Scholars often encounter film history as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities that may yield as much bemusement as it does insight. ¹ In it resides, for example, the Turkish Star Wars, the bootleg exploitation mixtape, the film secretly shot at Disney World, the silent Russian slapstick sci-fi espionage film, and so forth. ² Like the proverbial Indian in the cupboard, the DEFA Indianerfilme – popular westerns produced by communist East Germany (GDR) from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s that presume allegiance with Native American resistance against the evil capitalist cowboys – transfix many film historians with their presumed strangeness, given or despite their blockbuster-level box-office returns and millions of long-term Eastern bloc fans. Numerous overview pieces have adequately summarized and processed the genre for a post-communist-era film studies crowd: ³ they conclude that these profitable westerns starring Serbian actor Gojko Mitic were certainly of the revisionist tradition but, in the end, more indicative of (East) German fantasies about themselves and indigenous peoples than about the indigenous experience, and were more about stunts and glamour shots of muscular Eastern European bodies in action than true solidarity with the people portrayed. That much is crystal clear.

What is not clear is what our stakes have become as we continue to write about this body of 14 films. Fredric Jameson, for example, sees the westerns shot in Eastern Europe as a “convulsive attempt to undermine national stereotypes in general, ambiguously reinventing them in the process”. ⁴ Sebastian Heiduschke meanwhile describes how the popular films have been employed as Internet bait for DEFA fan websites, which crudely compare the films with American and Italo-Westerns while reproducing the narrative that the Indianerfilme were “concerned wtih the life, culture and history of the Native American” (Heiduschke, 2006, 159). Do we study the DEFA Indianerfilme because of their rearticulation of the national through genre tropes? Or do we study them because of their potential to draw eyeballs, thanks to their unique combination of action, kitsch, ethnic drag, and naïve communist ideology? For every legitimate reason to study the films, so it seems, there is an equal and opposite “perverse” reason as well. ⁵

This article does not so much specifically dissect the East German Indianerfilme in detail as it does address their presence within the cinema of the GDR, and what has been said about these westerns in the public sphere. An overview of the genre is provided, but the primary concern here is a producer/audience discourse analysis that conceives of the Indianerfilme as cultural artifacts that might resist the clichés ascribed to them. I assert that the standard discussion points about these films – i.e., their role as popular entertainment in socialism, their ideological reversal of both the West German and American western, their problematic racial politics, their displays of postcolonial solidarity – have actually changed very little since their conception in the 1960s. The ever-present German enthusiasm for Native American culture, Hartmut Lutz’s (2002) aptly named “Indianthusiasm,” constitutes one such continuity. ⁶ The uninterrupted popularity and unblemished star-image of their chief protagonist Gojko Mitic is another. Both Mitic’s social location and impeccable physique have lent him credibility that the dominant SED party could never possibly possess, as I discuss elsewhere. ⁷ But the Indianerfilm’s apparently ineluctable appeal stems not only from Mitic’s star power, rather also from the genre’s unwitting success at creating what Michael Saler might call an “immersive secondary world” of heroic Indian adventures within the post-industrial socialist GDR ⁸, a fantasy world that successfully captured popular attention and crossed national borders by addressing universal values held by many Eastern Bloc populations. These films appear authentic in their gestures toward transnational and transhistorical solidarity by being 1) openly artificial (overcoming 20th Century socialism’s lack of transparency) and 2) jointly Eastern European as well as German (overcoming national difference). A shift in German cultural studies which privileges pop over high culture and intersectional over ideological analysis has permitted these films to metonymically figure for GDR visual culture in our classrooms, with interesting philosophical consequences for German film history in general. Finally, Dennis Broe argues in his recent article “Have Dialectic, Will Travel” that these films constitute sites of active, working-class counter-hegemonic resistance, be it against oppressive state or neo-liberal market forces, a move comparable to the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s ⁹. These films are certainly artifacts of resistance, in the sense that they have their own hidden lives and agendas, as per the new object-oriented ontology. ¹⁰ They are ambiguous, commodified, ever-circulating celluloid fantasies that are screened as both illustrations of a dead country’s media history and as a form of rebellion against some pernicious threat (be it capitalism or Soviet occupation) through the haunting, active bodies and talents of fake indigenous people depicted onscreen. But let me state that a site is somewhere where something takes place, whereas an artifact is something that may have at one time been put to use to produce a certain effect, but which now simply testifies to the conditions that produced it.

Indianerfilme as Processes

The institutions that produced these artifacts intended for them to achieve very specific affective and educational objectives. From the studios’ origins in Soviet-occupied Berlin in 1946 and relocation to Potsdam-Babelsberg in the early 1950s, the DEFA Studios in East Germany had a mission to, as Soviet Colonel Tulpanov stated at their inaugural ceremony, “re-educate the German people–especially the young–to a true understanding of genuine democracy and humanism, and in so doing, to promote a sense of respect for other people and other nations.” ¹¹ For the first two decades of production, moral and socio-political appeals in DEFA films were indeed genuinely prioritized over the logic of short-term economic returns, an institutional inclination which has also influenced generations of film scholars to seek moral, ideological and/or “subversive” messages in DEFA films’ narrative and regimes of representation. Yet the stubborn reality was that DEFA was fundamentally just part of the global film business, and that the word “business” never quite disappeared despite the anti-capitalist, state-subsidized rubric of socialism.

What material conditions governed DEFA genre productions? Full-length DEFA features cost 1 million Ostmarks each and, according to Ralf Schenk, had to present themselves as “easy, unambiguous and comprehensible to everyone” ¹². The Indianerfilm fulfilled the latter requirement quite well. Film crew members’ salaries hinged on the success of a film, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree than under capitalism. Yet ideologically safe productions that were proven to have “Devisenrentabilität” – the capability of harvesting badly needed foreign currency – were afforded larger budgets and fewer studio obstacles. Such productions were only in a few genres: Märchenfilme (fairytale films), 70mm adventure films and the Indianerfilme. The average budget of a DEFA Indianerfilm, for example, stood a little under 2.5 Million Ostmarks. As the Ostmark’s purchasing power declined in the 1980s, so too did the genre. Stefan Zahlmann also reminds us that structural factors – material availability, artist cachet, long-term production trends, transnational deals – were absolutely instrumental in decisions to green-light a DEFA production (Zahlmann, 2010, 14). An absolutist perspective with regard to political approval or “subversion” ignores all the ways in which mass media in a modern society do not lend themselves to substantive political control. Put another way: a DEFA film had to be interesting or entertaining enough to attract at least a small audience, but if it proved too attractive – like for example Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1973) – then suspicions of subversive content would necessarily prompt official disapproval.7 Directors and producers wanting to preserve their positions knew how to make films the exact level of “interesting” to guarantee their survival. A film had to be innocuously subsumed under established, self-understood genre categories in order for it to make it past the laborious screenwriting process. Thus Dennis Broe’s argument that the Indianerfilme were somehow “subversive” overestimates the degree to which DEFA filmmakers conceived these films in terms of the “subversive” potential of the material: of alternative political imaginaries or indigenous subjectivities. Blockbusters co-opt the popular for the sake of revenue, even when they occasionally speak to resistance movements. ¹³ The Indianerfilme were certainly socialist blockbusters intended to reach to audiences beyond the GDR while rekindling the domestic audience’s interest in state-sponsored cinema. As artifacts, they successfully negotiated between a state and its audience, including a general agreement about what oppression and resistance ought to look like and about the outline of an approved socialist playground that could easily intermingle Marxist-Leninist narratives of history with protagonist-driven action fantasy.

In a strange twist of fate, the Indianerfilm became overnight the most commercially successful genre at the disposal of the DEFA Studios. From 1966 to 1985, DEFA produced 14 of these Eastern European-located films, mostly starring Serbian actor/stuntman Gojko Mitic. They depict muscular Native Americans being oppressed by and actively resisting American expansionism. The films intended to project East German solidarity with postcolonial struggles and the so-called Third World (particularly in Vietnam), and were well-received east of the Oder in places like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Tim Bergfelder writes that, rather than offer mere spectacle and easy resolutions, the Indianerfilme were “aimed more for ethnographic authenticity and the depiction of social realities” ¹⁴. This utterly staged and pre-packaged genre fiction was acclaimed for delivering prosthetic history that, as Gerd Gemünden writes, “[reveals far more] about the political agenda of its makers than about the objects which they pretend to portray” ¹⁵.

The genre’s artifacts can be subdivided into six sub-cycles of material, based on their approach to history and fiction. The first sub-cycle, the most popular and profitable of them all, consisted of literary adaptations: Die Söhne der großen Bärin (The Sons of Great Bear, 1966) based on the eponymous novel by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Chingachgook, die große Schlange (Chingachgook, the Great Snake 1967) based on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, or The First Warpath (1841). Once these famous novels had been adapted, DEFA began to produce its own in-house fictitious Indian stories, ushering in the second sub-cycle: the so-called “Entwicklungstrilogie” (trilogy of development). These late 1960s films – Spur des Falken (Falcon’s Trail, 1968), Weiße Wölfe (White Wolves, 1969), and Tödlicher Irrtum (Fatal Error, 1969/70) – were built around cinematic set pieces such as train chases and oil slick fights. The sub-cycle cemented the genre as a regular staple at the East German Sommerfilmtage, open-air screenings of family-friendly films. The third sub-cycle consisted of adaptations of real Native American chieftains’ biographies, signaling a return from genre kitsch to historical materialism. Osceola (1971) depicts the Seminole chief who helped free the slaves in Florida, while Tecumseh (1972) looks at the Shawnee chieftain’s betrayal by the French in the war of 1812. By the end of this sub-cycle, it had become clear to the DEFA group Roter Kreis, the production unit responsible for the Indianerfilme, that the guilty pleasures of Eastern European landscapes and stunt sequences that these films offered were unable to seriously address the issues of real chieftains’ biographies ¹⁶. Hence the turn to the aesthetic of the Italo-Western with the fourth sub-cycle: Apachen (Apaches, 1973) and Ulzana (1974). The fifth sub-cycle marks what I call the genre’s baroque period, when the studio unsuccessfully tried to revive itself with gimmicky Indianer content: the Dean Reed star vehicle Blutsbrüder (Blood Brothers, 1975), the culture-clash melodrama Severino (1977), and the incompetently directed trickster-thriller Der Scout (The Scout, 1983), about a Nez Perce guide who leads racist Union soldiers astray. A sixth sub-cycle could be formed out of the non-Roter Kreis films – Uli Weiss’ Blauvogel (1979) and Helge Trimpert’s Atkins (1985) – in that each film involves some aspect of the Indianer secondary world without the inclusion of Mitic himself.

Indianerfilme as Consumables

The emergence of the Indianerfilm came about as a result of what Annette Deeken has called the “Karl May Problem” – that German audiences cannot get enough of the popular good-vs.-evil American Indian fiction of 19th Century low-brow author Karl May, regardless of the passage of time or political climates ¹⁷. Our artifacts necessarily resemble more the Karl May content they supposedly oppose than other anti-westerns. West German Karl May film adaptations such as Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake, 1962) and the Winnetou (1963-5) trilogy shot in Yugoslavia and Italy by Horst Wendlandt had broken box-office records throughout Europe. These films ran well, despite their being panned by critics as mere pastiche of the “superior” American westerns of John Ford or Delmer Daves. East German audiences, who had been unofficially consuming Karl May novels for years on the black market and watching westerns on West German television, traveled down to Prague in the early 1960s to catch the latest of the Winnetou westerns, later for the brutal Italo-Westerns or the tongue-in-cheek Czech western Limonádový Joe aneb Konská opera (Lemonade Joe, or the Horse Opera, 1964). The genre interested the Eastern bloc audiences, in that it offered a specifically “American” playground to explore underdog struggles. “Genre” here indeed adheres to Jörg Schweinitz’s non-hierarchical definition: “an openly structured, intertextual system of stereotypes” ¹⁸. The GDR-specific “feeling that they lived on a reservation” behind the Berlin Wall, as Holger Briel (2012) put it, and long-standing GDR “Indian club” traditions also justify said interest. To boot, these westerns had more-or-less saved the West German film industry. In 1965, the cultural crackdown of the 11th Plenum in East Germany led to a number of films being shelved and the firing of DEFA founder Kurt Maetzig from his position as the head of Roter Kreis. Hans Mahlich and his chief dramaturg Günter Karl were in the meantime working on a German/Czech/Yugoslav adaptation of Welskopf-Henrich’s anti-May series The Sons of Great Bear for television. When Maetzig was replaced by Mahlich as head of Roter Kreis, the television mini-series transformed into a feature film of considerable budget with a relatively unknown Serbian sports education student who could ride (Mitic) as the star, and the rest became cinema history.

The East German filmmakers who created The Sons of Great Bear and their target pan-European audience found themselves preoccupied with several major topoi that the reception and scholarship of the films have for the most part merely reproduced. One was the genre’s wholesale embrace of the language of humanist “entertainment” (Unterhaltung), a concession to Western media cultures made, perhaps, in symbolic exchange for the utmost seriousness of the murder and exploitation of Native Americans ¹⁹. This gave license for East Germany to frame the films as ethnographic stunt shows: an ideologically-approved socialist “body” genre when the other body genres – horror, pornography, kung fu – were otherwise banned. For example, director Gottfried Kolditz proudly finds his efforts for improving the riding and action sequences of Falcon’s Trail as overcoming obstacles for future socialist productions in the same vein ²⁰. Another was the films’ ideological departure from the racist American western, with its representations of indigenous Americans as anonymous and villainous, in favor of Native Americans as heroes and role-model socialists. This much is explained in the Sons of Great Bear‘s initial pitch from Mahlich and Karl: “We saw the possibility of creating an Indianerfilm that would differentiate itself from westerns that show Indians only as anonymous masses and hostile. Not the white oppressors but the Indians are in our case the heroes for the audience, Indians who can serve as role models in their courage, will to fight and love for their people” . ²¹n this same vein, the “off-screen qualities” of Indianerfilm star Mitic discussed by Gemünden – his athleticism, good looks, wisdom, affability, and anti-alcoholism – were also noted by his production team ²², though his good behavior off-screen (which helped sell his and the films’ authenticity) was only rewarded by a significant salary bump by his third DEFA film. ²³ Another point raised in early criticism of the film was its romanticized view of the “noble savage,” a critique posited later by scholars such as Gemünden ²⁴, Katrin Sieg ²⁵  and Vera Dika ²⁶, among many. While many of his peers waxed poetic about the “realistic” quality of the Sons of Great Bear, GDR critic Manfred Haacke comments that Mitic’s “eagle-eye stares and tree-like poses don’t quite fit as means of giving shape to real heroism, let alone permit one to lay claim to a realistic work of art” ²⁷.11 Dramaturg Karl publicly defended his films against charges of racism on the basis that Indianer stories really “couldn’t do without the romantic qualities of [Native American] landscapes and lives”. ²⁸ In other words, the uncomfortable position between these films’ laudable ambitions as works of solidarity with indigenous resistance against imperialism and the not-so-laudable race appropriation (i.e., Eastern Europeans dressed in ethnic drag) required to carry them out was already established once the films had hit the silver screen. The Germans loved a little exoticism, and a little realism to wash it down. Furthermore, the postcolonial dimensions of the films, namely the figurative struggle of celluloid Native Americans standing in for the Native American Rights or Civil Rights movements in the United States or the battles against U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, were leveraged to justify the films’ continued manufacture and development under the state discourse of solidarity. Quoting Karl from an early draft of the 1971 film Osceola, which is set near plantations in Florida during the 1830s: “The discrimination suffered by people of color is not only part of the USA’s unreflected past, but one of its burning contemporary problems. … The demonstration for equal rights for people of color merges with the demonstrations against the dirty war in Vietnam” ²⁹. The GDR filmmakers and audience thus had at least three proper registers of reading the Indianerfilme: as a taste of the kinetic, violent world cinema becoming mainstream in the late 1960s, as a defiant, grassroots-socialist response to the racism and imperialism of the American past and present as well as the recent atrocities of the Holocaust, and as an ironic “blank parody” of a western ³⁰ that nevertheless draws upon the nostalgia and alluring fantasy propositions of the genre. European consumers were thus able to engage in a popular sphere dialog with the Cold War superpowers while indulging in childhood fantasies of Manichean conflicts with fast horses and explosions.

Indianerfilme as Processed Remainder

Madeleine Casad has recently argued that the DEFA Indianerfilme contain use value as objects that resist the present, both as “post-Wende ‘camp'” and as serious markers of East German identity ³¹. Now that the Indianerfilme have proven to have a successful afterlife on VHS and DVD – outstripping all other titles in the Icestorm collection in sales – reviews within the last decade have all attempted to pin the tail on these films’ legacy. As expected of a global attention-based economy, this has resulted in a series of pieces endlessly reveling in the films’ novelty. J. Hoberman’s “When Westerns Were Un-American” emphasizes anti-fascist undertones and unintentional racism when he summarizes the Indianerfilme as such:

Indian tribes, usually led by the Yugoslav bodybuilder Gojko Mitic, struggle against various combinations of avaricious settlers, mendacious military officers, corrupt lawmen, and rapacious imperialists. Populated by greedy seekers of lebensraum and loot, as well as whip-cracking martinets shouting in German at their presumed racial inferiors (often played by Slavs), these movies have an unintended subtext . ³²

In the 2012 New Yorker article “Socialist Cowboys,” Anna Altman emphasizes the affinities between the ideals of socialism and the obsession with Indianer, seeing them in terms of the open processing of German genocide and the building of community around tribal affiliations. She writes: “Here were East German actors posing as cowboys, acting out scenes of ethnic genocide and transport, expelling Indian communities with calls of, ‘We will exterminate you!'” ³³. Amie Siegel’s popular documentary DDR/DDR (2008) insists on using Indianerfilm footage – in particular a canoe scene excerpted from Chingachgook played backwards – to illustrate a socialist metaphor about rivers flowing uphill. Mitic’s dynamic body movements in Siegel’s appropriation exhibit a vitalism within a socialist fantasy of reversed time; of looking at the alternatives to West German domination of East Germany, of capitalist cynicism over socialism re-fashioned, in Siegel’s vision, as hipster kitsch. Meanwhile, Alexander Osang writes of an odd quest to track down Mitic and his West German doppelgänger Pierre Brice (who played Winnetou in West Germany) in order to write an Indianerfilm in 2009: The Last Ride (Der letzte Ritt). ³⁴ By that point, the Indianerfilm Der Schuh des Manitu (The Shoe of Manitu, 2001) had broken all box-office records in such a way as to feasibly provide some financial incentive to do so. But Osang’s meditation on a film-that-could-never-be continuously slips into the language of this infectious genre, calling Mitic “Chingachgook” and commenting – as Reinhard Wengierek did about Mitic in 1982 – on the actor’s well-toned torso as a means of fighting the encroaching cowboys ³⁵.

The telos of these analyses appears to be a post-Cold War desire to master the Indianerfilm. Something elusive about socialism appears to be locked inside the genre, and something racist and perverse as well (though no more so than other film cultures). Much as the Indianerfilme invite an ironic reading, however, it appears impossible not to slip into the talking points of what has been said before about them. After all, most people know so little about Indianerfilme that parading their novelty is easy and piques many a filmgoer’s interest. Much as Jim Collins writes about films of the 1990s as constellations that slip readily between “eclectic irony” and “the new sincerity” ³⁶, the Indianerfilme of the 1960s and 70s embrace a cocktail of irony and sincerity that begs for film critics to take a stand: Mitic as an openly fake Indian in redface doing nevertheless authentic stunts, fighting as the underdog against a 19th Century enemy that seemed equally omnipresent in the decades of the films’ creation. As those decades recede into history, however, we now unwittingly approach the films as a kind of socialist Star Wars (1977): an incoherent, pulpy universe that nevertheless hits all the right nostalgic and emotional notes in a Central and Eastern European audience accustomed to both irony (with regard to their present circumstances) and sincerity (with regard to past German and Soviet crimes). Mitic is authentic, his films are in dialog with real American Indian history, and the details feed into the simplistic arcs of revenge and rebuilding narratives. Like Star Wars, the Indianerfilme forge an immersive secondary world in which fandom can be at once ironic and sincere, in which anyone can one can access it from a variety of venues and still contribute to the world’s content. Mahlich and Karl created a story world that could feasibly run alongside the regular “socialist” brand without disrupting the carefully tended story worlds of the SED party. It is a world where East Germans could invent their own Native American massacres (as in Blood Brothers) to build an alternative universe of oppression and resistance, as artifacts proclaiming object lessons of Native American resistance that both a 6 year-old and a 40 year-old can contemplate equally. Dika (2007) claims that the Indianerfilm is “wearing the skin” of a U.S. genre as it died, and both Broe (2012) and Dika claim that under the skin of these genre films lies a lost desire for unification and an alternative socialism. This “desire” might well be extant, but not without a strong counter-presence of good old-fashioned hegemony. Given the earlier discussion of the institutions behind them, this article maintains that the Indianerfilme were massively subsidized by a state that wished to use them to rebuild the cinema audience and harvest foreign capital. That Mitic became the GDR’s one true, grassroots star – he had a Yugoslav pass and could leave, yet he stayed – forced the state itself to adopt a kind of ironic discourse regarding the films. The films were intentionally manufactured as artifacts of resistance: as toys that not only satiated the populace, but also as an Indianer playground that fostered a surrogate hope of overcoming collective difficulties as a socialist “tribe”. Seeing the films as both part of an immersive secondary world – “playing Indian” as the collective, if you will – and as a confluence of transnational flows and personnel helps us begin to unravel their now-enshrined double move as historical object lesson and mass entertainment, socialist filmcraft meeting sober meditations on history and wild German fantasy on the plains of an Eastern European America.

One postscript to my discussion here would be the current role of the Indianerfilm in German Studies, which typically has us teaching it as part of a survey on German film history. For their DEFA portion of the course, professors often screen The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946), the first post-war German film and a serious confrontation with Nazi crimes, and then The Sons of Great Bear as a piece of GDR popular culture. We are intended to perceive socialism and anti-fascism in both, one serious and the other popular. In tandem with the screening of The Sons of Great Bear, students often read Katrin Sieg (1998) about the “ethnic drag” that Mitic is clearly performing (Hint: He’s not an Indian! That’s kind of racist!) and/or Gerd Gemünden (1998) on the East German kit-bashing of Karl May, Karl Marx, and Howard Hawks. Then the students write papers and masters theses at places like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stanford, Smith and Swarthmore about how the films 1) are kind of racist but kind of genuinely not, or 2) take and twist certain aesthetic tropes of the western toward “socialist” ends. These facts and discourses were all more-or-less known to the filmmakers and reviewers at the time, and are already baked into the final products. As artifacts of resistance, the films can also easily resist these dialogic readings as well, remaining curios in the Wunderkammer. What I would like to say here is that our inability in German film studies to adequately master the discourse and these films’ popularity beyond the conventional rubrics suggests that there are institutional logics with which we must reckon, and perhaps imaginaries lurking in the Indianerfilme, yet to be discovered.

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Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Evan Torner. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Balkan Westerns represent an important part of a cultural phenomenon which took place in the European Eastern bloc during the second half of the 20th Century: the phenomenon of the ‘Red Western’, or the ‘Ostern’.

In the Soviet Union, the western was considered a “reactionary genre which praised the white colonialists’ extermination of poor Indians. American westerns were distributed in the USSR only in the 1920s. Some westerns also managed to reach the Soviet screens after 1945, when the Reichsfilmarchiv (Reich Film Archive) was removed from Berlin and taken to Moscow. Then, from the 1950s on to the 1980s, during the last 40 years of communism, there were only 5 (five!) US westerns in the Soviet film distribution system.

Nevertheless, because these films were always received with great enthusiasm by the Soviet public, the Party bosses decided to allow Soviet filmmakers to come up with “our own westerns with the right content”. The result was the ‘Red Western’, and there were dozens of them produced in the USSR during that period.

Of course no one officially called these films westerns’; they were “heroic adventure movies”. Sometimes they became great box office champions: Little Red Devils (Tsiteli eshmakunebi, Ivane Perestiani, 1924), and its remake Elusive Avengers (Неуловимые мстители, Edmond Keosayan, 1967), with the sequel New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers (Новые приключения неуловимых, 1968) were great hits. Sometimes the films were real works of art: 13(Trinadtsat, Mikhail Romm, 1936), or Nobody Wanted to Die (Niekas nenorejo mirti, Vytautas Zalakevicius, 1966). In any case, the Red Western had its own history, with a brilliant beginning in the twenties and a sad ending in the late eighties, a history which mirrors, in a way, the story of Soviet society in 20th century. It also mirrors the story of Soviet state censorship, and a lot of other stories, small and great, too many to be all included in this presentation.

But there is one great story that needs to be mentioned: the Red Western has a father. And it is not Ivane Perestiani, Lev Kuleshov, or Mikhail Romm, but Josef Stalin.

Indeed, Stalin was a film freak and a great admirer of the western. The Russian State Film Archive (Gosfilmofond), founded in 1948 on the base of the Reichsfilmarchiv, contains plenty of evidence of the Great Leader’s passion for westerns. And at least two Soviet ‘red westerns’, 13, and “Brave People” (Смелые люди, Konstantin Yudin, 1950) were made at his direct wishes and orders.

If Stalin was the father of the ‘Soviet Red Western’, the ‘Balkan Western’ had three fathers. Their names: Josip Broz Tito, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, and Nicolae Ceauşescu. 1962 was ‘the year when the Balkan western was officially born’. Two events took place during that year, in two separate countries, which, although apparently not connected, are nevertheless both pivotal for the history of the Balkan western.

First, in 1962, filmmakers from West Germany decided to film the stories of their compatriot Karl May (1842-1912), who wrote about the Wild West. In the USSR, his writings were not known, but in Germany they were far more popular than the works of James Fenimore Cooper or Thomas Mayne Reid.

At the heart of Karl May’s novels there are two characters: one Indian, named Winnetou, and the other white (sometimes Old Surehand, sometimes Old Shatterhand). The first film to be made about their adventures was The Treasure of Silver Lake (Der Schatz im Silbersee, Harald Reinl, 1962). It is not known whether director Reinl ever supposed that his film would only be the first in a long series of many other pictures featuring the two inseparable friends, but the success of the film had surpassed all expectations and soon, the producers launched the pipeline: from 1962 onwards, almost until the end of the sixties, each year marked the release of at least one new film about Winnetou on European screens. But what has all this got to do with the Balkans?

The German producers of the films, like their Italian counterparts who were shooting their ‘Spaghetti westerns’ in Spain, were looking for locations that were both spectacular and cheap. In the beginning, they had also considered Spain but, in the end, they found an even better (and cheaper) place: it was Yugoslavia.

After his historical quarrel with Stalin, Tito had started to build his relatively? liberal brand of socialism. And he was also a great western admirer. During the 1950s, US westerns were often shown on Yugoslav screens and they were very popular. More than one generation of young Yugoslav boys grew up with these movies. So when the Germans suggested a co-production, the Yugoslav comrades were happy to agree.

It proved to be the ideal partnership: the Balkan side was open and friendly, and the Germans were given total production freedom and low prices in addition to fantastic shooting locations in Croatia. Soon enough, Winnetou and his white brother received permanent residency in the “happiest barrack of the socialist camp”.

The results pleased everyone. After The Treasure of Silver Lake (which also received financing from the French), in 1963, Reinl shot “Winnetou”. Now, along with the French and the Germans, Italy was also credited among the producing countries, and the franchise was on a roll. During that same year, and with the same 3 countries as co-producers, another director, Hugo Fregonese, was called in to shoot Old Shatterhand with the same actors (Pierre Brice – Winnetou, Lex Barker – The White Brother). Then 1964 saw Winnetou 2 by Reinl, and Alfred Vohrer’s “Among the vultures”, where Lex Barker was replaced by Stewart Granger.

The Yugoslavs were involved in all these films, and not just as the country that provided the locations. All the films credit the Zagreb studio, Jadran Film, immediately after the name of the main German concern, indicating an equal partnership.

The Soviets would get to see some of these films later, but none of them were shown immediately after they appeared in the early 1960s. Instead, Khrushchev granted the opportunity to screen a real US western in the USSR.

The times they were a-changing. In 1959, Khrushchev made his historical visit to the United States, during which he also went to Hollywood, where he met Marilyn Monroe, Frank Capra, and Gary Cooper. A new film agreement was signed then, according to which The Magnificent Seven (1960) was purchased for Soviet distribution.

The Magnificent Seven became a landmark success and a social phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Between 1962 and 1964, the citizens of the USSR never tired of seeing the film. Tickets became impossible to get. Stadiums and other open areas were used for the projection when regular cinemas could no longer cope. All men wanted to dress like cowboys, and since there were no Soviet shops where one could buy jeans, hats and boots, the costumes were all made at home from scrap materials.

The most curious thing about the whole national craze that engulfed The Magnificent Seven is that, according to statistics, the picture was not a box-office champion. Evidently, the numbers had to be manipulated, but be that as it may, the fact remains that an American western was able to stir the Soviet public so much that they seemed to forget all about their allegiance to their communist identity and ideals in the process.

Party leaders began to grumble. First, they forbade children from watching it. Then, the classic ‘letters from the workers started appearing in the central press. Finally, in 1964, just before Khrushchev’s removal from the head of the party, the film was withdrawn from distribution, before its export license had expired.

With Khrushchev gone, the communist party bosses decided to make their own response to imperialist propaganda, and encouraged the wide production of ‘Red westerns’, with the ‘reds’ playing the good guys and the ‘whites’ given the parts of villains. Recalling the huge success of Perestiani’s 1924 film Little Red Devils, a remake was ordered, which led to the creation of The Elusive Avengers in 1967, and, sure enough, the film became a major hit. The Civil War after the Bolshevik revolution became the time and historical arena for Soviet Red Westerns and, before long, Soviet boys started to forget The Magnificent Seven.

In 1966, comrades from East Germany received the ‘advice’ to try their own hand at making a classical western with reds and whites. This they did, and the result was The Sons of Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin, by the Czech director Josef Mach). For this production, the East Germans also went to Yugoslavia, since they wanted to beat their Western compatriots and rivals on the “same battlefield”. Their co-producer was Bosna Film studios in Sarajevo. Sure enough, history had since proved that it was not possible to compete with the West in general, and in film production in particular, but until 1968, the communists did not abandon hope, so the East Germans decided to step into the ring and fight.

The Sons of Great Bear was the screen adaptation of a novel by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, in which the Indians are portrayed as noble, while the whites are all bloodthirsty. This was, of course, an absolute must for the script to be approved. Ironically, the white villain’s name was Red Fox, but he was not that important. The important thing was that the noble Indian, played by the young, beautiful athlete Gojko Mitić, provided the youth of the socialist bloc with a credible star of their own: Mitić became the instant idol of millions.

The success of The Sons had satisfied the authorities. Of course, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the film distribution system was wide open for ‘Western westerns’, the film could not compete with other American films of the genre. But in the other, more ‘ideologically unblemished’ states, the box-office results were encouraging.

The main difference between The Sons and the pictures made at the Jadran studios by the West Germans was in the central element of the plot structure. Winnetou is brave and noble, but he remains in the shadow of his pale-faced brother who is the main hero. The screen adaptations of Karl May’s novels are all about the good white guy who helps the Indians fight against the bad whites. In parentheses it should be noted that while the Ostern Sons was shot in Yugoslavia, Old Surehand became the first film of its rival West German series to be purchased for distribution in the USSR, during the short period of liberalization between October 1964 and August 1968 (the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia). Changing the title of the film, the Soviets accidentally emphasized its ‘white-guy bias’, naming it The Faithful Hand, Friend of Indians. Needless to say, the film was a big hit and made a lot of money for the Soviet distribution system, back in 1968.

Despite its reasonable success, the production of The Sons of Great Bear marked the end of an ambitious attempt by the East to beat the capitalists at the western genre. After that, the East Germans ceased to travel around the world in search of spectacular locations for big productions aimed at international audiences (The Sons never managed to find an audience in the West), and began to stamp their ‘right westerns’ for its own audience, as well as for the benefit of their most friendly markets: the post-1968 ‘normalized’ Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Bulgaria, and Mongolia.

Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia, the West Germans continued to actively develop their gold-mine, Winnetou. With Alfred Vohrer’s 1965 production of Old Surehand, which was successfully screened even in the Soviet Union, the franchise was well established and the films generally passed, for most of the inexperienced viewers in Europe, as genuine American westerns. Of course, as with the Italian ‘spaghetti westerns’, that was their main intended purpose. Stewart Granger, the ‘absolutely true, absolutely American’ star of Old Surehand, was an actor with a clear understanding of the nature of the genre – with him as a central figure what else could they need for convincing the audiences?

Stewart Granger, a star of the fifties – Beau Brummel(1954), Scaramouche(1952) – was not the only Hollywood actor to cross the Atlantic in the early sixties, to revive a genre that was all but dead in America. A little-known Clint Eastwood was another. Unlike Granger, who arrived with great ambitions to re-launch a once brilliant career, Eastwood went to Spain only to spend one summer and earn a little money. Instead, Sergio Leone made him one of the greatest cinematic figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Granger, though, was unable to repeat his triumph. European filmmakers were happy to have him in their movies, and the European audiences received him enthusiastically but for the Americans, he remained an artist “from the past.”

In 1965, Harald Reinl completed the movie Winnetou 3 in which he attempted to kill Winnetou, believing, apparently, that the series had exhausted itself. Artistically, this is definitely the best film in the series, and it has a well-accomplished look and feel even now, forty years after its creation. In the end, Winnetou sacrifices himself to defend the life of his pale-faced brother, shielding him from the treacherous bullets with his own chest.
The Soviet Purchasing Commission did not buy Winnetou 3 for distribution in the USSR. They may have disagreed with the final sacrifice of the native chief for the benefit of the white hero. Or it may have been for a different, more prosaic reason.

In the brief liberal period before August 21, 1968, two West German westerns, shot in Yugoslavia, had been purchased and distributed in the Soviet Union. It is quite likely that the distributors were planning to buy a few more films from the successful series and had no interest in purchasing the film in which Winnetou dies. However, in the late sixties the opportunity was foiled. And by the time the ban was lifted in the mid-seventies, a new artistic and ideological obstacle appeared.
Initially, East German “osterns” were produced at a quality that was comparable with that of their rival West German “westerns”. However, by the beginning of the seventies, the osterns from GDR became so tedious and anemic that they could no longer even remotely compare with their rivals. The result was that the evidently superior Winnetou series could no longer be shown without exposing the other – “ideologically correct” – osterns to ridicule.

In the end, Soviet boys never got to see Winnetou die. Not that the ones who did get to mourned him for long. The box office success of the film was so impressive that the producers decided to postpone the closure of the project and, in 1966, Harald Philipp released a very weak Half-Breed / Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi, followed, in the same year, by another Vohrer film Thunder at the Border / Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand. Harald Reinl was also convinced to return to the beloved hero with The Valley of Death/ Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der Toten, in 1968. Pierre Brice continued to play the Indian hero in all of these films, and they were all shot in Yugoslavia, the country that had, by then, been hosting ‘cowboys and Indians’ films for nearly a decade.

And there is yet another country that needs to be mentioned in the story of ‘red westerns’. In 1965, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, who had been the Communist leader of Romania since 1947, died. In his place, the party chose a young dynamic leader, Nicolae Ceausescu who, for a few years, looked poised to become a second Tito. He proclaimed a policy of friendship with all the other socialist countries, ignoring the serious rifts that had, by then, appeared in the communist bloc, sent a friendly telegram to Brezhnev as he was “flying over the Soviet territory …” on his way to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong (when Sino-Soviet relations were frozen), met with Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, was a friend of Kim Il Sung … And he began to flirt with the West.

In August 1968 (unheard-of insolence!) he refused to participate in the occupation of Czechoslovakia, denying Soviet troops the right of passing through Romanian territory. This move certainly enhanced his prestige in the eyes of Western champions of freedom and democracy. Loans, investments and other favors were not slow to appear.

The late sixties and early seventies were perhaps the best times for Romanian cinema during communism. A lot of films were produced, and there was even some allowance for criticism of classical Stalinism. Films which were banned in Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, or Czechoslovakia (after 1968) were sometimes shown in Romania. Many westerns also, even some which had been deemed malicious by Soviet film censors could be seen in theaters in Bucharest.
Like Tito’s Yugoslavia had done before, Romania also opened its doors to co-productions. Blessed with exquisite natural conditions – mountains, valleys, a wonderful coastline – no worse than in Yugoslavia, the possibility of obtaining virtually free labor and extras (the army was often used for this), Romania became a paradise for Western producers who wanted to get solid results with minimal financial investment.

It all began with historical super-productions like Dacians (Dacii, 1967, incidentally, a film which features Pierre ‘Winnetou’ Brice in the part of Septimius Severus, a Roman officer), The Column (Columna, 1968), The Battle for Rome (Bătălia pentru Roma, 1968), and then came the turn of the ‘westerns’.

Around the years 1968-1970, the French and the West Germans teamed with Romanian studios to create their own adaptations of Fenimore Cooper’s novels. A number of TV movies were produced at that time: The Last of the Mohicans, Prairie, Adventures on the Shores of Ontario, Deer Slayer. Each film had two directors: one from the guests’ side, another from the Romanian. Both guest directors were French: Jacques Drevil (Adventures on the Shores of Ontario, The Last of the Mohicans) and Pierre Gaspard-Huit (Prairie, Deerslayer). Their Romanian counterpart was a novice: Sergiu Nicolaescu.

Being a self-taught filmmaker, Nicolaescu’s participation on these projects (as well as on Dacians and Battle for Rome) was a kind of film school. He had graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and then, in the early sixties, he landed a job at the Bucharest film studios at a friend’s recommendation, where he made a few documentaries and short films. His first feature length was Dacians, the big international co-production which effectively launched his career as the most successful Romanian film director of all time.

Nicolaescu quickly understood the essence of directing grand cinematic spectacles. The artistic quality of his films usually comes second to their entertainment value. Despite that (or maybe because of that), spectators in Romania, and in the Soviet Union, adored his films. In the 1970s and 1980s, Romania gradually fell under the spell of Ceausescu’s cult of personality and became an increasingly paranoid and isolated neo-Stalinist state. Perhaps much of Nicolaescu’s fame and fortune are also due to the lack of any serious competition, and to the people’s desperate need for Western-style cinematic entertainment, of which he became the sole provider allowed by the regime.

In any case, his career soared to heights that were incomparable with any of the later performances of his French colleagues with whom he co-directed the Fenimore Cooper adaptations. Jacques Drevil and Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s names do not remain associated with any important achievement in the history of film. Those co-productions themselves are now remembered only by specialists and enthusiasts of the European western.

The image of Ceausescu’s Romania and the Romanian cinematography doubtlessly benefited from this period of international co-productions. The western adaptations were successful at the time, especially in the other socialist countries. In the USSR, the black-and-white, abridged versions of Prairie and Adventures on the Shores of Ontario were received quite warmly in the context of the rather bleak offer of imported films distributed in 1972, even though the films had only been made for television and not for the big screen. Luckily, in the late sixties, video had not yet been invented and even the movies made for television were filmed on 35mm.

So this was the golden decade of the sixties, the golden decade of the Balkan western. During the last two decades of communism only Romania continued to produce ‘red westerns’; the Bulgarians and the Hungarians (after György Szomjas’ 1976 ‘goulash western’ The Wind Blows Under Your Feet) stopped making them. One much later exception is the 1996 film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame by the Serbian director Srdjan Dragojevic, a great homage to Yugoslav partisan films (the so-called “Gibanica westerns”). And, of course, one can also count Dragojevic’s last film The Parade (2011), a tragi-comical remake of The Magnificent Seven with the action set in Belgrade’s gay world. The Serbian director’s films give us a nice illustration of how it is still possible to escape from the Balkans through the western genre.

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Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Sergey Lavrentiev. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Many Europeans, especially Germans, have long been fascinated with Native Americans whose imagined culture they have appropriated for a variety of different agendas and by so doing have essentialized “the Indian”. Lischke and McNab observe that non-Aboriginal peoples “often fail to understand the sheer diversity and multiplicity and the shifting identities of Aboriginal people” ¹ and have represented “‘Indians’ as European categories of thought rather than as human beings”. ² Reflecting on such imaginaries the Anishinabe cultural critic Gerald Vizenor notes in his book Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998) that before colonial times the term “Indian” did not exist. It was invented by Euro-Americans. In his view, “the Indian” is “a simulation without a referent”. ³ DEFA’s Indianerfilme were shaped both by ideological intents and by what Hartmut Lutz terms “Indianthusiasm”. ⁴ Die Söhne der großen Bärin (1966, The Sons of the Great Mother Bear) was so successful – around ten million GDR citizens saw the film – that it led to other popular Indianerfilme throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Unlike the enormously popular West German westerns of the 1960s, based loosely on Karl May’s Winnetou and sometimes called “Sauerkraut” or “Spätzle” westerns, DEFA’s Indianerfilme do not depict Native Americans as a homogenous group, but instead attempt to present different tribes and time periods. Yet with their focus on imperialism, colonialism and genocide the films consciously appropriated Native Americans for the Cold War struggle. Although DEFA prided itself on its historical portrayal of Native Americans, it nevertheless borrowed them for GDR politics of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism and perpetuated such romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans as “noble savages”, popularized by May. In these films, “the Indian” with his perceived stoicism and struggle for freedom was utilized as a potent, yet also defeated symbol of resistance.

To appreciate depictions of Native Americans in the East German westerns, it is useful to consider briefly their previous images in American westerns. Early American silent westerns frequently showed Native Americans positively and often included friendships between them and whites. Some were set “entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero”. ⁵ As in the Indianerfilme there is a tone of nostalgia about “civilization’s advance and the native’s demise”. ⁶ Later, however, many westerns depicted Native Americans as savage and degraded, as “one more roadblock thrown by nature against the advance of pioneers”. ⁷ Gerald Vizenor observes that westerns “are not cultural visions, but the vicious encounters with the antiselves of civilization, the invented savage”. ⁸ In pro-progress westerns, Native Americans are stereotyped as violent and treacherous to justify their defeat. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), for example, is “one of the most viciously anti-Indian films ever made” because “the entire film is in effect an argument in favor of killing Indians as the only solution to the ‘Indian Problem’”.  ⁹ In contrast, many anti-progress American westerns create different stereotypes of Native Americans as noble and virtuous and often treat them patronizingly.

DEFA, the state-owned film studios in the GDR, was not blind to the success of the West German westerns of the early 1960s. Because they were banned in the GDR citizens travelled to Czechoslovakia to see them. The GDR government dismissed May as a bourgeois author of trivial literature and banned his works. That Hitler had enjoyed his stories further harmed his reputation in the post-World War II era. ¹⁰ When DEFA proposed making a western or Indianerfilm, their preferred name that highlights their focus on “the Indian”, the studio had to conform to GDR cultural policy that literature and film “educate” the public. DEFA used a Marxist-Leninist perspective to depict Native Americans in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Through their attention to history “the producers and filmmakers were hoping to infuse what state officials considered a sensationalist and escapist genre with an enlightening and educative purpose”. ¹¹ Through telling the story of the “Indians” the producers wanted to teach young people about the evils of capitalism. In an article in the Berliner Zeitung in 1971 Günter Karl, the chief dramaturge of the DEFA group “Roter Kreis” (red circle), which produced many of the Indianerfilme and included such prominent directors as Josef Mach, Gottfried Kolditz and Konrad Petzold, emphasized the group’s historical-materialist perspective, but also pointed out that to be effective they had to use successful aspects of the western genre, including a “gewisse Romantik” (a certain romanticism) in their treatment of Native Americans. ¹² In contrast to the West German westerns’ lack of concern with historical accuracy (for example totem poles, clearly modeled on those from the Pacific North West, appear in some scenes of Mescalero Apache villages), DEFA stressed that its films were based on historical documents, and the studio worked with Dr. Lothar Dräger from the Leipzig ethnographic museum to achieve historical authenticity. ¹³ Günter Karl, who wrote the script for Spur des Falken (Trail of the Falcon), for example, not only conducted extensive historical research, but also used support from the Leipzig Ethnographic Museum. As Torner has observed about the film Osceola, however, Dräger idealized Seminole culture “via a hybrid of Völkerkunde (ethnography) and Marxist-Leninism”, ¹⁴ an idealization that also informed his perceptions of Native American tribes in the other DEFA films. The supposed anthropological authenticity was, therefore, filtered through romanticized versions of Native Americans that perpetuated stereotypes. Thus, like American and West German westerns “the Indian” becomes in the DEFA films an ideological construct.

DEFA used this “quintessentially” American genre to sharply criticize the United States. ¹⁵ It did little, however, “to question established genre conventions” and accepted “a certain degree of Americanization” in order to “gain favor with home audiences”, tired of “DEFA’s political fables”. ¹⁶ The films closely follow the conventions of the western genre, including, for example, tavern scenes, action shots of “Indian” attacks, ambushes of stagecoaches and railroads, and shootouts. Where they differ is in their positive depictions of Native Americans. By adhering closely to these conventions DEFA undermined, however, its attempts at differentiation and authenticity in its portrayal of Native Americans. In particular these attempts collided with the studio’s decision to adopt the star-system. Following the western genre’s use of white actors playing their Native American roles in what Katrin Sieg terms “ethnic drag” ¹⁷ and noting the success of Pierre Brice as Winnetou in the West German westerns, DEFA chose the Yugoslav actor Gojko Mitić to impersonate all its Native American protagonists. As a result Mitic came to represent “the Indian”, thereby working against DEFA’s goal to differentiate the various tribes: “The faces of all tribes (. . .) were collapsed into Mitic’s strong jaw, exaggerated red make-up, a long black-haired wig and muscular torso”. ¹⁸ Mitic had already played parts in some West German Winnetou films, for example, in Unter Geiern (1964, Frontier Hellcat) where he was the chief’s son Wokadeh. Through his various Native American roles for DEFA Mitic became a superstar with a large following of enthusiastic fans in East Germany and other Eastern European countries and later, after the demise of the GDR, also in the West. Whenever Mitic appeared, there were spontaneous mass rallies that the GDR government had not even ordered. ¹⁹ He became “a role model for children, the dream of teenage girls, and an ideal son-in-law – a particularly Teutonic form of model Indian and model citizen”. ²⁰ The athletic Mitic, who had studied sport, performed all his own stunts, once being bitten by a horse, ²¹ and during the filming of Chingachkook in the Tatra Mountains his canoe capsized several times in the cold lake. ²² Ironically, Mitic, who played the Indian “Other”, was for East Germans also an “Other” since he was from Yugoslavia, and in the films his voice was always dubbed by a native German speaker. Although Mitic spoke German fluently, he did so with an accent. The director Konrad Petzold justified such dubbing by saying that in American westerns “Indians” often speak incorrect English, which he saw as discrimination, hence the East German “Indian” hero had to speak correct German, since it would have been “happig”, a colloquial phrase meaning “a bit much”, if an “Indian” spoke with a Slavic accent. ²³

DEFA used a variety of settings, mostly in Eastern Europe, to represent the American West. Many of the films were co-productions with studios in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Mongolia, and even Cuba, where part of Osceola was filmed. Filming in Yugoslavia, where the West German westerns were also filmed, was particularly helpful since DEFA could use sets left behind from the Winnetou films and could also rely on experienced extras who had already played in the West German westerns. Another advantage of filming in Eastern Europe was that people in South East Europe had darker skins, which made it easier to represent them as “Indians”. ²⁴ In the DEFA films, the extras are portrayed as somewhat backward, as primitive and almost childlike, in contrast to the heroic, resolute chiefs played by Mitic. DEFA frequently used non-professional actors. For example, the slaves in Osceola were actually African students studying in the GDR. ²⁵ Not only were locations in Eastern Europe only an approximation of the American West, but they also presented some challenges. For example, while filming Trail of the Falcon in the Caucasus wood to build the tipis was stolen. ²⁶

Because the DEFA films were not bound by the May model set among the Mescalero Apaches, they attempted to give a broader picture of different tribes and time periods. Tribes depicted include, for example, the Dakotas (Die Söhne der großen Bärin, 1966, The Sons of the Great Mother Bear; Spur des Falken, 1968, Trail of the Falcon; Weiße Wölfe, 1969, White Wolves); Apaches (Apachen, 1973; Ulzana, 1974); Mohicans, Hurons, and Delawares (Chingachgook, 1967); Shoshones (Tödlicher Irrtum, 1970, Deadly Mistake); Seminoles (Osceola, 1971); Shawnee (Tecumseh, 1972); Cheyenne (Weiße Wölfe; Blutsbrüder, 1975, Blood Brothers); Nez Percé (Der Scout, 1983); and Iroquois (Blauvogel, 1979, Blue Bird). Of the above Blue Bird is the only one not narrated from what DEFA viewed as a Native American perspective. The films address Native American tribes only at a specific point in time, and their plots are predictable, showing incidents of Native American resistance to the encroaching whites. No attempts are made to understand their lives over time. While they include such Eastern and Southern tribes as the Hurons, Delawares and Seminoles, like most westerns they focus on defeated and vanishing tribes of the American West. The term “Indianer” has long been associated in the Euro-American and particularly the German imagination with Plains Indians ²⁷ so it is not surprising that such tribes feature prominently in DEFA’s films. Since the late 19th century, “the befeathered and mounted warriors of the plains had become the dominant Indian stereotype within popular culture”. ²⁸

DEFA films are always sympathetic to Native Americans’ struggles for existence and glorify their “courage and integrity”. ²⁹ Native Americans are portrayed as noble and peaceful and they want to live in friendship with the whites. Several films depict an idyllic life in villages where Native Americans live in harmony with nature – until the whites burn the village and kill women, children and old people. Reflecting a growing environmental consciousness they imagine “the Indians” as living a wholesome life amidst nature in sharp contrast to the many smoky and often violent saloon scenes where the whites drink and gamble. Native Americans become hostile only to defend themselves, to escape from barren reservations, or to revenge massacres. They are the “good guys” fighting bravely and hopelessly for their freedom against overwhelming odds as ever-more white settlers flood into the West. In the film of the same name the chief Tecumseh likens whites to swarms of mosquitoes. In contrast to many American westerns of the time, which present conquering the West as a triumph and an important step in nation building and which celebrate the heroism of cowboys and settlers, DEFA films sympathize with the victims of such “progress”.

In their depiction of imperialism, colonialism and genocide these films sharply criticize the United States and they stress the close connection between capitalism, militarism and racism (the GDR considered itself anti-racist, and DEFA took the high moral ground in these films). ³⁰ In most of the Indianerfilme there is a gulf between white Americans and Native Americans. Unlike the West German westerns close friendships between whites and Native Americans are rarely shown, and only a few good whites appear. One exception is Blood Brothers, whose script was written by the American singer and songwriter Dean Reed, who moved to the GDR for political reasons, in which the white Harmonika, played by Reed, and the Cheyenne chief, played by Mitic, become blood brothers. Another is the good sheriff in White Wolves. Otherwise most American whites are depicted as greedy, violent and vicious. They are bandits, fat capitalists, rich mine owners, and land speculators, such as the aptly named Bludgeon in Trail of the Falcon. Some even have pointed teeth to signify their predatory nature. They not only fight against “the Indians”, but also against each other, shoot the buffalo so that Native Americans have no food, and massacre Native Americans. More and more whites steal their land, break treaties made with Native Americans at will when for example gold is found in the Black Hills, and murder them, encouraged by the government bounty offered for Native American scalps, emphasizing that Native Americans are treated like animals, and undermining the notion that only “Indians” take scalps.

A frequent scene in American westerns is when the cavalry rides to rescue the settlers from “the Indians”, thereby playing the heroic role of saviours. In the Indianerfilme, however, the cavalry, representing the military, is always shown as an instrument of government oppression that protects the capitalists and hunts down and murders “the Indians”. One of many such examples is in Blood Brothers, which begins with the Sand Creek massacre in which the cavalry slaughter peaceful Cheyenne, mostly women and children. DEFA films also depict the cavalry’s participation in the forced removal of Native Americans from their fertile lands to rocky, barren reservations.

In several films, DEFA addresses imperialism, showing that the colonial powers, using a divide and conquer strategy, manipulated Native Americans to fight on their side and thus against each other. In Chingachgook, whose plot derives from James Fenimore Cooper, for example, which takes place in the 1740s during the colonial wars between the British and the French, the Hurons fight for the French and the Delawares support the British. In Tecumseh the Shawnee chief, betrayed by the United States government, joins the British in Canada to fight against American oppression, where he is also betrayed. The films do not differentiate between the colonial powers, which all break treaties and promises and grab Native American lands. The French and the British appear less repressive than the Americans only because their subsequent defeats took away their opportunities to plunder and kill Native Americans. In Apachen DEFA depicts imperialism in action as the United States, represented by capitalists and the cavalry, encroach increasingly on New Spain, belonging to Mexico. Ironically, the film treats the Mexicans, who are also imperialists, but are not a target of Cold War rhetoric, quite positively since they try to help the Apaches. In Tecumseh DEFA alludes briefly to Christianity’s complicity in colonialism. Tecumseh’s attempts to unite various tribes to resist fail when some choose the Americans and Jesus. DEFA’s reflections on imperialism are silent about Germany’s own previous imperialist endeavours.

The DEFA films stress the genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans by the United States and show genocide as integral to capitalism and colonialism. Their attempt to link racism and class largely fails since the films suggest that racism exists in all levels of white society. The films show a close connection between economics and racism with the profit motive used to justify murdering those who stand in the way of “civilization”. Many of the films depict massacres in Native American villages, where, to drive home their message, the camera focuses slowly on the representations of brutal murders of women and children. The booklet accompanying Blood Brothers uses the word  “Ausrottungspolitik” (extermination policies), a word fraught with meaning for a German audience after the Holocaust, to characterize American policies toward Native Americans. ³¹ Most of the American whites are racist, as the frequently repeated “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” suggests, an attitude shared by the colonial powers as when a British officer remarks: “We will fight to the last Indian”.

Surprisingly, given the GDR’s supposed anti-racist attitudes and its promotion of women’s rights, the films, following the conventions of the western genre, demonstrate a definite gender bias and a reluctance to accept interracial relationships. For the most part white and especially Native American women are shown as “passive and obedient, reflecting what German women should be and not what Aboriginal women really were (and are) like”. ³² Most are depicted as childlike victims, helplessly dependent upon their men. Like American westerns DEFA also avoids addressing interracial marriage. In Blood Brothers, for example, soldiers kill Harmonika’s pregnant Native American wife, conveniently avoiding the issue of miscegenation and eliminating the “problem” of giving birth to a mixed race child.

As several critics have observed, the Indianerfilme “tell us more about the politics and culture of former East Germany and Germans in the late twentieth century than they do about Native people in North America”. ³³ By using Native Americans to criticize the United States the films contributed to Cold War rhetoric, but they also offered, as Gemünden points out, “blueprints for a better socialist Germany”. ³⁴ At the end of The Sons of the Great Mother Bear chief Tokei-ihto exclaims “Ackerbau, Büffelzucht, Eisen schmieden – das ist unser neuer Weg” (farming, raising buffalo, smelting iron – that is our new way), ³⁵ a utopian vision of a peaceful and productive workers’ society. The films also emphasize the necessity for citizens of the GDR and other Eastern European countries to work together in solidarity to build new societies just as in Ulzana the Apache chief attempts to build a self-reliant nation out of different and often warring tribes. ³⁶ By emphasizing Native American resistance, the Indianerfilme remind their viewers of their state’s commitment to antifascism, one of the foundational myths of the GDR. ³⁷ Other aspects of the films resonated with East German audiences. Dika argues that the conflict in The Sons of the Great Mother Bear is “best described as the struggle for nation against the forces of partition”. ³⁸ In her view, East German audiences could identify with “the Indians” because they had experienced “the pain of partition, and the loss of nationhood”. ³⁹ Through identifying with a persecuted minority audiences could also ignore “the recent racist German past that had been characterized by extinguishing alleged enemies”. ⁴⁰ Similarly, the films’ portrayal of the long, brutal marches to infertile reservations would arouse multiple associations in East German audiences: the deportation of the Jews, the forced death marches of concentration camp inmates at the end of the war, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the East. By implication, the films’ solidarity with the resistance of historical Native Americans against an imperialist power suggests the GDR’s solidarity with freedom movements around the world, such as the Vietnamese people in their struggle against United States militarism. “Indians” in some films, for example Apachen and Blood Brothers, “employ guerrilla and terrorist tactics against their scheming American enemies”. ⁴¹ The films thus suggest a model for resistance groups around the world, but since, as they demonstrate, the “Indians” were ultimately doomed, this model is hardly compelling.

The subtitle of White Wolves, “wilder Westen und historische Wahrheit” (wild West and historical truth), points to DEFA’s conflicted goals in these films. It wanted to present authentic and ideologically correct portraits of Native Americans, but it was also concerned with box office success, which led it to emphasize the adventure/entertainment aspects of the western genre. Lischke and McNab argue, in fact, that commercial concerns were primary, that  “any attempt to lend accuracy or authenticity to them was quite secondary”. ⁴² DEFA took over uncritically widespread romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans as noble savages and tropes of a dying race, perpetuated in the West by May. Unintentionally, the films offered many East Germans, whose travel was restricted, not only entertainment, but also a temporary escape into a more exotic world. As Briel notes “shots of roaming tribes and of the big blue sky of the American West had a particular appeal”. ⁴³ Inadvertently, by depicting Native Americans’ resistance to the American government the films also gave their audiences a space to question their own government’s policies. ⁴⁴

In DEFA’s Indianerfilme, its most successful film series, Native Americans, despite the studio’s repeated claims of authenticity ⁴⁵ and its attempts to avoid a false romanticizing of “Indians”, are appropriated for Cold War rhetoric against the capitalist and militarist West, specifically the United States. They undergo a “re-mythification” to become brave examples of oppressed groups fighting throughout the world for their freedoms. Despite the many inaccuracies and the appropriation of Native Americans for ideological purposes, however, the films’ focus on Native American perspectives, their attempts at historical authenticity, and their positive depictions of Native Americans as individual people were at that time quite unique.

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Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Jennifer Michaels. This article has been peer-reviewed.

This article explores the concept of the frontier, central to the western genre, and its function within two Hungarian films produced in the country’s socialist period. Adhering to the generic conventions of the western by appropriating its visual and narrative tropes, these productions explore a distinctly Hungarian cultural and historical realm. Essential to the reflections on the specific socio-cultural context of Hungary is the representation of the Hortobágy in both films, a stretch of scenic flatland in the northeastern part of the country. ¹ Complexly coded on national as well as transnational levels, this landscape performs key functions in the films as both an instantly recognizable frontier milieu evoking the cinematic Wild West and a realm pregnant with cultural and historical significance expressing Hungarian national identity.

While the 1976 film The Wind Blows under Your Feet (Talpuk alatt fütyül a szél) directed by György Szomjas heralded an explicit appropriation of the genre by revisiting the rural milieu of Habsburg Hungary in the early 19th century, the Hungarian-American co-production Brady’s Escape (1984) focused on a more recent historical moment, placing its (military) frontier adventure within the context of the Second World War. Despite the diverging time periods addressed in these works, the films share a conscious use of the western iconography and its frontier imaginary placed within a unique cultural realm, and an ambitious dedication to reconstitute their Hungarian environments as veritable cinematic frontier universes. The exploration of Hungarianness through the visual markers of the nation is key to this process in both films. Yet while they employ virtually identical symbols associated with Hungarian culture, these motifs fulfill different functions within the two works. Szomjas abundantly employs them in a mode of ironic and critical self-reflection, while in Brady’s Escape these icons become part of a passive enactment of aestheticized exotic imagery, meant to form a visually appealing background to an American soldier’s adventures in a foreign country.

In order to understand the purpose of Hungarian frontier symbolism in these films, in particular through the layered meaning ascribed to the landscape central to both narratives, it is important to establish some historical and cultural reference points through which the frontier identity of Hungary, and in particular its puszta geography, emerges and the ways in which these issues relate to broader processes of national mythmaking and expressions of national identity.

Hungary on the frontiers of Europe

The importance of the frontier as a historical, and cultural construct has been irrevocably entwined with expressions of American national identity, in particular through the work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In his “frontier thesis” (1893), Turner established a unique and exclusive connection the American West as a distinct frontier land and the cultural and political values of American society. This conceptualization of the frontier, which as Turner stressed developed distinctly from European culture, has strongly influenced representations of the West in a variety of popular cultural contexts, notably cinema. Yet despite the undeniable centrality of the frontier experience in expressions of nationhood in America, the frontier as a historical and cultural construct has also been central to a number of diverging geographical frameworks of which Hungary provides a notable example.

Essential to the country’s cultural identity is a sense of ambiguity, or in-betweenness, a characteristic it shares with most nations constituting the Eastern European region. Such ideas are historically rooted in the area’s position as a fluid geographical zone between Europe and Asia, and its ongoing position as the site of lengthy political, military and ethnic conflicts, a complex ever-shifting regional identity effectively evoking the image of a frontier area. ² Such notions have been central to both conceptualizations from abroad, as well as forceful expressions of national identity from the 19th century onward in specific nations of the region, including Hungary. Situated between east and west, an image importantly informed and reinforced by the, to this day contested, origins of the Hungarian people from the Asian continent, the “Western images and stereotypes of the (Magyar) Hungarians and the Hungarian self-images oscillate between two poles.” These historically constructed visions, one negative, the other idealized, pervade both historiography and literary, as well as broader cultural contexts, which identify them on one hand as “Asiatic barbarians, rapacious, wandering, horse-riding nomads ill-placed in civilized Europe,” while in the period of Romanticism increasingly “an exotic image of freedom loving Hungary surfaces, involving the picturesque ingredients huszárok ‘hussars,’ cigányok ‘gypsies,’ puszta ‘Hungarian steppe.’ and csárda ‘inn on the puszta’” [author’s emphasis] as László Marácz succinctly summarizes. ³

The Great Hungarian Plain: a national frontier space

The Great Hungarian Plain poses an important mythical realm onto which these ideas were mapped. A vast stretch of land, which encompasses plains and wetlands, it has been designated as the place where the ancient Hungarian nomadic people settled toward the 9th century. The site of military conflicts, notably between the Austrian Habsburg Empire and the Turkish Ottoman army, which lasted until the late 17th century, the area remained a sparsely populated region, where moderate agricultural and economic development only arrived in the second half of the 19th century, amidst societal upheavals.

The complex ethnic, social and economic structure of the region, combined with the striking landscape of seemingly endless open spaces, figured centrally in the descriptions of the foreign travelers who visited the region, the imaginary constructions of the Hungarian frontier land presenting a fascinating sphere for mythical constructions of the familiar and of the foreign, the familiar often established through parallels drawn to the iconic images of the American West. The isolated layout of modest homesteads dotting a largely deserted landscape, and an economy based on pastoral activities such as cattle herding and horse wrangling, as well as the persistent presence of outlaws until the late 19th century also contributed to identifications of the area as a remote frontier region, solidifying its image as a veritable “wild west” of the East.

British scholar’s Arthur John Patterson’s descriptions of Hungary from 1869 provides an apt illustration of such formulations of the puszta, in a text which emphasized both the economic opportunities presented by the country and its disappearing “virgin soil” as well as the visual echoes it presented of the “newly planted settlements on the skirts of the western wilderness” of America. ⁴ A. N. J. den Hollander’s two part essay The Great Hungarian Plain: A European Frontier Area from 1960 presents a more recent, key historical study framing the Hungarian Plain as a frontier region usefully embedding the iconic representations of the region as a frontier within a broader historical and socio-economic survey of the area, arguing that underdevelopment and remoteness remained its defining characteristics well into the era of modernization. ⁵ That the popular tropes associated with the frontier have been sustained in popular representations of the puszta, despite broad transformations of the region brought about by the numerous socio-cultural and political shifts during the 20th century, can be witnessed by the circulation of this imagery in tourist publications, which to this day perpetuate its “Wild West” identity as the essence of Hungarian culture. ⁶

Parallel to these developments, the puszta landscape became a powerful symbol of processes of nation-building from the 19th century onwards, a representation, which continued to affect the self-image of Hungarians well into the socialist era, as the films under discussion illustrate. Importantly, the processes of national awakening in this period were throughout Eastern Europe tied to romantic depictions of the land and the peasantry. The puszta in particular effectively evoked ideas of freedom and openness through its seemingly endless, striking geography. ⁷ In this way, the remote region of the Alföld, the cradle of the Hungarian nation, played a central role in the development of national consciousness in the 1800s as expressed by the literature, poetry as well as the visual arts of the period. Turning to the complex regional character of the country, these representations sought to negotiate the dual identity of the nation as westward looking, while exploiting and idealizing the distant image of the non-European origins of the Hungarian people. ⁸

During the 20th century, images of the puszta circulated widely in both domestic as well as foreign contexts through the expanding field of mass-produced visual culture, including illustrated magazines, as well as travelogues and newsreels, strongly entwined with the developing field of tourism. This landscape was notably rediscovered through these channels, along with its horsemen and herdsmen, celebrated in the interwar period by ethnographers, as well as photographers and filmmakers. Hortobágy is a notable example from the field of cinema, a lyrical film by Austrian director Georg Höllering (1936), which employed non-professional actors (the horsemen, or csikós of the region playing themselves) to relate the story of agricultural expansion impinging on this ancient equestrian culture, and ultimately engaged the tensions brought about by an increasingly modernized society. The loose narrative of the film, perhaps not incidentally revealing themes explored in western narratives as well, merely serves as a backdrop for the visually stunning scenes of the noble inhabitants of the puszta, which include poetically framed shots of horses roaming across the plains. ⁹

The large-scale processes of Soviet-style collectivization, implemented across the rural areas of much of Eastern Europe immediately following the Second World War, held extensive consequences for the societal structure and landscape of the region. Much of the Great Hungarian Plain was transformed through the reorganization of the land to accommodate large-scale agricultural developments and a forced resettlement of the area’s population. The 1960s are generally associated with a marked loosening of most socialist dictatorial systems of the Eastern European region, processes that reflected varying degrees of anti-Soviet sentiments growing within the political elites of these countries. Broadly speaking, the forced celebration of communist internationalism of the initial postwar period coexisted by then with a renewed interest in innocuous symbols of the nation and its well-known folk motifs, which served on a basic level to form national coherence, employed as a tool to legitimize socialist ideology within a given nation state.

As already suggested, the developments described in relation to the circulation of the puszta imagery in the 20th century are closely entwined with the field of tourism. Tourism under the socialist period also served, within the domestic framework, to solidify national cohesion through a culturally and historically meaningful geographical space. ¹⁰ During the 1970s, the Hortobágy underwent considerable transformations, importantly becoming a national park in 1972, with tourism steadily established as a prime industry in the area. The activities of horsemen became exclusively sustained within this controlled field of cultural expression, as the skills of the csikós were performed for the lens of domestic and foreign tourists alike, their strong identities as plainsmen increasingly reduced to a trite visual attraction of historical Hungarianness.

The centrality of the puszta was similarly sustained in the socialist film and television culture of this period. For instance, the 19th century outlaw culture of the region was the subject of the television series Rózsa Sándor (Miklós Szinetár, 1971), which related the adventures of the famed historic outlaw involved with the failed Hungarian 1848 uprising against the Austrian Habsburg Empire. Set on the Hortobágy, the show employed populist folk motifs, the peasantry standing in for the working class, and an idealized vision of the landscape to depict an idyllic, romanticized Hungarian milieu within which Rózsa’s heroic feats were executed. ¹¹ An earlier, formally rigorous investigation to destabilize these puszta-tropes and this specific historical moment of the 19th century, was presented in Miklós Jancsó’s seminal film The Round Up [Szegénylegények] (1966). Set during the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, it centers on a group of peasants imprisoned, and questioned by the authorities as they are thought to have ties to the revolutionary figure Rózsa. Shot on the puszta, in a formally rigorous style which alternates extreme wide shots and close-ups, and patterns of people and horses captured with striking geometrical precision, the quasi-abstraction of the landscape in this film subverts its mythical iconography, in order to investigate the complex power-relations and historical processes embedded in this quintessentially Hungarian frontier landscape. Importantly, Jancsó’s films echo the formal attributes of the western in general, and John Ford’s filmmaking in particular, an influence which implicitly pervades the aesthetic language of this important film, in particular through the striking use of the frontier landscape as a national icon, the Hortobágy replacing the vistas of Monument Valley so powerfully featured in Ford’s key westerns. That Jancsó’s visual language has deeply impacted the ways in which the puszta landscape has been featured in Hungarian cinema from the 1960s onward, is also significant to note.

The close analyses that follow address the above-outlined issues relating to visual expressions of Hungary’s historical frontier identity, and some of the rich intertextual references the films evoke in their diverging assessment of the essential symbolism of the Hortobágy region. In this way, these cinematic frontier adventures respond to the deeply engrained historical and cultural construction of the puszta milieu, and by extension, an essentialized mode of Hungarianness, negotiating the specifics of this manufactured image in different ways.

The Wind Blows under Your Feet

The Wind Blows under Your Feet, Szomjas’ first feature, is set in the 1830s and centers on the efforts of townsmen to implement a canalization system in the wetlands of the southwestern area of the Alföld known as the Nagykunság. The film’s plotline evokes the well-known frontier trope of the disappearing traditional way of life, transposed onto the puszta milieu. It thus references a key historical period in the development of the area in the early and mid 1800s before it became an important agricultural region, a time when horsemen and herdsmen, as well as outlaws, still roamed the plains. While a number of politically engaged “westerns” of the 1960s and 1970s explore similar narrative conflicts of impending industrialization in order to address issues of social injustice, which require active resistance by the peasant population (often with the help of an outlaw hero), Szomjas diverts from presenting such a clear critique of capitalist societal development. ¹²In the cultural context of socialist Hungary, it is precisely the avoidance of depicting a heroic, Robin Hood-like outlaw, what historian Eric Hobsbawm termed a “social bandit” that can be considered a notable reformulation of the country’s frontier environment. To this end, the superficially anti-capitalist tale of agricultural modernisation is deemphasized in favor of the stylized representation of the Hungarian frontier milieu and the powerful visual symbols associated with it. These importantly function within a broader representational system, through which Szomjas aims to thoughtfully deconstruct the puszta universe and its inhabitants, and the idyllic vision of Hungarianness it has come to represent. ¹³ In one interview, Szomjas described his film as an effort to subvert the népiesch imagery of popular representations of this realm, a term that fuses the Hungarian adjective népies (folk) and the German phrase völkisch, to critically designate a diluted, superficial display of folkloric themes, as well as prettified and exaggerated motifs of folk culture, and the ways in which such images falsely and superficially came to represent the essence of the nation. ¹⁴

To this end, the puszta constitutes a central protagonist in the film, and the conflict between Gyurka Farkas Csapó, the aging outlaw who returns to the area after a lengthy prison sentence, and his long-time adversary, the sheriff in charge of capturing him, connects deeply to the vanishing frontier universe of the flatlands. Their strong ties to the land form the essential link within their relationship, as they strongly oppose the inevitably disappearing frontier life brought about by modernization. As the sheriff, indignant that a young outlaw mocks his elder’s age explains “we both are getting old, and the puszta along with us” reinforcing the biological connection between the soil and their kind through the dialogue, foreshadowing that the transformation to the land will also produce the downfall of the hero. As the narrative comes to a conclusion, the outlaw is betrayed, not by his sheriff double standing in for the ancient laws of the puszta, but by his own people, his lover, and the young amoral bandit he took under his wing. The downfall of the brigand hero that concludes the narrative once again contains a series of distinct generic motifs, from a stylized duel to his death by hanging, which unfolds against the wintry backdrop of the empty plains. The marked shifts from the autumnal to the wintry landscape serves to symbolically represent the death of the hero, and thus enforce the symbiotic relation between the land and this figure. Yet the land is markedly featured in less than romanticized terms. ¹⁵ For example, a scene of pursuit on horseback between the sheriff and the outlaw is intercut with shots of a herd of grey cattle, a well-known iconic Hungarian breed, and a herdsman standing still among the animals, a carefully staged shot which intertextually references the popular representation of these puszta icons in painting, photography and film. But this seemingly picturesque shot gets subverted, as a close up of the man’s feet reveals his bare feet in a heap of freshly produced, steaming cow dung, undercutting the image of the nurturing Hungarian soil, plainly featured as excrement.

In exploring the puszta, Szomjas creatively recontextualizes a number of its iconic symbols, integrating them into the recognizable visual and narrative patterns of a western narrative. Beyond the visually striking flatland, beautifully captured through carefully staged wide angle and traveling shots which emphasize its openness and wide expanse, the csárda becomes an important location within the plot. This locale, a type of inn traditionally associated with the puszta region and its popular imagery, represents one of few solid structures and forms of permanent human presence on the plain. Here, it also stands in for the saloon of dusty American frontier towns, complete with a “wanted” sign, casually used as a target practice by a local outlaw. This setting becomes a site to key generic elements, such as extended bar brawls, which distinctly imitate the outrageous, acrobatic antics of comedic Italian westerns starring Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill, whose films were hugely popular throughout Eastern Europe, and to a certain degree came to supplant for many viewers classical American westerns as ultimate reference points for fictional frontier adventures.
As Philip French suggests in his discussion of the western, “the location of the westerner in his landscape is a matter of paramount importance, and there are relatively few movies which do not begin with a single man or group of men riding through the countryside.” ¹⁶ The shot in which the outlaw first appears maps this iconic image of the lone westerner onto the puszta. The figure appearing in the distance, enveloped by the endless, desolate, landscape, as the sun rises behind him over the horizon, this image immediately shows the director’s self-conscious play with the western’s visual lexicon, also evidenced by the subsequent shot of the outlaw stopping near a gallows, on which a raven is resting (here the seemingly harmless raven, ubiquitous in the Hungarian countryside, creatively standing in for the ever-threatening vulture associated with death in the American frontier desert). The extended shot of the lone horseman, which lasts several minutes, becomes the backdrop against which the cursive titles of the credit sequence appear, while a folk music track, sounds of a plaintive violin and zither accompanying male vocals, explicitly marks the image as foreign to the habitual western universe of North America.

Djoko Rosic, a Yugoslav-born Bulgarian actor who started his extensive Hungarian career in the western-inspired outlaw film Unruly Heyducks [Hajdúk] (Ferenc Kardos, 1975), plays the phlegmatic outlaw of the film. Rosic’s striking features and horse-riding skills made him an appealing actor to embody rugged frontier-dwellers in all Hungarian manifestations of the western, effectively channeling the ambiguous outsider status of such characters. That his association to the genre remained central to his established career in the cinemas of the region can be attested by his roles in other cinematic frontier adventures, including some East German productions as well as the Bulgarian film The Judge [Sadiyata] directed by Plamen Maslarov (1986). His brief, but memorable appearance in Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies [Werckmeister harmóniák] (2000), in which he is simply credited as “Man in Western Boots,” provides a more recent confirmation of Rosic as an enduring icon of the locally produced western in Hungarian culture.

The characteristic sheepskin clothes of peasants and herdsmen populating Eastern Europe historically provided a visual reference to their un-Western (barbaric) nature. These modes of dress simultaneously marked them in the eyes of foreigners as exotic others and inferior beings engaging primitive lifestyles. ¹⁷ Szomjas enhances the image of these figures and their savage, alien identity, through playfully inserting them into a recognizable cinematic frontier setting. Importantly, these representations of the primitive inhabitants of an ancient pastoral realm also reference the nomadic, non-European, non-Western roots of Hungarians. This dual exposition of the people of the puszta as ambiguously Eastern thus creatively grafts the diverse myths of the Hungarian squarely onto a “western” frontier milieu.

The scene, in which the outlaw protagonist encounters, and subsequently kills a fellow bandit who denounced him years before, serves as a salient example. The man appears sitting alone on the muddy land, a small fire smoking in front of him, his head poking out from the bulky sheepskin that fully envelops his body, his eyes concealed behind a worn out hat. A subsequent closer shot of this seemingly limbless furry creature of the plains reveals not only the unwelcomingly peeking muzzle of his gun, hidden inside the fur, but also his dirty feet, comically poking out from below the hide. Szomjas defamiliarizes the Hungarian “native” of the puszta as he deconstructs the iconic imagery associated with the landscape and its people. This emblematic visual illustration becomes in this framework fused with the generic invocation of the Indian Other in westerns, relocating both images to the realm of the strange and the unfamiliar.

Throughout the film, a diverse list of animals characteristic to this region appear, such as the mangalica pig, the longhaired racka sheep, or the already evoked grey cattle, their presence marking the unique geographic territory on which the narrative unfolds as unmistakably Hungarian. Further on, the film presents what could be considered the most widespread of stereotypes about Hungarian culture from the realm of gastronomy, the country’s best-known paprika-meat dish: the goulash (gulyás). Again transposing a recurring trope from the western onto the Great Plains of Hungary, that of the consumption of food around a campfire, one scene shows the horsemen surrounding a kettle of steaming goulash instead. In a fixed shot staged as a tableau, the men are shown taking their time to smoke their pipes, a kuvasz, again, a distinct Hungarian dog breed, calmly standing between them, in a makeshift straw structure that signals the itinerant nature of the horsemen’s routine. Presented in popular culture as an ancient Hungarian meal, and served to tourists in similar ways since the 1960s, that is, in large kettles above open fire as displayed in this scene, the goulash has grown to be an irreplaceable item of consumable local culture. Here, its presence serves no other purpose than a tongue-in-cheek addition of a widely recognizable Hungarian flavor, a gastronomical ornamentation of frontier folk culture. ¹⁸ Confirming the key role of the dish as an exemplary icon of the Hungarian cultural essence one critic noted, while reviewing Szomjas’ second western feature, that his nastier foreign colleagues would no doubt label Hungary’s new cinematic exports “goulash” or “paprika” westerns. Goulash western has indeed become the term designating Szomjas’ two explorations of the genre in the 1970s, a term neatly aligned with the similarly stereotypical culinary monikers, such as the Spaghetti western, and subsequent national explorations of the genre from across Europe and beyond. ¹⁹

Szomjas, when preparing to shoot this Hungarian western, was unable to find “virgin areas” of the Nagykunság region to convincingly represent the untouched wasteland about to be transformed by progress in the 19th century. He was ultimately forced to move his film crew to the edge of the Hortobágy National Park, interestingly the area, which to this day most artfully represents a distilled sense of ancient Hungarianness to its visitors, within the context of an artificially sustained frontier area. In a remarkable repetition of historical processes, the director also came upon actual canalization work being conducted in the area, which he featured fully in his film. ²⁰
Szomjas’ first feature challenges rigid generic categories and simplified notions of national belonging as well as the superficial exploitation of history and folk culture. In employing irony and visual excess through the relentless exploration of iconic images of the Hungarian landscape, he creatively fuses western icons and symbols of Hungarianness, as my examples have shown. As mentioned earlier, the ideological conflicts unfolding on the frontier serve predominantly as dramatic devices played out on the endless puszta landscape, but the narrative seems to distinctly divert from taking an explicit political stance. The real concern of this film remains a critical, humorous reconsideration of different myths of the Hungarian, enveloped in the fictional universe of western frontier encounters.

Brady’s Escape

Brady’s Escape, completed in 1984, provides a remarkable contrast to Szomjas’ western adventure, although this film revisits the visual motifs of the sweeping puszta, its horsemen, flora and fauna beautiful lensed by cinematographer Elemér Ragályi, who also worked on The Wind Blows under Your Feet. Despite the visual elements echoed throughout both films, and the sometimes near identical framing of the puszta landscape, which, as discussed above, conjures up stock images circulating about the region throughout the 20th century and beyond, these elements nevertheless fulfill a markedly different role, one that undermines the potential for a critical gesture so strongly pervading Szomjas’ work.

While the Hungarian title of the film, Hosszú vágta (Long Ride) stresses the connection of the protagonist’s journey with the film’s central equestrian motif (vágta in Hungarian means gallop), the English language title emphasizes the centrality of its American character, and unquestionably frames the narrative as his unique journey. ²¹ An American – Hungarian coproduction, hailed as the first to be established between the socialist country and the United States, was much awaited ahead of its release and signaled, within the film industry as well as the broader cultural realm the increasing weakening of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence on socialist Hungary in the 1980s. ²² The story originated from its director Gábor, while the American author William W. Lewis penned the screenplay, whose personal experiences as a World War Two pilot served as a primary inspiration for the film. ²³

The narrative centers on a U.S. pilot, the eponymous Captain Brady of the film’s English title, who while flying over Hungary in 1944, is shot down, making a forced landing on the Hortobágy. His co-pilot dies, but Brady survives, receiving shelter and assistance from a number of local horsemen, as well as the town doctor and his English teacher daughter, while the SS officer overseeing the region relentlessly pursues him across the plains. During his days in hiding, the American captain befriends a young Hungarian boy, Miki, and develops a love affair with the schoolteacher. After an extended pursuit, much of it on horseback, he safely makes his way to Yugoslavia, and, it is implied, back to the United States, but the young boy he decides to take along is fatally shot in the final stretches of their flight.

The film provides a hybrid generic format, merging motifs of the western with those of a regional, Eastern European subgenre of the war film broadly referred to as the “partisan film.” The latter was a staple of 1960s and 1970s socialist Yugoslav popular cinema in particular, but other national contexts produced their domestic versions as well. Such films, directly inspired by classical Hollywood cinema, narrated the invariably heroic acts of local resistance fighters against villainous Nazi invaders during the Second World War, historical points of reference framed through large-scale, adventurous and exciting narratives. In this way, they fed into broader processes of national mythmaking, confirming the essential role of history within the newly founded socialist states, while engaging the basic narrative structures of popular cinematic genres. These films have been described, both informally and in a number of recent scholarly sources, as so-called “red westerns.” Nevena Daković, for example, argues that the similarity resides in the ways in which both genres seek to present “frontier narratives” through “the genre-ingrained task of mythologizing and ideologically naturalizing the (national) past.” ²⁴

That the film markedly frames the resistance of the citizens of occupied fascist Hungary through their connection to the U.S. soldier, the characteristically American cowboy from Wyoming, is notable in this regard. Pointing to a clear detachment from the state-prescribed communist historiography regarding the pivotal historical events of the Second World War, the resistance of the Hungarians is shown independently from the imminent efforts of liberation by Soviet troops, a historical moment altogether missing from the film’s narrative in general and the victorious final escape of the American hero in particular. Brady’s initial plans to meet up with advancing Russian soldiers on the eastern front notably fails, forcing him to seek an alternative route via neighboring Yugoslavia and its partisan faction. ²⁵ Elsewhere in the narrative, the Soviet army is shown collecting the belongings of the local population, Hungarians distinctly framed in these brief scenes as the victims of their “liberators,” clearly embedding the harsh realities of the imminent dictatorship of postwar decades within this historical moment. Thus while the Yugoslav “partisan films” sought to legitimize the official history of the newly formed socialist state, Gábor applies its central elements to destabilize Hungary’s communist historiography.

Yet although these elements suggest a notable reformulation of official historical narratives propagated by the socialist state, the construction of the moral universe of the puszta and that of the caricatural villain of the plot, the German Nazi officer, leaves no space for nuanced exploration of this tumultuous period of Hungary’s past. This unquestionably stereotypical articulation distinctly shifts the horrific actions of the war years onto this uninspired stock character, fully removed from a Hungarian context. ²⁶In this way, the simple citizens, and the ur-Hungarian horsemen are framed solely within a heroic fantasy of resistance, while leaving the obvious military and political opposition between an American soldier and the German-allied Hungarians, the complicated, albeit real historical framework of the narrative, underexplored. An initial remark from a horseman, stating that Brady’s sort “are the bastards bombing us” briefly addresses this given, which is subsequently absent from the film, supplanted by a rather unconvincing innate urge of the csikós to help the cowboy in peril. It is perhaps in this way, that the detached exoticness of the puszta landscape and its inhabitants is granted its dual functionality within the narrative, to at once provide an aesthetically pleasing frontier background for the actions of the American hero, and bury the historical complexities and contradictions of 20th century Hungarian history within an easily palatable, but decidedly superficial fantasy. This schematic representation no doubt aimed to make a Hungarian historical fiction film palatable for foreign (American) audiences, exempted from having to untangle the country’s sociopolitical coordinates.

The central plot of the film is introduced in flashback. Brady, by then a grandfather, is introduced in the film on his Wyoming farm, where he is forced to put his beloved, but aging stallion Aranka to sleep. This traumatic act propels the memories to Hungary many years prior, to the fateful encounter between American cowboy and Hungarian mare. The equestrian symbolism remains central to many key action sequences in the plot, and provides the basis for the fundamental identification of the Hungarian puszta as a distant, unknown realm of horsemen, presented as strange and exotic, yet also familiar as a frontierland of cowboy-like figures. Several narrative and formal strategies used in the film reinforce this idea, painting the csikós as one-dimensional figures, evoking the noble savage trope pervading tales of the American west.

While Szomjas consciously subverted such simplified notions of Hungarianness, here, these elements become integrated within a conventional adventure film, visually enhancing the central story focused on the American. The film notably enacts the perspective of an outsider in constructing the image of the puszta –extending Brady’s perspective of the Hungarian frontierland onto the presumed foreign audience. In doing so, the film ultimately adheres to the very essentialist, népiesch figures of Hungarianness, which Szomjas sought to revert.

The connections between American cowboy culture and Hungary’s fundamental identity of a horse-riding nation is embedded within this artificially constructed puszta milieu. While Szomjas relied on easily identifiable visual tropes and narrative elements to construct the instantly recognizable western-like frontier universe of Hungary, Brady’s Escape forces this comparison to be virtually omnipresent, visually as well as through the dialogue. The young csikós Miki notably self-identifies as a “cowboy,” and it is Brady’s own cowboy identity that ultimately establishes the powerful connection between him and the locals. ²⁷

The outsider’s perspective cast onto the land is established early on in the film, which finds Brady crashing down onto the Hortobágy. As he hits the land, we see the scorched earth of the puszta underneath his flapping parachute, an image, which lends a decidedly strange otherworldly atmosphere to his first contact with the land. As more of the landscape is revealed, a vast flatland dotted by shallow marshland, the environment vaguely echoes yet simultaneously differs from habitual western frontier settings. It is the human presence on the puszta that subsequently intensifies the analogy. As Brady looks up to survey the unfamiliar environment, he suddenly finds himself facing a small group of horsemen, shadowy figures framed menacingly from a low angle. The first medium close-up of a horseman, captured from Brady’s point of view, is that of a csikós played by Djoko Rosic, whose sudden appearance may have served as an insider’s joke to Hungarian viewers, announcing the generic parameters of this domestic western in this early scenes.

The culture evoked by these horsemen is directly tied to the land, their mud huts, simple tools, and exclusive use of horses as modes of transportation revealing a marked engagement with an idyllic, picturesque representation of old ways of life. The opposition of traditional lifestyles butting against efforts of modernization resurfaces as a familiar premise. But here, this generic motif becomes superficially mapped onto the wartime military context. While Hungarians are invariably shown within their idyllic rural setting, suspended in the peaceful, timeless landscape, the Nazi officer and his army are strongly associated with markers of modern life encroaching on the tranquil puszta. This conflict is visually emphasized in a number of scenes, which show the horsemen or the doctor’s horse-drawn cart crossing paths with the Nazi officer’s automobile en route to the nearest town. Similarly, the carefully choreographed final showdown between German officers and the brave csikós of the puszta, one armed with machine guns the other with whips, depicts a dramatic encounter carefully staged on an empty stretch of land. This confrontation sees the horsemen perish one by one, executed by the Nazi officers who shoot them down from their cars.

The pilot’s essential skills as cowboy provide an obvious link to the Hungarian csikós men who save him, a link established visually when he hides from the German officer on the prowl by donning the traditional outfit of the Hungarian horsemen: blue loose-fitting pants and blouse, as well as a rimmed hat vaguely reminiscent of those worn by cowboys, a dress which he wears throughout much of his scenes on the Hortobágy. Importantly, once the American approaches the safe destination of the Yugoslav partisan stronghold, he removes his “disguise,” once again wearing his US army uniform. Through this gesture, Hungarianness is revealed as a costume, a decorative element as mere artifice at the service of the American hero.

Similarly, an important, recurring action within the film is the training of horses, prompted to perform different actions on demand, such as lying down flat on their side. These stunts, presented episodically in the film notably suspend the action. The first one of these scenes shows the young csikós standing in a field, while the American pilot looks on (he will later learn these tricks, which will serve him to escape from his enemies on a number of occasions). The young boy executes the stunt while carefully facing the camera, a well-known and often performed segment of the popular horse-shows put on by horsemen for visitors of the region’s national parks. This sequence thus once again confirms the key performative function of the Hungarian horsemen, largely evoking a tourist-oriented visual and irrevocably superficial image of its culture.

Hungarian critics largely rejected the film’s artificial representation of Hungary, repeatedly labeling it an “IBUSZ advertisement,” referring to the visually striking but clichéd images propagated by the country’s state-run tourist bureau. ²⁸ This negative reception of the film, while rightfully pointing to the fundamental weaknesses of the plot and its unimaginative development towards a predictable conclusion, also reveals a level of anxiety surrounding the move away from a state-sponsored structure of the film industry. In particular, they emphasize the obvious compromises made in an attempt to produce a financially successful Hungarian adventure film palatable for foreign consumption in a period that preceded the fundamental restructuring of Hungarian society and culture in the final years of the decade in which Brady’s Escape was made.

Conclusion

The Wind Blows under your Feet and Brady’s Escape, two examples of the appropriation of the western genre in Hungarian cinema, complicate our understanding of the functioning of popular genres produced in socialist Eastern Europe, which necessitates a more nuanced understanding of how representations of history and expressions of national identity were negotiated during the Cold War period. While these films and the Hungarian context they engage should not be seen as unique examples of the appropriation of the genre in international film culture, as evidenced by the western’s ubiquitous presence throughout socialist Eastern Europe and beyond, it nevertheless provides a salient case study for the diverging, and often contradictory role the cinematic frontier trope provides to representations of the nation, and the usefulness of the frontier imaginary in perpetuating, enhancing, or dismantling the complexly constructed self-image of a given country.

—
Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Sonja Simonyi. This article has been peer-reviewed.

The Second World War in Yugoslavia. More than one million dead from 1941 to 1945. Nazi German forces partnering with Croatian Ustaša (and sometimes Serbian Čhetniks) against the multi-ethnic Yugoslav Partisans. Serbian Čhetniks as arch enemies to the Yugoslav Partisans (and not necessarily friends to the Croatian Ustaša). The Yugoslav Partisans against everybody, facing opposition from all sides, and who ultimately prevailed in the domestic struggle. The sheer number of competing forces and shifting alliances on the Yugoslav front made it the most hotly contested and dangerous theatre of operations during the war.

In 1944 Belgrade was liberated. In 1945 the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was formed as a socialist state with Josip Broz Tito – the supreme commander of the Partisan forces – as prime minister and chairman of the League of Yugoslav Communists. This was the crowning achievement of the man considered by many military strategists and historians as the finest guerilla commander in the history of modern armed conflict. Aside from being a brilliant field general, Tito was also as an avid cinephile who employed a personal projectionist for his home theatre and watched at least one film a day. His favorites were Hollywood Westerns.

A Committee for Cinematography was established in Socialist Yugoslavia in 1946. The prewar surrealist writer Aleksandar Vučo was placed in charge of the committee and he quickly outlined a manifesto that Yugoslav films were to adhere to. The four points of this manifesto are key to understanding the development of the genre of the Partisan war film, and read as follows:

From the outset Yugoslav films were designed to be conservative, as well as conduits for state propaganda.

The Committee for Cinematography initiated regional directions for all six republics in Socialist Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia). Each was to found a film studio, a cinema network, and all were to work cooperatively with the state on the import and export of films. As a result of these directions, Avala Film was founded on 15 July 1946 in Belgrade (Serbia) and Jadran Film was founded one day later in Zagreb (Croatia). These were the two main film studios in Yugoslavia and they were the most active in international co-productions as well. The various film studios that were created functioned autonomously. Film workers were given the status of freelance artists, and on 5 March 1950 the Yugoslav Film Workers League was founded. ²

Tito was in need of a national mythology as the glue holding his patchwork construction together. The structuring motif of this mythology was ‘unity and brotherhood’, and the narrative that underlined it was the national liberation struggle during the Second World War. In discussing Partisan war films and their use of the revolutionary struggle, Nemanja Zvijer has written that

[t]he struggle for liberation can be viewed mythically as an exalted event that marked the symbolic beginning of the political odyssey of an ideological system. Therefore victory in war, in a larger context, justified itself as the socialist order and because of that was necessary for its achievements, finally relating itself towards something sacred. ³

The notions of the sacred and mythical will be of further concern for this brief survey.

Just as the classical Hollywood Western mythologised the early formation of the United States of America (and in some senses became the archetypal American film genre), the Partisan war film did the same for Socialist Yugoslavia, while sharing conventions and iconography such as simplified good/evil dichotomies and conflicts, wide open rural spaces, horses, guns, and gunfights. The conservative and orthodox approach to Marxism that was practiced by the League of Yugoslav Communists was reflected in the schematic and inflexible genre tropes of the Partisan war film. ⁴ Formally speaking, the Partisan war film obeyed the rules of classical construction, displaying clear communication and a seamless style. Continuity was observed with regards to space (mise-en-scène) and time (editing), lighting was naturalistic as were décor and performances, and narrative followed a traditional dramatic structure.

The content of the Partisan war film was historical – specifically, the Second World War. These films told tales of brave Yugoslav Partisans fighting against various enemies. In addition to evoking the Western, war film genre conventions and iconography were depicted in these productions: military operations, guns, uniforms, armies, victorious battlefield conclusions. Perhaps we can conceive of the Yugoslav Partisan war film as a unique hybridization of the two genres. As a result of the dogmatic conventions in these films, a romantic picture was painted of the wartime Partisan hero: he was courageous, valiant, resourceful, and selfless. In those instances where the Partisan fighter was a woman, the characteristics remained with an added level of virtuosity. Senad Musabegović (2009) offers the following critique of the gender-based ideological manipulation present in these films:

[t]he struggle was united with a symbol of female emancipation, because women could become fighters. And when they become fighters they acquire their own autonomy because of participating in the struggle, along with men, in creating a collective will. ⁵

It is interesting to note that in Partisan war films, which tended to be conservative and a bit old-fashioned, women were treated with care and often celebrated – sometimes worshipped (as is the case in the film Slavica (Vjekoslav Afric, 1947), which will be explored shortly). In the era of Yugoslav ‘New Film’ in the 1960s, which generally opposed the rigid ideology of the classical Partisan war film, women were often mistreated, abused, and even murdered. This is one of the great ironies of the New Film era, which is often seen as a liberated moment in Yugoslav cinema that afforded the opportunity to explore personal subjectivities rather than official mythologies. Perhaps these personal visions were dark and fatalistic to be directly in conflict to the forced optimism of the Partisan war films. Still, if so, it is unfortunate that women were regularly made to be victims in these efforts. It is even more unfortunate that there was only one woman in the country that was able to direct feature films – Sofija Jovanović, who began her career in the 1950s and mostly made classical theatrical adaptations.

Like the Western, the Partisan war film seems to be particularly linked with open, rural spaces, as if somehow in defining their inseparability with the landscape of the nation itself (and the pending development of the nation). The titles of these films often refer to a naturalist aesthetic, such as V gorakh Yugoslavii/In the Mountains of Yugoslavia (Abram Room, 1946) or Na svoji zemlji/On Native Soil (France Štiglic, 1948). Sometimes the titles refer directly to a natural landmark or resource, such as rivers in the films Bitka na Neretvi/The Battle of Neretva (Veljko Bulajić, 1969) and Sutjeska (Stipe Delić, 1973). Another interesting example of this naturalism is the film Jedini izlaz/No Way Out (Vicko Raspor and Aleksandar Petrović, 1958), which takes place underground in a system of caverns full of wondrous stalagmites and stalactites as the setting for thrilling battles. Rarely do these films take place in urban locales, though Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac, 1972) is an exception, with its exposition of city-based warfare in the Bosnia & Herzegovina capital. Indeed, many of these films feature Bosnia & Herzegovina as a setting. As Musabegović notes, Bosnia & Herzegovina serves as a dominant symbol of the Partisan war film. He writes that

World War II operations in Yugoslavia were conducted most often on the territory of Bosnia & Herzegovina. One reason is because of the geographical map and topographical structure of the republic…with its mountains and canyons it presented optimal conditions for military maneuvers. Besides its geographical configuration, Bosnia & Herzegovina had one more advantage – its unique multi-ethnicity, which favored a nationwide resistance movement. ⁶

These rural spaces and this lush naturalism often featured the use of horses, just as in a Western. The royalist Četniks are usually seen riding horses into battle, as part of their rustic and perhaps provincial nature as simplistically depicted in the films. Germans usually ride into battle on tanks in these films, while the virtuous Partisans most regularly travel on foot, emphasising their modest roots. As a result, the depiction of various modes of transportation had ideological implications in these films.

Though the numerous military operations situate these productions primarily within the war film genre, the polyvalent collection of codes at play in the films helped birth the appearance of the ‘Red Westerns’ that characterized certain productions in other socialist states. Perhaps the Partisan war films can also colloquially be called ‘Red Westerns’ for these reasons, even if they were not literal reconstructions of the tropes of Hollywood Westerns like their counterparts. ⁷

***

The early history of the Partisan war film begins in the immediate postwar era. In 1946, in a show of solidarity with the new Socialist Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union through Mosfilm produced In the Mountains of Yugoslavia. This was the first feature film produced in Socialist Yugoslavia. The film was shot in Russian and directed by Abram Room, with cinematography by the great Eduard Tisse. Room had already directed the first dialogue film in the Soviet Union, so he was a pioneering choice to handle the first Yugoslav feature production. Tisse was of course famous for being Eisenstein’s preferred cinematographer. In the Mountains of Yugoslavia served as an early example of transnational production by Mosfilm, which was often in the business of producing features in the various satellite states of the Soviet Union. Also, this proved to be a forerunner of the numerous international co-productions that Yugoslavia engaged in during the 1960s and 1970s.

The story of In the Mountains of Yugoslavia follows the fortunes of one Slavko Babić, a peasant from the mountains of Bosnia & Herzegovina who joins the liberation struggle and fights his way to Belgrade, helping to liberate it while becoming a war hero in the process. With this film the schematic was set for the Partisan war film genre, and it also functioned as an example of the socialist realist aesthetic that the Yugoslav film industry would model itself after. In addition, the production of this film served as a veritable training ground for the first generation of Yugoslav film artists, as many worked on the production crew. This is not to say that there was a lack of professional filmmakers operating in prewar Yugoslavia, both foreign and domestic. However, a national film industry only existed in an embryonic phase in the prewar years, as most worked independently.

In his book-length survey of the history of Yugoslav cinema, Petar Volk (1983-86) wrote of Room’s film that it “showed that it is not easy to align national illusions and desires with the real possibilities of cinematic expression”. ⁸ Still, In the Mountains of Yugoslavia gave an example of how to consolidate power and perpetuate a national mythology (or illusion) through aesthetics. Of course, this film also displayed the exaggeration that went along with a mythologising of heroic narratives. For this reason, it is necessary to place quotation marks around ‘realism’ when discussing films of this tradition. Perhaps a better description would be ‘romantic’ socialist realism, as these films always lionised their heroes and placed them in as flattering a light as possible.

One of those Yugoslav film artists that got their start on the Mosfilm production crew was Vjekoslav Afrić. He was a successful prewar theater artist in Zagreb, who played the role of Četnik commander General Draža Mihailović in In the Mountains of Yugoslavia. Afrić would be chosen as the director of the newly-established film academy in Belgrade in 1947, which meant that he had a hand in educating the subsequent generations of Yugoslav film artists. ⁹ 1947 was the initial year of domestic feature film production in Socialist Yugoslavia, and the first film produced was Slavica, which Afrić directed as his debut. In an effort to practice and promote ‘unity and brotherhood’, Slavica was produced by Avala Film from Belgrade (though shot on location in Croatia) with Afrić, a director from Zagreb. This pattern was repeated in the second film produced that year: Zivjece ovaj narod/This Nation Will Live (Nikola Popović, 1947), produced by Jadran Film from Zagreb with Nikola Popović, a director from Belgrade. This sort of trans-republic cooperation was encouraged from the start, though it was nothing new, as film artists from across national and republican lines had collaborated since the prewar days of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Slavica is a very naturalistic film, which takes place in the seaside town of Split in Croatia, amongst a community of fishermen. It presents an idyllic vision of an unspoiled countryside, and the film also details a heroic narrative set during wartime conflict, though with an interesting deviation for this inaugural domestic production. The heroine of the film is the title character Slavica, a peasant woman who follows her fiancé into service with the Partisans. Slavica serves proudly and even has a boat named after her, which functions as an attack vessel during the climax of the film. As is the case with the film In the Mountains of Yugoslavia, the hero (or heroine) dies in combat at the conclusion. It was previously mentioned that the Partisan war film was mandated to preserve optimistic conclusions, and as a result it is interesting to see the tragic turn of events in these two early films. It was not common for the hero to die in later Partisan films. However, in these two films an optimistic sensibility is retained as the memories of the heroes are honored, and both films conclude with a celebratory parade marking the liberation of the country and an end to the war. The heroic deaths in these films serve the function of honorable sacrifices to the altar of nation-building.

The 1940s were a time for the seeding and development of the Partisan war film within the general history of Yugoslav cinema, coinciding with the seeding and development of the country itself. At this time Yugoslavia was trying to justify its existence both to itself and to an outside world, while also steering a precarious political balancing act in the process – and this is why these early films were fairly rigid in relation to the socialist realist line. Though initially enjoying warm relations with the Soviet Union, Stalin would break with Tito in 1948 when Yugoslavia was excommunicated from the Comintern. This sent the country on its first step towards the self-management and non-alignment that would characterize Yugoslavia in its golden age (the 1950s and the 1960s). With the onset of the 1950s, the Partisan war film began reflecting some of these progressive changes. For the most part the genre remained orthodox in orientation. However, the national film production was slowly diversifying with new styles and new directors, ultimately leading to the 1960s, when Yugoslav cinema fully blossomed with the fruits of a European film modernism.

The film Dalekoje sunce/Far from the Sun (Radoš Novaković, 1953), is exemplary as a transitional work of sorts that points to the shifting values inherent in a modernising Yugoslav national cinema. Novaković was the managing director of the wartime film section that was a predecessor to the Committee for Cinematography. ¹⁰ He directed a number of short documentaries in the immediate postwar years and his feature film debut, Sofka (Radoš Novaković, 1948), was from a script by Aleksandar Vučo. In Far from the Sun we begin to see some cracks in the mythological armor of the Partisan war film. Far from the Sun is very stylised, often relying on expressionistic effects that distort camera angles, lighting, and emotions, while also making extensive use of process shots that problematise a seamless reality. This is a film full of darkness as well (symbolised by its title), both literal with regards to the cinematography and thematic with regards to the ambivalence of the soldiers towards their actions and its moral consequences.

To be sure, Far from the Sun is not wholly-subversive of classical Yugoslav cinematographic values: the basic conflict of the film is still one of good versus evil, represented by Partisans versus Nazis; there is an intermittent voice-over narration that extols the mythological abilities of the resilient Partisans; there is an upbeat and optimistic conclusion featuring music – and for the first time in the film, sunshine – with majestic and scenic mountain views. Yet and still, the motif of a hellish fire runs throughout the film: the cloudy smoke in the opening credit sequence, representing the flames of war; the various smoldering fires used by the soldiers to keep warm; the burning village they discover, as well as the burning bodies within it. The tradition of the Partisan war film is being tested in a trial by fire here, which, even though it threatens to consume, is ultimately controlled.

***

As stated earlier, Tito was an avid cinephile known to enjoy at least one private film screening each day. His preferred genre was Hollywood Westerns, and it should be seen as no coincidence that the Partisan war film appropriated many of the tropes of that genre. Westerns are often about power relations, and a running theme in these films is a preservation and propagation of the law in the face of a lawless environment. Musabegović draws a connection between the Partisan war film and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), with regards to their mythologising nation-building. However, it seems that Griffith’s film was more about mythologising the past without necessarily hypothesising a potential progressive future – though it can be said that The Birth of a Nation helped to lay the groundwork for the Western and its particular generic construction. Ultimately, Griffith’s film is an attempt to critique the present (while fearing for an uncontrollable future bereft of white hegemonic power) and roll back the clock to an idealized past. One cannot say the same for the Partisan war film, and its championing of a multi-ethnic society structured on mutual respect and support is at odds with the divisive intolerance of Griffith’s worldview.

It should be noted that many contemporary critics and historians – often those emanating from the region of the former Yugoslavia itself – have written the socialist history of the country as a totalitarian affair which was intolerant of dissent. Therefore, in this view, the classical cinema of the era probably can be likened to Griffith’s infamous work, which represents a conservative and rigid ideology. However, as others have noted in contrast, it is possible that such critics overestimate the oppressive nature of socialism and the convenient narrative of brave artist versus dogmatic and dangerous regime. ¹¹ Still, the Partisan war films seemed to be more formulaic and self-effacing when it came to an individual artistic identity. Of course, this does not make them any less interesting as objects of study.

The struggle against lawlessness and its implications for nation-building can be paralleled with the capacity for socialism in the Partisan war film, though these films were never overtly about the principles of socialism. Socialist ideals were implicit in the films and sometimes commented upon in a didactic manner, but the films were rarely preachy (not to say they were not romanticized or melodramatic). Again, quoting Musabegović,

[i]n Partisan films the fighters do not discuss Marxism, and Marxism is not mentioned or introduced as an independent theme. The presentation of the struggle and situations of conflict enable the embodiment and demonstration of Marx’s ideas about building a communist society.1 ¹²

Perhaps it would not be practical for soldiers to discuss the tenets of Marxism on the battlefield. Still, it is interesting that given the heuristic aims of the schematic for this cinema, the opportunity was not taken to celebrate the virtues of the socialist path in a more literal manner. Many Partisans performed most of their left-wing activities in the prewar years when communists were outlawed, struggling against a royalist regime and agitating for social change. However, rarely were films made about this particular era until after the death of Tito.

After the war Tito was able to deftly transform the liberation struggle into the establishment of what could be called a dictatorship (and not one of the proletariat). Tito had the title of ‘President for life’ bestowed upon him, and therefore it would be hard not to criticise the totalitarian strategies underlying such a move – though perhaps it is true that Yugoslavia needed a strong hand to guide it through an increasingly complex world marked by the Cold War, through a non-aligned course between the two global superpowers. Yugoslavia had found its champion in the legendary freedom fighter Tito, whose presence was evoked in mythical terms on-screen when the international star Richard Burton portrayed him in the film Sutjeska.

It bears mentioning that Sutjeska was the first instance of Tito being portrayed by an actor on film – and this was in 1973, roughly 25 years after the development of the Yugoslav film industry (and a mere seven years before Tito’s death). Perhaps it is ironic that such a passionate film lover would not allow an actor to portray him on the silver screen – or perhaps the right actor just had not yet come along until Burton (though plenty of Hollywood and European film stars visited Yugoslavia during the golden years). Tito was then like a holy spirit in Yugoslav cinema, framed in pictures on walls everywhere, but whose likeness could not be rendered iconic in moving images, lest blasphemy be the charge. Indeed, there was only one other instance of Tito’s likeness being depicted in a film: Plastic Jesus (Lazar Stojanović, 1971). This film  of the Yugoslav Black Wave, directed by Lazar Stojanović, showed Tito in an ambivalent light through documentary footage of him in front of a microphone in a studio, preparing to address the nation, yet somehow looking confused and unsure of himself. The film was promptly confiscated and banned, Stojanović received a prison sentence, professors at the academy where the film was produced as a student thesis were removed or reassigned, and the entire Black Wave was disassembled and put down. Perhaps there was too much ‘realism’ present in these documentary images of Tito, and not enough Partisan.

It can also be no coincidence that here, as in other contexts, works of imagination are linked with transformative power. Before a new world can be built it must first be imagined. As Benedict Anderson (1991) noted in his pioneering book, nations are imagined communities – if so, Yugoslavia was perhaps the imagined community par excellence. Anderson wrote “[c]ommunities are to be distinguished…by the style in which they are imagined” ¹³. Therefore, the Partisan war film takes a central position within the transformation and construction of Socialist Yugoslavia, with Tito as the mythical force holding it all together. However, the Partisan war film seems more than a simple work of imagination when one assesses its ethical constructs. In this sense it becomes something like a hypnotic spell or a national dream, utilised by the powers at large so that the citizens of Yugoslavia would sleep peacefully knowing that the heritage of heroes past was protecting them.

—
Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Greg de Cuir, Jr. This article has been peer-reviewed.

As with any illegitimate children it is really difficult to reveal the ancestors of non-American westerns. We may consider them pedantic, and therefore not take into account Charles Ford’s explorations of early cinema, which unearthed films like Indian Banquet/ Repas d`Indien (1896, directed by Gabriel Veyre for the Lumière brothers), or the 1911 Joë Hamman’s cycle Arizona Bill ¹, proclaiming them to be ‘the first European or French westerns’. Acknowledging Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera “La fanciulla del West” as the first spaghetti western would be just as shocking ². However, it may be acceptable to consider La Vampira Indiana (1913) among the old roots of the spaghetti western, at least because it was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone ³. Further on, it is difficult to pinpoint the first western film in a certain country because we should previously decide if we are going to accept only the pastiches and not the parodies and local adaptations of the genre. Robert Hossein’s films The Taste of Violence/ Le goût de la violence (1961) and The Rope and the Colt/ Une corde, un Colt… (1969) and Luc Moullet’s A Girl is a Gun/ Une aventure de Billy le Kid (1971) can be regarded as first French “modern” westerns.

If we do not take into consideration all the adaptations whose plots take place elsewhere than in the United States, we have to ignore a lot of important films which are sometimes considered “local westerns”. Among them, we would find films like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), György Szomjas’  Goulash westerns from 1976- 1979, and lots of other films such as Captain Lechi (1960, Yugoslavia, d. Živorad ‘Žika’ Mitrović), Miles of Fire/ Ognennye versty/ Огненные версты (1958, USSR, d. Samson Samsonov), The White Sun of the Desert/ Beloe solntse pustyni/ Белое солнце пустыни (1970, USSR, d. Vladimir Motyl), At Home Among Strangers, Stranger at Home/ Svoy sredi chuzhikh, chuzhoy sredi svoikh/ Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих (1974, USSR, d. Nikita Mikhalkov), the Bulgarian films Manly Times/ Mazhki vremena/ Мъжки времена (1977, d. Eduard Sachariev) ⁴ and The Judge/ Sadyata/ Съдията (1986, d. Plamen Maslarov) ⁵, the Greek Blood on the Land/ To Homa vaftike kokkino/ Το χώμα βάφτηκε κόκκινο (1964, d. Vassilis Georgiadis) ⁶, as well as the Romanian cycle of films featuring the character Mărgelatu (1982- 1987, from The Yelow Rose/ Trandafirul galben to The Turquoise Collier/ Colierul de turcoaze).

If we limit our search to non-American westerns whose plots are located in Western America things get much easier. For example, with West or East German westerns it is easy, in both cases, to go back to the origins: Treasure of Silver Lake/ Der Schatz im Silbersee (directed by Harald Reinl, starring Pierre Brice and Lex Barker), produced in 1962, is the first West German western (although it is, in fact, a West German- Yugoslav- French co-production), while East Germany’s first film of the genre was the 1966 The Sons of Great Bear/ Die Söhne der großen Bärin, directed by Josef Mach, also a co-production (East German- Yugoslav). We can add that Treasure of Silver Lake was also the first western shot in Yugoslavia ⁷. Bulgaria was also a partner in such co-productions, both with West Germany (1965, Legacy of the Incas/ Das Vermächtnis des Inka, d. Georg Marischka, a film also co-produced by Spain and Italy), and with East Germany (1971, Osceola, d. Konrad Petzold, a production in which Cuba was also involved).

In Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia also delivers an early western parody in 1964 with Lemonade Joe/ Limonádový Joe aneb Konská opera (d. Oldrich Lipský, after Jirí Brdecka’s novel and play with the same title).

All of the westerns or related films made in the 60s mentioned above, along with a lot of other genuine American westerns, have been shown in Romanian movie theatres. We can even detect Sergio Leone’s influence on both the Transylvanians’ and the Mărgelatu cycles of Romanian western inspired films, even only because the main characters John Brad (played by Ovidiu- Iuliu Moldovan in the Transylvanians’ cycle), and Mărgelatu (played by Florin Piersic) have unshaven faces, undoubtedly reminding of Clint Eastwood in Leone’s films. However, without denying the influence of previous foreign productions, Romania’s foreign policy in the seventies might have actually played the decisive role in the birth of the three Romanian westerns made between 1979- 1982.

The Czech film Lemonade Joe had been a parody not only of the western genre, but also of multinational corporations and the Western way of life. Like other communist countries, Romania also made films whose plots were located in the West. Two such films were produced in the early sixties: A Bomb Was Stolen/ S-a furat o bombă (1961, d. Ion Popescu- Gopo), and The Famous 702/ Celebrul 702 (1962, d. Mihai Iacob). Both have plots which are typical for crime films, but there is also an ideological aspect, and both films can be also seen as satires of the West. However, this ideological war was quickly and almost entirely abandoned in Romania, at least in fiction films.

Beginning with 1965, even before turning into a tyrant, Nicolae Ceauşescu left his mark on Romanian society. In 1965, on the occasion of the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, he declared the end of socialist realism as the one and only artistic approach validated by the party, encouraging the exploration of the whole “diversity of styles”. Indeed, a short “thaw” followed, whose liberalism was beneficial for all forms of expression, including cinema ⁸. However, there was also a negative side to this strong personal influence Ceausescu had on all aspects of society, and this negative side finally prevailed. Although generally after 1968 Romanian culture enjoyed greater freedom, in cinema things were a bit more complicated. For instance, Ceauşescu loved the historical character Vlad ‘the Impaler’ so much, considering him a national hero, that he could never accept any horror parodies on Dracula. Not subjected to such restrictions, the Czech director Oldrich Lipský could turn Jules Verne’s novel Castle in the Carpathians into a charming horror parody with his film The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians/ Tajemství hradu v Karpatech (1983), while Romanian Stere Gulea, in his Castle in the Carpathians/ Castelul din Carpaţi (1981), could only turn it into a painfully flat political film. The only time Dracula was mentioned in a Romanian film in the 70s was in the documentary Dracula: Legend and Truth/ Dracula, legendă şi adevăr (1973, d. Ion Bostan), a film targeted at foreign tourists, which aimed only to explain the relationship between the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler and the legendary vampire Dracula. The only parody on Dracula accepted on the Romanian screens during communism was Oldrich Lipský’s film which subtly alludes to the legend.

As it is known, after his 1968 speech in favor of Czechoslovakia’s political right to self-determination, Nicolae Ceauşescu was no longer in good relations with Moscow and with some of its satellites. This was one of the reasons why he sought to approach the West, the USA, and Yugoslavia. He was the first communist leader to visit London and Washington, while Bucharest was the first communist capital visited by Charles de Gaulle and by American presidents. Richard Nixon visited Romania in 1969, and his successor, Gerald Ford, followed in 1975. In return, Ceauşescu also visited the United States twice, in 1971, and 1978 ⁹.

The three Romanian westerns The Prophet, the Gold and the Transylvanians (1979, d. Dan Piţa and Mircea Veroiu), The Actress, the Dollars and the Transylvanians (1981, d. Mircea Veroiu) and The Oil, the Baby and the Transylvanians (1982, d. Dan Piţa) are parodies and this is what makes them valuable, probably more than they would have been if they were serious westerns. Unlike with classical westerns, the main characters are not American and they do not intend to settle in America. It is the story of three brothers from Transylvania, the oldest and the youngest arriving in the USA, not as immigrants but in order to look for the middle one and bring him home. The historical circumstances are barely credible: the elder brother, having participated as a volunteer in the Romanian War of Independence of 1877 (although, as Romanians from Transylvania they would have been, at that time, subjects of the Austro- Hungarian Empire), he wants to bring his brother home believing that, now that Romania had become independent, their fate as Transylvanians would be more promising. Once in America, the brothers are reunited but they encounter various obstacles which prevent their return. First, there is gold and a Mormon leader, then oil, then the marriage of the youngest brother and the birth of a baby, a conflict with Hungarian neighbors (even in America!), fighting bandits, and finally, the eldest brother’s passion for an actress. All these will postpone their trip back to Europe during the first film, and also during its two sequels. Each of the three brothers has his own skills and character traits that help them survive and fight against the villains of the West: the elder brother with his mixture of native force, peasant wisdom and innocence, the youngest with the knowledge he’d earned from books, and the middle one with his riding and shooting skills he had acquired as a frontier man in America. Thus the Transylvanians solve America’s problems before getting a chance to solve their own back home! Even the episode of the quarrel and subsequent alliance with the Hungarians symbolize that the old Romanian- Hungarian feud is not irreconcilable.

Paradoxically, the three Romanian westerns resume the ideological war with the West in subtler way. To understand that we have to remember two other films made the same time: Aurel Vlaicu (1977, d. Mircea Drăgan) and Stefan Luchian (1983, d. Nicolae Mărgineanu). While the westerns deal with a Transylvanian peasant who looks for a better life in America, the films mentioned above are about two famous Romanians, an airplane builder and a painter who are lured for a while by Paris. So we may say it about immigration ¹⁰ and brain-drain, same as in the Yugoslav contemporary production The Secret of Nikola Tesla/ Tajna Nikole Tesle (1980, d. Krsto Papić) where the Serbian inventor is a victim both of Edison and J.P.Morgan, which might be true and that is why turned into a patriotic film. Such an interpretation may seem far-fetched with the westerns, but we must remember that it is not a case of immigration from Romania but from Transylvania under Austrian-Hungarian rule and the elder urges his brother to return home because “Our country Romania is free now”.

The scripts belong to Titus Popovici ¹¹, probably the greatest Romanian scriptwriter during communism, already specialized in epics and friend of director Sergiu Nicolaescu. The fact that he was a member of the central committee of the Romanian communist party is obviously quite an important detail. In spite of that, according to the documents regarding the production of The Prophet, the Gold and the Transylvanians kept by the Romanian Film Archive, Titus Popovici was advised to “underline the seriousness” of certain scenes and, because he didn’t quite stick to all the terms of the agreement, was finally fined with 10% from the value of his contract. The total value was of 140,000 lei which, at that time, was worth about 10,000 USD, or the price of two Dacia automobiles.

The three westerns present some unusual situations. First of all, they are about Romanians going to America and intending to come back. Even reconstructing the Far West using Romanian locations was unusual, although the 1968 Romanian- West German- French co-production The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/ Aventurile lui Tom Sawyer and its sequel The Death of Indian Joe/ Moartea lui Joe indianul (d. Mihai Iacob and Wolfgang Liebeneiner) were the first films made in Romania whose plot required an American western atmosphere. The French, German and Romanian cast tried to play Midwestern Americans living at the end of the 19th century, while the Danube played host to Tom Sawyer’s adventures, replacing the Mississippi.

During communism, Sergiu Nicolaescu was the first director who shot some scenes abroad, in Istanbul and Prague, for his epic The Last Crusade/ Michael the Brave/ Mihai Viteazul (1971). Nicolaescu was one of several Romanian filmmakers who have been involved in international co-productions, including westerns. Between 1968- 1988, Nicolaescu directed a film and two TV series of the western genre. They were screen adaptations of novels by Fenimore Cooper and Jack London: The Prairie/ La prairie (1968, France- Romania, co-directed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit), and the two series Leather Stocking Legend/ Die Lederstrumpferzählungen (1969, France- West Germany- Romania- Austria) and The Gold Rush/ Lockruf des Goldes (1975- 1988, Austria- West Germany- Romania- France, with Alecu Croitoru as co-director). Several Romanian actors were cast in westerns shot in Yugoslavia, such as Violeta Andrei ¹² who became Gojko Mitić’s partner and a prototype for the beautiful ‘squaw’ (the American native chieftain’s wife).

It is maybe a significant illustration of the ‘relative liberalism’ of the 1960s that “Romanian Folk Ballads”, a collection of folklore published in 1966, included an early 20th century ballad from Maramureş called “The Song of Immigration”/ “Cântecul emigrării”. The ballad tells about the adventures of Transylvanians travelling ilegally from Austro- Hungarian Transylvania to the harbor of Fiume (Rijeka) in order to embark on a boat for America. The ballad ends with the first impressions of the naive Transylvanian in New-York: “Arrived in America, guess what I saw then:/ Only black folks and Englishmen.” ¹³.  A similarly rare and amusing gem is the documentary film If I Were a Cowboy/ De-aş fi cowboy (1972) ¹⁴. Nicolae Cureliuc, a self-educated peasant from the village Mariţeia Mică, sends a letter to the magazine “Cinema” in which he asks whether cowboys still exist nowadays. Director Iancu Moscu tried to find an answer and made two trips to Mariţeia Mică, a village in North-Eastern Romania where the residents live mainly from livestock. He interviewed some naive youngsters and even screened The Miracle Rider/ Călăreţul misterios, a vintage western (1935) starring Tom Mix, at the local cinema. Iancu Moscu’s documentary shows the faces of the spectators while watching the film and alternates images of the Romanian village with scenes from the old film. Altough the documentary also shows images from the nearby modern silver exploitation at Leşu Ursului, much different from an early 20th century gold mine in the Wild West, the village itself ironically proves that life was still similar. Such ironical conclusion contradicted, in fact, the official propaganda of the times about communism having improved the village life. In 1972 Romanian villagers still used, as they still use today, horse-drawn carriages, still got drunk at the local bar and, while some rode motocycles, most still proudly wore their wide-brimmed hats.

It is important to consider some other facts about the period when the three ‘Transylvanian’ westerns were made, in order to better understand and assess the extent of their boldness. Four years before, the first Romanian western writer Nicolae Frânculescu ¹⁵ published his first western novel: “The Fangs of the Jackal”/ “Colţii şacalului” (1975). It was followed by “South of Rio Grande”/ “La Sud de Rio Grande” (1980). Both novels pretend to render the notes and adventures of Ştefan Şercanu, a Romanian who crossed the Wild West. In 1988, the first novel was turned into a comic strip by Sandu Florea (under the pseudonym Dorandu) ¹⁶.

In 1977, two years after Gerald Ford’s visit to Romania and one year before Ceauşescu’s second visit to the USA, the Romanian Academy published a first collection of studies on the history of Romanian- American relations: “The Image of the New World in the Romanian Principalities and Their First Relations before 1859” ¹⁷. In fact, Gerald Ford’s visit is mentioned in the foreword of this book. The most interesting fact is that the book offers a short biographical note about George Pomutz (1818- 1882), an American hero of Romanian origin. He was a general during the Secession War, and because of his knowledge of foreign languages (he knew no less than eight), he was later appointed general consul for the USA in Russia, where he was the one who bought Alaska for the US ¹⁸. Two years before the publishing of this first collection of studies on early contacts between Romanians and Americans, Val Tebeica published a book (also the first of its kind) on Romanian explorers ¹⁹. Although he wrote about several explorers such as Iuliu Popper, who went as far as Tierra del Fuego, or Samuilă Damian, a globe-trotter who met Benjamin Franklin, the author does not mention George Pomutz, whether because he did not know about him or he simply did not find his story relevant enough.

In order to render Romania’s efforts at that time to play the card of collaboration with the West and the USA, we should also mention that, in 1974, the Romanian air company TAROM inaugurated the first regular flights to New York, soon after Yugoslavian JAT and Aeroflot from USSR ²⁰. In 1976, to celebrate the USA bicentennial anniversary, the Romanian Navy exercise clipper “Mircea” visited several US harbors; in 1980, Bucharest hosted the 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences, and, in 1984, Romania and Yugoslavia were the only communist countries who attended the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Perhaps of less importance, but still relevant, is the fact that, in the late 70s and in the 80s, Bucharest had a cinema theatre specialized in screening mainly westerns. It was called “Luceafărul“ (The Morning Star), today “MediaPro Cinema Theatre”, and centrally located.

And, for the picture of that era to be complete, we should also mention that, when the three Romanian westerns were screened (1979- 1982), the times of “national communism” had already begun. Economically it was the beginning of a period of severe deprivation and shortage of consumer goods, after Ceauşescu had decided to urgently repay the country’s foreign debts through massive exports and a drastic reduction of imports. Thus, the number of genuine American westerns had already decreased, as did the overall number of foreign films released in Romania, while the number of Romanian feature films reached its peak: 30 films were made in 1980 ²¹. Maybe it is not only a coincidence that three of the people involved in making Romanian westerns left Romania soon after completing their works: director Mihai Iacob left Romania for USA in 1973 (where he also died in 2009), director Mircea Veroiu left for France in 1984 (but came back in 1996), while  cartoonist Sandu Florea also left for the USA in 1991.

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Frames # 4 11-19-2013. This article © Marian Tutui. This article has been peer-reviewed.

To discuss genre and New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) initially might seem like a counterintuitive comparison, as much of criticism surrounding NLAC emphasizes its resistance to the dominant forms of European and Hollywood cinema. However, viewed as a global genre, the western, like NLAC, creates dialogues across disparate regions through shared characteristics and meaning. To make this comparison also brings the importance of the politics of the western to the forefront, as NLAC is a deeply political film movement and the western genre is often used globally as a form of political critique. In this article, I will examine some examples of the western in NLAC, and the ways in which these films grapple with both the politics of their local state as well as that state’s position within the larger geopolitical order. In looking at the western in the Latin American context, I argue that the transculturation of the dominant genre renders it nearly unrecognizable when viewed through western analytical frameworks but, when examined within the tenets of NLAC, demonstrates the possibilities of drawing on genre for political ends.

Mary Louise Pratt borrows the term “transculturation” from Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who first used the term in the 1940s as an alternative to the reductive ideas of acculturation and deculturation when describing cultural transfers. ¹ While acculturation implies a move towards the dominant position, and thus away from a marginal one, Pratt uses transculturation to describe how “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.” ² The process of “selecting and inventing” from dominant cultures through transculturation clearly suggests the western’s continual relevance in different political and historical moments through the way it offers a dynamic model of borrowing and adapting genre. ³ In Latin America, the western functions as a way to address the power and wealth disparities brought about by what was then commonly referred to in Latin America as American neo-imperialism. At the same time, however, we might question whether or not the western can even be relevant in the Latin American context: if it is traditionally a genre about conquest and the imperialist drive, can it be made to speak for the oppressed, for those impacted by conquest and imperialism? And, perhaps more importantly, can we think about the western in Latin America without treating it as a marginal variant of the Hollywood western? First, the western in Latin America provides an important case study for thinking about how the western must be considered without the constraints of of the US as an origin. But even beyond questions of origin, the western is both a political and popular form, and its use in Latin America reveals the way its popular appeal is crucial to its use in local political frameworks.

But what does it mean to talk about the western as “popular” and “political?” As I will discuss in more detail later, “popular” is defined in two ways: first, as popular film meant to entertain and distract the masses (and in this sense, seen more negatively in NLAC), and, second, as popular for the people in the revolutionary sense, which is a positive definition. This second definition can be aligned with the political aspect of NLAC, but the first definition, which is where the western would typically be placed, is seen as being at odds with the ideas of NLAC, particularly Third Cinema frameworks. This article will examine these terms through an analysis of two films, Glauber Rocha’s 1968 film Antonio das Mortes and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo from 1970, in order to argue that the global western utilizes the popular appeal of the genre in conversation with critical political frameworks to encourage viewer engagement.

Genre and Third Cinema: The Politics of Antonio das Mortes

Third Cinema and the western seem initially to be at odds: the western traditionally hailed as a popular genre while Third Cinema is constructed in opposition to dominant systems, particularly Hollywood, in order to reclaim film’s revolutionary potential. The term comes from Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s essay “Towards a Third Cinema,” first published in 1969. Solanas and Getino define first cinema as Hollywood – films that use dominant cultural forms to promote and enforce capitalist systems and values to passive spectators – and second cinema as European or ‘art cinema,’ where the emphasis is on auteurs and aesthetics, rather than politics. Third Cinema, on the other hand, rejects the practices of these two cinemas in terms of both production and consumption: films are not the artistic vision of the director or made as part of a bourgeoise studio system, and they are screened outside traditional viewing spaces in order to provide a “risk” for viewers that seek them out. Solanas and Getino argue it is

the cinema that recognises in that [anti-imperialist] struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point – in a word, the decolonization of culture. ⁴

This need for the “decolonization of culture” comes from what Solanas and Getino identify as an imposed dependence on the mass culture of neocolonialism, which seeks to promote and disseminate bourgeoise values to the oppressed in order to further imperialist expansion. To fight this expansion, Third Cinema seeks to become emancipated from the binary of “their” and “our,” which means developing a cinema that cannot be incorporated into the dominant cinema. At the same time, what I am arguing here is that the process of transculturation allows Third Cinema to utilize the western genre (from first and second cinemas) for revolutionary purposes.

Third Cinema, more broadly, coalesces around questioning and resisting dominant power structures enacted through colonialism. Film becomes not only a revolutionary act, but also opens a dialogue to challenge viewers in considering oppression in all forms, as well as ideas of community and nation. These key interests, in oppression, colonialism, and nation, are also central to the western, but usually imagined in very different ways. So can the two be reconciled? The western, as a genre often recognized for celebrating colonial advancement and capitalist nationalism, might seem antithetical to ideas of Third Cinema, but by re-positioning it within those critical frameworks rather than conventional, comparative, western readings, I will argue that the genre can be aligned with the project of Third Cinema.

Released in 1969, Antonio das Mortes (original title O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro or The Dragon of Evil Against the Warrior Saint) received attention both in and out of Brazil. Following the domestic and international success of Barreto Lima’s 1953 “nordestern” O Cancageiro, it was clear there was an audience for genre films and Rocha built on this interest to develop his own use of the cangaceiro story. Commonly associated with Cinema Novo – a Brazilian movement influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave and aligned with Rocha’s “esthetic of hunger” – Antonio das Mortes follows Rocha’s previous film Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1966), where the titular character appears as well. The events of Antonio das Mortes pick up after Antonio has killed Corisco, “the last cangaceiro ⁵” at the end of Deus e o Diabo na Terra do So, and he has become overwhelmed by guilt surrounding his actions. However, when the “Colonel,” a powerful corrupt landlord, sends Dr. Matos (his right-hand man) to hire Antonio to kill Coirana, another cangaceiro, he accepts the assignment without pay. Believing he had already annihilated the cangaceiros from the area, Antonio goes to kill Coirana largely out of a twisted sense of duty. During his fight with Coirana, Antonio inflicts a fatal wound, and ends up taking Coirana to die amongst his followers in the mountains. However, when Coirana’s followers are subsequently massacred, Antonio is forced back into action against Mata Vaca, who was hired by the Colonel after Antonio to eliminate all possible rebels from the area. After a few more twists and turns, Antonio teams up with an alcoholic professor to fight the Colonel and Mata Vaca’s men in a final shoot-out heavily reminiscent of spaghetti westerns.

This fairly straightforward description of the narrative ignores much of the often surreal elements and it is worth noting that Antonio das Mortes is often read, particularly by western critics, without acknowledging this aspect of the film or simply by expressing bewilderment at its appearance. For example, Ernest Callenbach compares the film to Michael Curtiz’s 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, focusing on the use of folk myth in both films to argue that Antonio das Mortes is, essentially, a conservative film. ⁶ Thomas M. Kavanagh, on the other hand, takes approaches such as Callenbach’s to task for forcing the film into a western critical framework, and claiming ignorance in regards to anything else. For Kavanagh, Callenbach’s attempt at “objectivity” becomes a form of cultural imperialism, which fails to consider the film as anything but “radically other.” ⁷ The issue with this, for Kavanagh, is that once a film is labeled as “revolutionary,” then the primary focus for reading the film is always in terms of the “adequacy” of its revolutionary representation on a universal level. ⁸ This move to the universal is dangerous in both its potential for homogenization as well misreading the film entirely.

To support his reading, Kavanagh turns to Rocha’s statements on the film in order to show the impossibility of separating the film from its historical and cultural contexts. For Rocha, “The mysticism of my film is a part of everyday reality, a part of the people in the northeast of Brazil whose everyday realities, whose everyday way of life, is involved in mysticism…” ⁹ Kavanagh thus argues that the folklore Rocha draws on in the film, ranging from the use of St. George to the mysticism he refers to here, is not antithetical to its revolutionary purposes, as Callenbach claims, but rather a way of accessing the social reality of the people, drawing the film in line with Third Cinema. So in Antonio das Mortes, the violence becomes a way of connecting the mysticism entrenched in everyday reality to politics, as well as the crucial connection between the western genre and Third Cinema.

The cangaceiro figure provides a clear example of this relationship through connecting folklore to politics through violent action. Throughout history, rural populations in northeastern Brazil faced violence perpetrated by large landowners and the police. The cangaceiros were the figures who rose up against these violent forces of colonialism/neocolonialism, and in Antonio das Mortes, the cangaceiro is treated as both a mythical figure as well as a revolutionary force responding through violence to the hunger and repression they suffer at the hands of the landowners, such as the Colonel. The violent relationship between the cangaceiros and the landowners then provides a way of thinking about representation (critique) of government that the film provides through its use of the western genre. In Latin American westerns, the critique of the state is directed at a government that cannot be addressed, often because of strict censorship.

What is important about reading Antonio das Mortes as a western is the way that Rocha destabilizes generic tropes through adapting them to the Brazilian context. Here, the critical absence of the state creates a dialectical violence, as Terence Carlson argues, where “death involves every character” and there is little resolution from the bloodshed. ¹⁰ In this case, then, the opposition between the western as a popular genre and its use in Third Cinema frameworks goes beyond simply critiquing the state directly – an impossible project anyway because of censorship – and instead focuses on local elements from folklore and Brazilian history to develop its political project.

One of the key ideas of Third Cinema is that of a collective – a collective filmmaking process, films made for a collective people, and narratives that promote a collective, rather than individual ‘hero.’ For Jorge Sanjinés, “revolutionary cinema cannot be anything but collective in its most complete phase, since the revolution is collective.” ¹¹ The individual story is only meaningful, then, if it has meaning for the collective, and this focus on the collective results in changes in form and content. This emphasis is in stark contrast to the view of community and the hero often associated with the western, which is one way that Antonio das Mortes offers a departure from the genre. In this case, the subject is constituted differently than Western ideas of the individual/hero. As Teshome Gabriel argues, in Third Cinema, there is an “emphasis on collective social space rather than on transcendental individual space,” which helps differentiate the journey of Antonio das Mortes from that of a typical western hero. ¹² This idea of the collective plays out on several levels in the film, beginning with the narrative, which moves amongst characters and groups and often fragments between elements of history, politics, and genre.

This is illustrated at the very beginning of the film, when the visual of Saint Jorge appears as a backdrop during the opening titles. The image is fragmented into three parts, which draws the eye away from the singular act of killing the dragon and emphasizes the explanation of what will become the main “characters” of the film: the cangaceiro, colonel (landowners), beatos (peasant communities), jagunço (mercenary, or hired killer), and Sante (Santa), the spiritual leader of the community. The film then cuts to an empty landscape, which is first entered and exited by Antonio, firing his gun, and then his victim, a cangaceiro. While the opening seems almost medieval, the first scene is very much a western: the dusty landscape, the lone gunman, the hat and duster Antonio is wearing, and the drawn out death of the cangaceiro. However, the next cut reveals the Professor lecturing his young students on Brazilian history, including the year of the country’s independence. The static camera avoids drawing attention to Rocha’s directing, and the fairly short scenes (the whole introduction takes less than four minutes) move from one context to the next too quickly for a first-time viewer to even identify Antonio. These three early moments serve to establish the context for the film in terms of history, genre, and politics.

In Antonio das Mortes, the violence of the western is used not to pacify viewers through simple spectacle, but rather, is drawn along the lines of class struggle through the cangaceiro/landowner conflict. In this way, the film connects with Rocha’s “esthetic of hunger” through its use of violence to emphasize the repression of the people (who are shown to be Coirana’s followers) and their need for someone to fight on their behalf. This reading of violence in response to power dynamics might not be unfamiliar to the western genre, but the film destabilizes comparative readings in the way Rocha aligns the his use of the genre with Third Cinema and Brazilian history. The generic characters of the western here are filtered through Brazilian folklore and placed in a narrative that visually and thematically plays with genre in a way that demands active spectatorship. To read the film alongside dominant conceptions of the western, de-emphasizes these specifically local (political) elements but reading the film through Third Cinema offers a way to recover the revolutionary potential of the western in a global context.

Revolutionizing the popular in El Topo

In turning to El Topo (1970), I would like to continue to examine the revolutionary potential of the western through the localized frameworks of NLAC, by returning to discussing the “popular” and “political.” Julio García Espinosa, in writing about “imperfect cinema,” and Solanas, and Getino argue that the hegemony of Hollywood products establishes a passivity in the viewer, increasing their acceptance of the dominant, often (neo)colonial cultural narratives. Without alternatives, such as the films of Third Cinema, that open spaces for resistance and questioning, the cycle of distribution and consumption continues unchecked. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea offers a way in for considering the popular in terms of this framework, as he believes that cinema can be both. In “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” Gutiérrez Alea argues that film:

…should contribute in the most effective way possible to elevating viewer’s revolutionary consciousness and to arming them for the ideological struggle which they have to wage against all kinds of reactionary tendencies and it should also contribute to their enjoyment of life.

Gutiérrez Alea contends that film can be both entertaining and serve to raise the revolutionary consciousness of the viewer; this relationship between “show” and “spectator” is the viewer’s dialectic. Through this relationship, Gutiérrez Alea offers a consideration of both the capitalist underpinnings of popular film and its effects on the viewer.

Gutiérrez Alea first distinguishes between “popular” film and “people’s films,” where popular films are made to appease and entertain the masses rather than transform their consciousness – which is the goal of people’s films. Film became popular through its bourgeoisie origins, Gutiérrez Alea argues, because it was a form of entertainment that could “attract a heterogeneous public, the majority, avid for illusions.” ¹⁴ In this way, film was popular not as “an expression of the people” but for its appeal to the masses as distracting spectacle, turning them away from the harsh realities of everyday life. Gutiérrez Alea is particularly critical of genres in this respect, which he associates strongly with Hollywood:

[Genres] became empty stereotypes. They were the most effective expression of a culture of the masses as a function of passive consumers, of contemplating and heartbroken spectators, while reality demands action from them, and at the same time, eliminates all possibilities for that action.

These bourgeoise conventions work to condition people to the interests of capitalism, to situate them as consumers, but also create a cinema that is more appealing to the masses than what Gutiérrez Alea defines as the “people’s” cinema. Gutiérrez Alea points to the trouble with using terms like popular with an inability to define “the masses” – that is, he argues that in order to understand how to appeal to the masses, we need to identify “that which best suits their most vital interests.” ¹⁶ To appeal to the people, then, it is important to define them beyond broad groupings – to pay attention to the context of geography, history, and class. (In this way, Gutiérrez Alea’s approach to defining the popular echoes my own approach for defining the western genre.)

Following this, Gutiérrez Alea claims that popular cinema can be made revolutionary if it can respond to not only short-term needs (for entertainment and distraction) but also larger objectives: “transforming reality and bettering humankind.”17 Ideally, this change would happen in terms of the state: popular cinema can become “people’s” cinema only when through the transition to a socialist society. However, Gutiérrez Alea also believes that popular cinema can achieve this potential through creating a shift in the viewer from passive to active spectatorship. This is done by developing “open” films, where viewers are forced into active spectatorship through a lack of “happy endings” or clear solutions. For Gutiérrez Alea, films should show enough of the issues of viewers current social reality to illuminate the need for change, but not offer neat explanations or potential answers in order to instigate post-film participation in change. The most important aspect of making this change, however, comes from rethinking spectators within their historical and social contexts:

We must not forget that, in practice, spectators cannot be considered abstractions, but, rather, people who are historically and socially conditioned, in this way, the show must address itself first of all to concrete spectators to whom it must unfold its operative potential to the fullest.

In order to make popular films that are also political, and revolutionary, the “people” must be considered in terms of instigating action by appealing to the specific social and historical contexts.

This framework provides a way to look at El Topo. The heavily surrealist film, which plays with the western genre significantly, especially in its first half, has been the recipient of mixed reviews – usually falling into one of two lines of thinking, summarized by Roger Ebert in his 1972 review:

El Topo is a movie it’s very hard to be sure about after a single viewing. It weaves a web about you, and you’re left with two impulses. One is to accept it on its own terms, as a complex fantasy that uses violence as the most convenient cinematic shorthand for human power relationships. The other is to reject it as the work of a cynic, who is simply supplying more jolts and shocks per minute than most filmmakers.

To reject the film completely, however, seems to ignore both its roots in the Panic Movement and the potential for reclaiming the film as a revolutionary western through its insistence on active spectatorship through the use of surrealism. The Panic Movement, formed by Jodorowsky with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Torpor in Paris during 1962, sought to go beyond what they saw as a confined view of surrealism to provide a kind of release through shock and ultimately propel viewers, who were more like participants in the “happenings,” towards positivity and peace. In light of this, the violence of El Topo, in its over the top surrealist presentation, might be re-read as a seeking to incite a desire for change in the viewer through feelings of frustration.

The violence of El Topo is an important place to begin any reading of the film: it is the most intense and provocative aspect. Whereas Rocha utilized violence as part of the “esthetic of hunger” to show the need for change at a fundamental level, Jodorowsky uses surrealism to shock viewers into active participation. Robert Neustadt argues that the body of his work coalesces around ideas of “place” and “identity,” and when read through the lens of postmodernism, Jodorowsky “repeatedly reconstructs narrative quests for an origin.” ¹⁹ However, ultimately, the epiphanies Jodorowsky illuminates are revealed as ironic and the quest itself becomes so fragmented that it is clear there is no origin to be found. Despite the constant fragmentation and heavy irony, the film ultimately uses the western genre as a way to actively engage the viewer through its constant subversion.

This is revealed in the narrative structure of El Topo, which focuses during the first half on the titular character’s quest to defeat the Four Masters to become the greatest gun master in the land. Of course, upon killing all four masters, El Topo is shot and left for dead by his female companions, ironically emphasizing that he has not, in fact, become the ultimate gun master. The film also uses this moment as a kind of break before shifting to the second half of the film, which follows El Topo trying to free the deformed outcasts who saved his life from the caves they are trapped in, while also battling a group of depraved religious fanatics in the nearby village. This half also reintroduces El Topo’s son, abandoned at the beginning of the film, as an adult performing his own “quest for origin” by finding and threatening to kill his father. To try and describe the film narratively, however, ignores the fragmentation that subverts linearity at every turn. This fragmentation is crucial to the way the film, like Antonio das Mortes, demands constant spectator engagement.

In looking at Jodorowsky’s work, Neustadt contends that he maintains a “dialectical relationship with industrial culture,” where Jodorowsky is both aware of, and utilizing, techniques of the very mainstream he is also critiquing. ²⁰ El Topo uses the popular genre of the western as a departure point for the film. What I mean by this is that the use of the western implies a certain level of repetition and familiarity with genre codes: Jodorowsky is fully conscious of his use of the western – it is not randomly included. He is also blatantly playing with these genre codes and superficially subverting them at every turn. However, this surrealist use of the western actually demonstrates the genre’s revolutionary potential, by both continually engaging the viewer in active spectatorship and critiquing the view of genre as a “distracting spectacle.” The difficulty of El Topo, and perhaps why it has divided critics, lies perhaps partially in Jodorowsky’s often frustrating non-linearity, but more prominently in the fact that the film is rooted in genre only to subvert viewing expectations. This subversion, however, serves to encourage active viewership, as the surrealism in the film critiques dominant film codes.

El Topo develops political potential through identifying a particular audience, to return to Gutiérrez Alea. For example, the second half of the film deals with the totalitarianism of Mexican politics: the ubiquity of the Revolutionary Institutional Party’s (PRI) “el tricolor” is echoed in the cultist logos plastered on everything (and everyone) in the village. While the name of the party changed multiple times, some version of the PRI held power in Mexico for over 70 years, drawing on the rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution while controlling the state through corruption and electoral fraud. When villagers are rounded up, branded, ridden as horses, and shot in the streets by the city marshal, it is difficult not to connect the film to governmental violence such as the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968. But to make these connections requires a specific audience: the spectator needs to have an awareness of Mexican politics. However, that raises a second possibility, through the use of surrealism: the film almost requires the viewer to apply their specific knowledge and experience to the images and narrative. So, a Western viewer might make the connection between totalitarianism in general and the village cultists, but the surrealism requires an active spectator in order to create meaning. In this way, El Topo uses the popular genre of the western not as a distracting spectacle, as Gutiérrez Alea criticizes, but as a way of forcing active spectatorship from one (or many, due to the openness of surrealism) audiences.

Conclusion

While too close a comparison of El Topo and Antonio das Mortes might undermine the specificity I’m arguing for in terms of critical frameworks, I would like to briefly emphasize some of the connections in thinking about these films more broadly as part of the NLAC. In terms of production, both films were made independent of national industries controlled by repressive regimes. Both films also came out of specific critical traditions that emphasized the creation of counter narratives and active spectatorship to encourage revolution.

In the case of Antonio das Mortes, this is reflected thematically in the way the film uses the western to challenge the dominant generic tropes of the Hollywood western and the hegemony of the American narrative. For example, the binary of civilization and the wild, inhabited by savages, is commonly used in Hollywood westerns to emphasize the narrative of progress and the necessity of manifest destiny as people move across the frontier. In Antonio das Mortes, however, this idea of modern progress is challenged throughout the film but most specifically at the end, as Antonio is shown walking along a highway filled with trucks. The sudden intrusion of the modern world in the narrative is jarring, and sets up the emergence of a new conflict: “Antonio versus the enormous foreign corporate dragons.” ²¹ We have seen Antonio make a political conversion, of sorts, throughout the film as he seems to join the side of the “old” – the cangaceiros and the spirituality of Santa – and so the shot of him walking on the highway at the end visually puts him at odds with modern progress. He can create change on a local level, but is still powerless in the face of global capitalism. In terms of the western, this opposition destabilizes the generic satisfaction of the final shootout (where the ‘villains’ met their end by Antonio’s gun) by implying that the bloodshed has not, in fact, created a new “order” through the survival of the Santa and Antão, but instead created more conflict as the “old” will now face the “new” in the form of modernity. Civilization and progress are not the answer, it seems, but the “savage” (aligned here with the old) isn’t necessarily represented more favorably. Antonio, then, becomes a kind of hero for his in-betweenness and a new, liberated, space is created that runs counter to binaries of civilization and the wild promoted in dominant forms of the western.

In El Topo, as well, the binaries of civilization and the wild are subverted throughout the film. From the very beginning, the ridiculousness of El Topo riding into the frame with a sun umbrella (clearly an ironic nod to stereotypes of being “civilized”) is juxtaposed with the vast, empty desert space, of which El Topo is clearly a comfortable occupant. And when the film moves to the village in the second half, the “wild” becomes the camp of dwarves, which is repeatedly shown to be more civilized than the zealot villagers. For example, the religious elements of the two camps are both tinged with surrealism, seen in the rebirth ceremony performed by the old woman for El Topo and the deadly game of Russian roulette played in the cultist church. However, the scene in the church ends with the death of a young boy, while El Topo is, at least physically, transformed when he leaves the cave – shorn of his bushy hair and beard, he has visually been reborn after his twenty year “death” after being shot. The villagers, on the other hand, despite being dressed in fine clothes and looking the part of “civilized,” are connected with a savage violence – first in the street shooting, then while casually watching two men fight to the death, before entering the church and passing around a loaded gun with the same fervor as a religious relic. Jodorowsky undermines these binaries of civilization and the wild through surrealism, but the result is comparative to Rocha’s in that the ending is ultimately left open to encourage viewer engagement.

The rejection and subversion of genre tropes here is also a result of Brechtian distanciation, something we see in both Antonio das Mortes and El Topo. By challenging viewer expectations – narratively, generically, and visually – the films prevent viewers from mindless identification and absorption. In both cases, this estrangement is meant for political effect: in El Topo, to comment on totalitarianism in Mexico, and in Antonio das Mortes, to encourage revolutionary thinking in Brazil. However, the films use different methods to achieve distanciation, each retreating from mainstream codes and conventions towards mythology, for Rocha, and allegory, for Jodorowsky. Through distanciation, and rejection of mainstream generic codes, the political motivations of Rocha and Jodorowsky are developed in the critical use of the western. By seeking to change the relationship between the viewer and genre, these films demonstrate that the western takes on a particular political coloration in the way these filmmakers draw on genre within their respective critical frameworks.

At the beginning of this article, I raised the question of whether or not the western had been reframed as a political genre in Latin America, speaking against the colonial tendencies typically associated with the genre. Can the western, a genre about conquest, be made by (and for) the subjects of neocolonialism? And, if so, are they still westerns? One of the issues with answering this question, which has been raised by Callenbach’s analysis of Antonio das Mortes, is that using the popular genre of the western could lead to these films ultimately end up taking on the ideologies they set out to critique. Stanley Corkin, in his analysis of Cold War westerns, argues that films drawing on the western run the risk of being “recontained by its dominant conservative ideologies,” even if the filmmaker intends otherwise. ²² However, Corkin’s argument rests on the assumption that the western is, first, a conservative genre, which vastly oversimplifies the Hollywood form and ignores the wealth of films and scholarship that complicate these basic, and derivative, formulations. Second, Corkin’s dismissal assumes that the western is American – that is, that the genre can never not represent an American origin, no matter where it is used.

This is where an alternative history of the western, one which considers its global origins, offers a different way of answering this question. If the American western is considered just one (dominant) form of a global popular genre, then it is possible to rethink these Latin American westerns as an(other) western without marginalizing them in relation to American ideology. Kavanagh, writing about Rocha, argues for just this in regards to Western readings of Latin American films:

Once again, I would say that we have first to learn an objectivity: to allow this other to exist as other and likewise to resist the basically imperialist desire to anathematize it as but a deviant and inadequate variant of the same.

We can see this tendency in readings such as Callenbach’s, which focus only on the comparison to Hollywood, and thus reclaim Rocha’s work as falling into line with what he argues are conservative (Western) ideologies. This also crops up in some critics responses to the mysticism of Antonio das Mortes and the surrealism of El Topo: if it can’t be neatly categorized or explained, then it becomes problematic. However, the real issue with these kinds of readings is that they return again and again to comparison as an act of reclaiming these global westerns as simply “variants” of the American form.

Instead, what these Latin American westerns reveal is the importance of allowing generic frameworks to be adjusted for the specific historical and political contexts where they appear. Reading Antonio das Mortes in comparison to the themes of the Hollywood western, for example, leads only to points of difference, whereas reading the film in the Third Cinema framework it was made under demonstrates that the use of the western is, in fact, not about providing a critique of America but instead a move towards appealing to the audiences in order to incite collective action. In El Topo, the use of the popular genre works to subvert the viewing experience and this subversion, demanding an active viewing experience, becomes the political statement. This demonstrates the importance of reframing these films within a global context, where the western is a popular global genre, rather than an American one.

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Frames # 4 1-12-2013. This article © Chelsea Wessels. This article has been peer-reviewed.