Motivated by a desire to assess both the positive and negative cultural legacies of classical Hollywood cinema, this thesis focuses on a genre descendant of the classic western: the road movie. More specifically, inspired and contextualized by Hamid Naficy’s theory of ‘accented cinema,’ it will explore a subgenre of the road movie that features indigenous characters and narratives. Three indigenous-centered road movies – Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water – help me define a specific type of accented cinema which has emerged in United States. Positioned as cultural and social texts, these films can be considered “accented” by the ways in which they employ accepted modes of production and address the themes of nostalgia, border consciousness, and journeys.
Falkenberg, Elizabeth,
"An American Accented Cinema: Indigenous-Centered Road Movies"
(2019).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/yyy9-ys49
