Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature

Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney

Ronald B. Tobias

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781611860016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628951660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile—part grimace, part snarl—Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others—Jesse "Buff alo" Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Tales of Dominion
• 2. The Plow and the Gun
• 3. Picturing the West, 1883–1893
• 4. American Idol, 1898
• 5. The End of Nature, 1903
• 6. African Romance
• 7. The Dark Continent
• 8. When Cowboys Go to Heaven
• 9. Transplanting Africa
• 10. Of Ape-Men, Sex, and Cannibal Kings
• 11. Adventures in Monkeyland
• 12. Nature, the Film
• 13. The World Scrubbed Clean
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index