Foundational Myths and National Identity in European Transnational Post-Westerns

Foundational Myths and National Identity in European Transnational Post-Westerns Jesús Ángel González (bio) The concept of transnational post-Westerns stems from Neil Campbell's definition of post-Westerns as films "coming after and going beyond the traditional Western [genre] while engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values" (Post-Westerns 31). Campbell relates his use of the prefix post to words such as postcolonialism or postmodernism, in the sense that they come after but also oppose, deconstruct, and try to go beyond their antecedents; but he also references posthumous since Westerns have often been proclaimed dead, but they refuse to lie quietly in their graves. Thus, post-Western films use the features of the genre to interact with them in complex dialogical ways, and they take the audience "into a space of reflection, a critical dialogue with the form and content, its assumptions and histories" (31). In this way, "post-Westerns constantly and deliberately remind us of the persistent presence of the Western genre, its traces and traditions within the unraveling of new, challenging forms and settings" (309). The examples that Campbell provides range from Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) to No Country for Old Men (2007), going through other films like The Misfits (1961) or Lone Star (1996).1 Although Westerns started out as a national genre, it is well known that they have become a transnational phenomenon, which has been received and interpreted differently in diverse national contexts. Peter J. Bloom, for example, has studied the reception of American Westerns in colonial Algeria and suggested that they were often "interpreted against the grain of civil authority" and "appropriated beyond the film's narrative intention" (Bloom 205, [End Page 257] 209). Similarly, Susan Kollin has studied in detail the transnational intersections between the Middle East and the American West, pointing out how the American West "was often depicted as a New World Orient" (Captivating Westerns 8), and, conversely, how the West has travelled east in different formats: on the one hand, the Wild West rhetoric has been used in US military interventions and in the American films and novels about these actions in a Middle East reconceptualized as "Indian country," and, on the other, the Western has circulated transnationally, "capturing the attention of populations in Iran, Libya, and Egypt, where popular fiction and film have all recently reconfigured the possibilities of the form" and appropriated it for their own purposes (18). In fact, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have provided a number of examples of "international Westerns" from almost every corner of the world, including Germany, Denmark, Australia, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Once Westerns nearly disappeared from mainstream cinema, it was to be expected that post-Westerns exploiting their heritage appeared throughout the world, applying their assumptions and values to specific national environments. Kollin, for instance, mentions one example of a literary transnational post-Western (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, 2003, adapted in 2007 to the screen) where the frequent references to Westerns invite the reader to establish a dialogue with the original genre, showing the contrast between the world depicted in the films seen by the protagonists and the realities in Kabul in the 1980s (xvi–xvii). One very interesting aspect of post-Westerns produced outside the United States is that they adapt typically American assumptions and values to other regional and national environments and thus not only question the features of the original genre but also scrutinize their own regional and national identities and conflicts. A very imaginative example of transnational post-Westerns is Dust (Milcho Manchevski, 2001), which literally transports a gunslinger from the American Wild West to another frontier, the European Wild East of the Balkans at the beginning of the twentieth century, where he needs to take sides in the rebellion of the Balkan indigenous population against the Ottoman empire. This [End Page 258] displacement allows the director to deal with Balkan (Macedonian, Greek, Albanian, Turkish) identities, showing that Balkanism, the stereotype of Balkan peoples as Oriental savages, is a fabrication, the result of many different stories disseminated by outsiders with little knowledge of the region or historical basis. Although Miller and...