Description
Celluloid Pueblo tells The tale of Western Ways Features and its role within the invention of the Southwest of the imagination. Active all through a thirty-year period of profound growth and transformation, the Herberts created a dynamic visual record of the region, and their archival films now function a time capsule of the Sunbelt within the mid-twentieth century. Drawing upon a ten-year career with Fox, Western Ways owner-operator Charles Herbert brought a newshound’s sensibility and acute skill at in-camera editing to his southwestern subjects. The Western Ways films provided counternarratives to Hollywood representations of the West and established the regional identity of Tucson and the borderlands.
Jennifer L. Jenkins’s broad-sweeping book examines the Herberts’ work on one of the vital first sound films within the Arizona borderlands and their ongoing promotion of the Southwest. The book covers the filmic representation of Native and Mexican lifeways, Anglo ranching and leisure, Mexican missions and tourism, and postwar borderlands prosperity and progressivism. The tale of Western Ways closely follows the boom-and-bust arc of the midcentury Southwest and the continuously evolving representations of an exotic—but protected and domesticated—frontier.