Porter directed a short silent film, The Great Train Robbery, whose theme, crime and retribution, became a standard of Western filmmaking for 75 years. The Western film reached the height of its popularity from 1930 to 1950. After 1950 television Westerns drew audiences away from big-screen Westerns.
. Pioneering movie director D.W. Griffith introduced the panoramic view, which became a characteristic feature of Westerns. William S. Hart is noted for his insistence on realism in Westerns based on his own life in Dakota Territory. Hart directed and starred in silent movies from 1914 until 1925 and was perhaps best known for his final movie, Tumbleweeds (1925). Hart was followed by the most influential of all Western filmmakers, John Ford.
在众多的美国西部电影明星里，威廉。S. 哈特说得上是首屈一指。与加里。古柏和约翰。韦恩不同，他只在西部电影中出演角色。在1914年至1924年期间，他雄霸影坛，无人能出其右者。美国西部片的基调也出自于他的创造，这在他自编自演的电影里体现得淋漓尽致：被认为是坏人的好人，因意外而违法的高尚之人，诚实却遭陷害的牛仔或因留言蜚语遭受嫌疑的警长。总之，主人公既性格矛盾，又与西部边疆社会格格不入！
与当时绝大多数好莱坞演员不同，哈特对西部的早期拓荒者的生活不无了解。事实上，他的童年生活就是在那度过的，当时具有荒野特点的西部正日益消失！他电影里主人公也正是深深扎根于他本人的记忆和经历之中，扎根于业已消失的西部的历史和神化之中。在美国历史上，没有哪一个时期或地区像西部拓荒时期那样，浪漫得无以复加，近乎荒谬。尽管如此，在个人与日益侵入的文明的冲突之中，神化与现实至少找到了一个共同的舞台！