| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Buffalo Bill. Dir. and prod. by Rob Rapley. HiddenHill Productions for American Experience, 2008. 60 mins. (PBS Home Video, http://www.shoppbs.org)

Rob Rapley's film begins with an arresting vignette: a photograph shows U.S. troops riding menacingly toward an Indian encampment at Wounded Knee. An eyewitness description chronicles the grief and fear with which they are awaited. As the film camera pulls back, we can see that the photograph shows, not the notorious attack of 1890, but its reenactment for a film. To save his failing career, the showman William F. Cody tried his hand at filmmaking and persuaded both American Indian survivors of the original attack and old army contacts to participate in this tension-fraught return to the battlefield. In this opening sequence, Rapley shows twenty-first-century viewers how the most famous historical entertainment of the nineteenth century provided spectators with the sense that they were watching something both thrillingly authentic and comfortingly fictional. Buffalo Bill's Wild West put the experience of western settlement and conflict at the center of American identity both in the United States and abroad. Rapley's film tells this story vividly by focusing on the biography of the showman who made himself into a national symbol.

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