The Western in the Global South 1138843121, 9781138843127

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface: "Coming back to bad it up": The Posthumous and the Post-Western
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Western in the Global South
PART I: Colonial Circulations of the Western in the Global South
1 The Western in Colonial Southern Africa
2 Cassava Westerns: Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa
3 The Italian (Southern) Western: From Colonial Cinema to Spaghetti Western
4 From Django to Django Unchained – Love Narratives in the Global South
PART II: The Western in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean
5 In the Crossfire: Africa, Cinema, and violence in Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako (2006)
6 Trashing the Western's Revenge Narrative in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt
7 Cowboys and West Indians: Decolonizing the Western and Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come
PART III: The Western in Australia and Asia
8 Aboriginal Cowboys? On the Possibilities of the Western in Australia's Far West
9 Tears of the Black Tiger: The Western and Thai Cinema
10 Tamil B Movie Westerns: The Global South and Genre Subversion
PART IV: South American, Mexican and Borderlands Westerns
11 An 'Imperfect' Genre: Rethinking Politics in Latin American Westerns
12 Landscaping the Western: Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys (2009)
13 Carlos Bolado's Bajo California: Crossing Borders and Dislocating the Western Tradition
14 Disinterring the Western in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Western in the Global South

“With its illuminating focus on the Western as a malleable space of ­cultural blending that has traversed national and political boundaries, The ­Western in the Global South offers scholars of this genre and of ­transnational ­cinemas more broadly valuable material for historical research. By ­decentring the Western’s well-worn tropes from their supposed roots in U.S. culture and positioning multifarious strands of the Western within a polycentric c­ ultural landscape, it offers a collection of fascinating case studies by analyzing specific cultural-political moments on their own terms.” —Austin Fisher, U ­ niversity of Bedfordshire, U.K.

The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre’s impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. ­Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization, and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural-studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender-studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. reappropriations of the ­Western genre. MaryEllen Higgins is Associate Professor of English and Comparative ­Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny, U.S. Her books include Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (2012) and The Historical Dictionary of French Cinema (co-authored with Dayna Oscherwitz, 2007). Rita Keresztesi  is Associate Professor of English at the University of ­Oklahoma, U.S. She is the author of Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (2005). Dayna Oscherwitz is Associate Professor of French and Francophone ­Studies at Southern Methodist University, U.S. She is co-author, with MaryEllen Higgins, of The Historical Dictionary of French Cinema (2007) and author of Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-colonial Heritage (2010).

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The Western in the Global South

Edited by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The western in the global south / edited by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz. p. cm. — (Routledge advances in film studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Western films—History and criticism. I. Higgins, MaryEllen, 1967- editor. II. Keresztesi, Rita, editor. III. Oscherwitz, Dayna, 1970- editor. PN1995.9.W4W36 2015 791.43'65878—dc23 2014046525 ISBN: 978-1-138-84312-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73113-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to our families. For Marga and Joan, and for Scott and Deb. For Miklós Keresztesi, Jacob Aronson and Deniz Çil. For Brian, Evan, and Emma. With much love.

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Contents

List of Figures Preface: “Coming back to bad it up”: The Posthumous and the Post-Western

xi xiii

N eil Campbell

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Western in the Global South

xxi 1

M aryE llen H iggins, Rita Keresztesi , and Dayna O scherwitz

Part I Colonial Circulations of the Western in the Global South   1 The Western in Colonial Southern Africa

11

J ames B urns

  2 Cassava Westerns: Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa

24

Tsitsi J aji

  3 The Italian (Southern) Western: From Colonial Cinema to Spaghetti Western

42

G iovanna Trento

 4 From Django to Django Unchained – Love Narratives in the Global South

60

C lifford T. Manlove

Part II The Western in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean   5 In the Crossfire: Africa, Cinema, and Violence in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) Dayna O scherwitz

81

x Contents   6 Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt

96

M ary E llen Higgins

  7 Cowboys and West Indians: Decolonizing the Western and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come

110

R ita K eresztesi

Part III The Western in Australia and Asia   8 Aboriginal Cowboys? On the Possibilities of the Western in Australia’s Far West

129

A ndrew W. Hurley

 9 Tears of the Black Tiger : The Western and Thai Cinema

149

J esus J imenez- Varea and Milagros E xpó sito-Barea

10 Tamil B Movie Westerns: The Global South and Genre Subversion

165

S warnavel E swaran P illai

Part IV South American, Mexican and Borderlands Westerns 11 An ‘Imperfect’ Genre: Rethinking Politics in Latin American Westerns183 C helsea W essels

12 Landscaping the Western: Ciro Guerra’s The Wind Journeys (2009)198 Carlos G . Torres- Rodríguez

13 Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California: Crossing Borders and Dislocating the Western Tradition

213

Carolina Rueda

14 Disinterring the Western in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men

233

B rent S trang

Contributors Index

253 257

List of Figures

  2.1 Black Cooper (Y. Ibrahim) practices drawing a gun in Le retour de l’aventurier (1966), dir. Moustapha Alassane 32   4.1 Django and Maria embrace, merging in the mise-en-scène.65   4.2 Maria’s psychic state in the mirror is a graphic match for Django’s (Figure 4.3) 66   4.3 Django’s psychic state in the painting is a graphic match for Maria’s (Figure 4.2) 66   5.1 Cowboy 1 (Jean-Henri Roger) directs Cowboy 2 (Ferdinand Batsimba) to shoot a teacher in the name of “efficiency.” 87   5.2 The lone avenger (Danny Glover) takes on the Group of Five 91   6.1 Atim’s (Ali Barkai) stance recalls Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.98   6.2 The patriarch’s (Khayar Oumar Defallah) assessment of ­masculinity in Daratt.100   7.1 “Didn’t I tell you I’ll be famous one day?” 123 10.1 Cowboy Velu arrives at the stone quarry 177 to surrender during the climax. 12.1 The land’s dryness frames Ignacio’s initial departure and gives the viewer an image of death as a pictorial symbol and as an interdependent 199 companion to his journey. 12.2 Ignacio and Fermín blend in with the vast landscape and look like two minute dots that form part of it. 201 12.3 The Indian is the possessor of a cosmic order in a space constructed harmoniously with the melancholic eco of the silent landscape that Ignacio 204 deeply respects. 12.4 Rather than carrying pistols and holsters, Ignacio carries an accordion as an instrument 206 that accompanies physical duels.

xii  List of Figures 13.1 This spiral made of seashells is Damián’s second sculpture on the seashore. 13.2 A series of silent and immobile women appear in the ­background as Damián converses. 13.3 A man’s face breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the viewer in an indigenous language. 13.4 Damián returns home while the colors of the Baja California desert and mountains are intensified at sunset. 14.1 Pete fills Melquiades’s corpse with a jug of anti-freeze to stave off its decomposition. 14.2 An INS Official drills Llewelyn, who tries to re-enter the U.S. with no pants on.

218 221 224 227 236 245

Preface “Coming back to bad it up”: The Posthumous and the Post-Western Neil Campbell

In 1998 Jim Kitses opened The Western Reader with a single, bold statement: “Someone is always trying to bury the Western”, continuing to claim that if all these proclamations of the death of the Western had headstones, they would “overflow even Tombstone’s cemetery” (in Kitses and Rickman 1998, 15). As I write this Preface to The Western in the Global South, I am struck, once again, by the current interest in the Western genre, not in its apparently pure form typified by what is referred to as the ­“classic ­Hollywood Western”, but as a more oblique, referential manifestation that we might term the post-Western (see Campbell, 2008, 2013). I have in mind the recent films The Rover (Directed by David Michod, 2014) and ­Mystery Road (Directed by Ivan Sen, 2014) both coming out of ­Australia and utilising tropes and milieus derived from classic Westerns, whilst never simply repeating them, but instead adapting them for new cultural, political and social commentaries. This current resurgence of interest in the ­Western reconceived, is the latest example of what this collection of essays as a whole proves more systematically and by drawing on multiple instances from five continents, that Westerns survive and “live-on”, travelling across generic boundaries, poaching and borrowing from many different earlier traditions, whilst contributing to the continued innovation of the genre as tool of political comment and critique. Quite simply, the dead genre refuses to remain dead and its last rites are premature, for the Western is constantly ­“resuscitated”, as Vera Dika points out, “arising, occurring, or continuing after death” (Dika 2003, 215). It consequently remains a flexible genre returning and haunting global cultures in multiple forms. In thinking of such cinematic works as post-Westerns we can invoke the deliberate echoes from many relevant traditions of thought and criticism that have invested in the connotations of the prefix “post”. Central to this is the poetic echo conjured by the haunting presence of the classic Western itself, endlessly transfigured posthumously (after its pronounced critical death) through the cinemas of the Global South who put it to work again, referring both backwards and forwards, so that its structures, themes, tropes, and assumptions become reflected upon and, potentially, critiqued and transformed through subtle acts of translation and reconfiguration. Of course, the use of “post” in terms of the Global

xiv  Neil Campbell South cannot be separated from a consideration of postcolonialism, and it is in this context that Stuart Hall’s discussion of the term, responding to Ella Shohat, is particularly helpful. Hall argues that the word “post” signals both the “closure of a certain historical event or age” and a “going beyond … [and] commenting upon a certain intellectual movement” (Hall 1996, 253). His point is that Shohat’s view of the ­“post-­colonial” attempts to be “both epistemic and chronological” thereby making it different from other “posts”, whereas he prefers to view it as part of a process: as “not only ‘after’ but “going beyond” the colonial, as post-modernism is both “going beyond” and “after” modernism, and post-structuralism both follows chronologically and achieves its theoretical gains “on the back of structuralism” (Hall 1996, 253). To adapt the phrasing Hall uses, “It is because the relations which characterised the […] [classic Western] are no longer in the same place and relative position, that we are able not simply to oppose them but to critique, to deconstruct and try to ‘go beyond’ them” (my additions, 254). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida, Hall goes on to argue for this sense of the “post”, of the “going beyond”, is articulating “a shift or transition conceptualised as the reconfiguration of the field, rather than as the movement of linear transcendence between two mutually exclusive states” (emphasis added, 254). “Post” , therefore, when used in “post-Western” does not simply signify overcoming the past, as if disengaged from the system it is in tension with (all the classic Westerns of the past), but rather asserts that its existence is “probably inescapable” from that system as well (Hall 1996, 246). Hence, following Hall’s argument, any sense of the Western and its post-Western forms “never operated in a purely binary way” but would always interact, overlap and inter-relate in complex dialogical ways (1996, 246). The Western in the Global South examines the ways by which diverse cinemas “interact, overlap and inter-relate” with the classic Western, and as a result appropriate, reimagine, and subvert its tropes for new political and aesthetic purposes. As a result, the Western genre persists, posthumously but differently. As Jacques Derrida has argued productively, genre is characterised by “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy … a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set” (emphasis added, Derrida 1980, 59). The global post-Westerns explored in this collection seem to me texts which “participate” in many of the formal, thematic and tropic discourses of the classic, established American Western whilst “not belonging” entirely within its borders or ideology. Post-Westerns, in this manner, are generically impure and transgressive, perhaps even “abject” in the sense defined by Julia Kristeva: “It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated … It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game” (Kristeva 1982, 1 – emphasis added). So, just as Derrida’s sense of genre defies the established “set”, so too does Kristeva’s abjection, which as she adds, places itself at “the edge

Preface  xv of non-existence and hallucination” from where it “does not cease challenging its master” (Kristeva 1982, 2). The “master” (or major) generic forms (and their associated political and colonial ideologies) evident in the classic Western are challenged, interrupted, and disturbed by the “minor” forms of prolonged and abjected cinematic styles found, I would argue, in many of the examples of post-Western discussed in the chapters that follow. After all, they do not have to destroy their precursors in order to function critically, because they exist within the genre and are aligned with it, folding outward whilst maintaining a vital connecting tissue to its inner workings and traditions, allowing relation, reflection and critical interaction simultaneously. Genre, Derrida claims, is rhizomatic or “folded” like an “internal pocket” that “splits while remaining the same and traverses yet also bounds the corpus” (Derrida 1980, 70). To reiterate Kristeva’s point above, we should consider the post-Western, therefore, as a “minor” form in the very specific sense defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “to send the major language racing … as bastards … by stretching tensors through it” (1996, 105), whereby dominant film language (and ideology) is pushed to the limits of its “elements, forms, or notions” and toward a “beyond of language” (99 - emphasis in the original). Once again the word “beyond” triggers our discussion of the “post” as a trace of interlinked shifts within genre, and if, as Derrida put it earlier, genre can be “participation without belonging” to the dominant form, then Deleuze’s concept of the “minor” enables us to see generic frameworks and expectations being stretched and, most importantly in the context of the Global South, interfered with and deterritorialized since the “unity of language is fundamentally political”, and this minoring process intervenes in the smooth-running of prevailing forms through its “power of … variation” (1996, 101). The “major language”, like Kristeva’s “master”, refers to the dominant form and ideology of the classic Hollywood Western which promoted a particular imagined American national identity that sustained specific values through its traditional “movement-action-image” (as Deleuze called it in Cinema 2) of hero-based situations and resolutions. Of course, such a system perpetuated and reinforced a narrative structure of individualism, Manifest Destiny, settlement, and imperial capitalism alongside prescribed notions of racial and gendered assumptions of superiority and control. Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, that within this patterning can coexist, in tension, and in dialogue, another (minor) language – a “creative stammering … whispering … [of] ascending and descending variations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 98). What is called for, they argue, is a “becoming” defined by “the extent that one deviated from the model” (105), so that such minor languages “must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority” (106). Thus as minor cinema post-Westerns have political potential because they have “the power, not to represent the world or located subjects, but to imagine,

xvi  Neil Campbell create and vary affects that are not already given” (Colebrook 2002: 103). For Deleuze and Guattari art is always productive, creative and about ­“becoming”, refusing simply to re-present established and accepted models, like that of the classic Western, or to simply reinforce the given; rather it ­“produces what is not already recognisable … disrupts and dislocates the tradition” (Colebrook 2002, 103). Thus the post-Western, as minor, acts in relation to the classic Western, like “a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue”, “uprooting [the standard forms] from their state of constants”, and creating a “cutting edge of deterritorialization of language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 99). In Cinema 2 (2000) Deleuze is more explicit in coining the term “neoWestern” to differentiate postwar films that he felt began to deterritorialize an “already given” and unanimous sense of American identity and ideology defined in earlier films. The pre-given mythology of a triumphalist America formed in the frontier West was, therefore, under question in neo-Westerns because they were not “addressing a people … presupposed already there, but … contributing to the invention of a people” (2000, 217). In other words, film (like all aesthetic form) imagines alternative ways of being and becoming a “people” whose identity has been denied or restricted by official culture or a national imaginary which asserts an approved and over determined version of a people “presupposed already there” – fixed by place and power, history and myth, aligned to a dominant, acceptable model, and repeatedly reinforced through all forms of the media. Jacques Rancière refers to this power bloc as the “distribution of the sensible” (2009a, 63). In this sense, Hollywood “distributed” a partial version of a unanimous ­American ­“people” through its dominant genres, including centrally, the Western. It was, however, the neo-Western that first demonstrated the “break-up” of such a unanimity, presenting in the postwar years and the subsequent civil rights era an American people that “could no longer believe themselves to be either the melting-pot of peoples or the seed of a people to come” (Deleuze 2000, 216). Deleuze argues “modern political cinema” developing at this time, was built on fragmentation and a questioning of unanimity, understanding there was no one “people”, but, “always several peoples, an infinity of peoples”, who could not, nor should not, be united into a “tyrannical unity” (Deleuze 2000, 220). Deleuze believed that this awareness was often “hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority” in the western world and yet it was “absolutely clear in the third world”, or what we might now call the Global South, where colonial exploitation, oppressed minorities and identity crises were commonplace (Deleuze 2000, 217). It was, therefore, from these colonial and postcolonial worlds that an emergent and resistant sense of “people” emerged running counter to American imperial unanimism, and having “to go through” and “work on” all the materials of the colonizer that had “swamped” their culture (Deleuze 2000, 217). As Deleuze puts it starkly, “they invent themselves in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute” (2000, 217).

Preface  xvii What this collection demonstrates are the many different ways these materials have been worked on over time and by different cultures as a means to articulate people “missing” in the narratives of the major language and to assert new values that resist simply endorsing and reproducing ­American imperial structures. Here, within these chapters that range from Italy, Jamaica, and Australia to Niger Senegal, and Thailand one traces the beginnings of such invention tentatively moving towards Rancière’s “recasting of the distribution of the sensible” (2009a, 63) through a strategic thwarting of the fables of American mythic film and the ideologies they consistently assume or promote. To follow one example of these processes that emerge in different sections of this collection, I want to turn to a brief discussion of how American Westerns “travelled”, were translated and mutated through the “spaghetti” forms of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, to the first Jamaican feature film The Harder They Come and how both of these folded back into Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Seen through this critical prism, the Western genre travels, becoming more than American, being both local and global, potentially “worlding” through borrowing and mutating the Western and turning it outward, redistributed, to the world. In the words of Rob Wilson, worlding is “shifting the taken-for-granted and normal life-forms … into the to-be-generated and remade” (Wilson in Wilson and Connery, 2007, 212). The world we think we know from the classic, unanimist Western (Deleuze’s “presupposed already there”), is remade by the worlding Westerns of the Global South like those discussed in this collection; films that transform materials from a fixed, accepted state to something else, like Rancière’s process of “undoing the sensible fabric” (2009a, 64). One can see this operating in the “spaghetti Westerns” that emerged in the mid-sixties with, Sergio Leone’s films, from 1964’s A Fistful of ­Dollars to 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. In the same year as Leone’s most famous film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Sergio Corbucci released Django, a deranged film of surreal brutality, with severed ears, mud-wrestling whores, red-scarved KKK thugs gunned down by a coffindragging, vengeful (but ultimately principled) gunfighter. In a sense, Italian Westerns such as these were already post-Westerns, knowing and critical, edgy, Marxist, and surreal, ever-reaching “beyond” the classic Hollywood form and its values. Leone once said, “As Romans, we have a strong sense of the fragility of empires … I admire very much that great optimist John Ford … [but] as Italians, we see things differently. That is what I have tried to show in my films … I see the history of the West as really the reign of violence by violence” (in Frayling, 1981, 135). As if responding to this “fragility of empires” and the whacked-out styling of the spaghetti Western emerging from the European South of Italy and Spain, within three years in another part of the Global South, Kingston, Jamaica, Lee “Scratch” Perry had written the song “Django Shoots First” for Lord Comic (1968) and later, with his band, the perfectly named Upsetters,

xviii  Neil Campbell recorded and released the album Return of Django (1969) inspired by ­ orbucci’s film. Postcolonial Jamaica saw in the already-edgy Westerns of C Corbucci and Leone a framework through which to re-accentuate feelings of post-Independence (6 August 1962), disempowerment, emergent cultural identity, and resistance to Babylon’s ideological structures – Leone’s “reign of violence by violence”. The idea of “re-accentuation” is borrowed from Mikhael Bakhtin, who wrote Every age re-accentuates in some way the works of its most ­immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation … New images … are very often re-accentuating old images, by translating them from one accentual register to another (from the comic plane to the tragic or the other way around). (Bakhtin, 1990, 421) Corbucci’s blue-eyed Django became the unlikely surrogate anti-hero; up from nowhere, mysterious, but fighting back against the odds, against oppressive powers. As Lee Perry told Black Music in 1977, “I was just basing it off a theory, so any cowboy could be Django. Like we see a film and we name the star Django because he’s a rude boy. He had some bad deal and now he’s coming back to bad it up. Like three or four guys beat him up, but him still tough, so him come and fight another day, you know?” (Perry online). Perry’s notion of “coming back to bad it up” might equally apply to the very spaghetti Westerns that inspired his music and their attempt at “badding up” the classic Western itself; of taking, re-accentuating, and reinvigorating the American genre to show its underside and the dark ideology driving its heroic repetition of American values and identity – Deleuze’s “presupposed already there”. But of course, you could not show Django in England (and many other countries) up until the 1990s, but one could glimpse it in two scenes of Jamaica’s greatest movie, The Harder They Come (1972), in which the Jamaican “sufferah” culture was represented for the first time on film. In an early scene, after watching Corbucci’s Django in the rowdy Rialto Theater in Kingston, Jimmy Cliff’s aspiring reggae singer Ivanhoe Martin transforms from naive country “bwoy” to rogue rude boy cop-killer. In Django the anti-hero fights against the oppressive KKK burning-cross-wielding Major Jackson who kills Mexicans for sport, referring to them as “inferiors” and is driven on by his overwhelming racist “cause”. Jackson translates to the corrupt postcolonial authorities in The Harder They Come, and forward most obviously to Leonardo Di Caprio’s Calvin Candie in Tarantino’s Django Unchained. The audience in the Rialto cheer and laugh as Django “come[s] to fight another day”, to resist the oppressors, just as Ivanhoe Martin will as The Harder They Come unfolds, becoming the gunfighter outlaw who mimics and performs the role he has learned from the Western. As the

Preface  xix mock-gunfighter, Ivanhoe resists and defies the role dictated by the established hierarchy of social class, church hypocrisy, corporate monopoly and state power. A billboard touting “Shell, The Good Mileage Gasman” (sic), followed by another which exhorts, “See Phillip Waite for a Better Life,” herald Ivan’s arrival into Kingston’s postcolonial globalizing civilization, and it is his performed gunfighter persona that will intervene to resist its encroaching power. As Obika Gray explains, the Jamaican “rude boy” culture of this period was a political appropriation of a Django-style anti-hero: They defied political authority, rejected the dominant cultural sensibility, and affirmed ghetto culture and ideology as legitimate rivals to the dominant Anglophile. This celebration of ghetto morality exalted a combative refusal to be submissive, a spontaneous militant affirmation of blackness, a disposition to adopt menacing postures toward those perceived as ­“oppressors”, and a readiness to challenge those found guilty of vaunting their class position and “high” skin colour. (in Persaud, 2001, 97) As Ivan adopts and adapts his gunfighter identity, we see him reading a “Top Guns of the West” comic book, an issue of Playboy magazine, and touting a garishly surreal toy pistol. Later, at the climax to the film, Ivan by now a wanted mythic gunslinger and outlaw meets his demise in a police shootout intercut with flashbacks to the earlier cinema scene with the crowd watching, cheering and laughing as Django slays the red-hooded gang with a hip-held Gatlin gun. Spaghetti Western meets postcolonial reggae, with no happy ending, no resolution, no assertion of national values, and more than a clear nod to Blaxploitation cinema and, in particular, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song released in 1971 the year before The Harder They Come. Henzell’s outlaw imitates not Jesse James or Billy the Kid, but a baroque version of the mythic West filtered through the lens of dancehall reggae and Italian Westerns (already self-aware and borrowing from Kurasawa’s Yojimbo), creating through the ironic, edginess of critical cinema a multiply inflected sense of the Western as always “worlding”, always challenging. Quentin Tarantino’s cut-and-mix Southern Western whose tag line was “Once Upon a Time in the South”, Django Unchained , brings to mind this thread of intersecting uses of the Western, reminding us of the genre’s longevity and its endless flexibility as an entertaining and political force. When interviewed on the film’s release, Tarantino commented that “Westerns are always a magnifying glass” (online 2013), as if to endorse precisely what I have argued throughout this preface, that the genre lives on and can be used to illuminate issues beyond and after its immediate regional and national roots, directing the audience to new and different dimensions, visions and politics. What The Western in the Global South demonstrates are the many complex routes the Western travels, and that, in the hands of new makers

xx  Neil Campbell and interpreters, it can continue to be a hybrid, re-accentuated genre with the power of critique and “dissensus”, as Rancière calls it (2009, 48–9). The effect of these dissensual re-workings of the Western is to potentially “alter the field of the possible” by bringing into play “the uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible” and thereby “altering the coordinates of the shared world” (Rancière 2009, 48–9). Perhaps, in the final analysis, this is what Lee “Scratch” Perry meant by “Coming back to bad it up”. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: The University of Texas Press, [1981]. Campbell, Neil. 2008. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Global Media Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Campbell, Neil. 2013. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Colebrook, Clare. 2002. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1996. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press [1987]. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. 2000. London: The Athlone Press, [1989]. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. “The Law of Genre”, Critical Inquiry, 7, Autumn, 55–81 Dika, Vera. 2003. Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gross, Terry. 2013. “Quentin Tarantino, Unchained and Unruly. Web. http://m.npr. org/news/Arts+%26+Life/168200139. Accessed Sept. 12, 2014. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When was the Post-Colonial”? Thinking at the Limit.” In Eds. Chambers, I. and Curti, L., The Postcolonial Question. London: Routledge. Kitses, Jim and Rickman, Greg, eds. 1998. The Western Reader. New York: ­Limelight Editions. Persaud, Randolph. 2001. Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy: The Dialectics of Marginalized and Global Forces in Jamaica. Albany: SUNY Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. New York: ­Columbia University Press. Perry, Lee “Scratch”. Eternal Thunder. Web. http://www.upsetter.net/scratch/words/ article_gayle.htm Rancière, Jacques. 2009a. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Verso [2004]. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London Verso [2008]. Wilson, Rob and Connery, Christopher, eds. 2007. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend a warm thank to Felisa Salvago-Keyes for her support, her generosity, and her robust enthusiasm. Not only did she help to make this volume on the Western in the Global South possible, but she also participated in bringing us together during this adventurous process, and in so doing cultivated enduring, cherished friendships between three colleagues. As many writers know, co-editing and co-writing generate lively intellectual exchange, careful negotiation, and cooperation—and in our case, creative cooperation through power outages, blizzards, and tornadoes. We have emerged greatly enriched. It has been an honor to work with committed scholars on several continents, some of whom we have never had the pleasure to meet in person, but hope to some day. We appreciate their intellectual insights, certainly, and also the forging of new connections that we hope will continue well into the future. Lastly, we thank Routledge’s four scholarly reviewers for their vigorous, detailed readings and expert suggestions.

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Introduction The Western in the Global South MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz

The Western is one of Hollywood’s most recognizable genres. It is a genre that was widely exported throughout the world, and as a result, the ­Western is globally familiar. The stars associated with the Western (John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood) are everywhere associated with the United States. The iconography of the American West – the cowboy hat, cowboy boots, six-shooter, wanted posters, sheriffs’ badges, saloons, dusty main streets, Monument Valley – is internationally recognizable and readable. Together or alone these images have evoked, from Africa to Asia to Latin America, a particular vision of the United States, functioning “to symbolize and fuel aspirant post-war notions of modernity” (Fisher 2011, 3). They also spill out of the cinematic context from which they originated, forming metonymies for various U.S. political practices within global arenas. Aggressive American foreign policy is termed “cowboy diplomacy.” American-style neoliberalism is termed “cowboy economics.” Such appellations foreground the Western’s – or at least the classic Hollywood Western’s – association with advanced capitalism, manifest ­ destiny, redemptive violence, and American exceptionalism. However, they also point to other processes, namely the appropriation, reworking, reinterpretation, and relocation of the Western genre – its icons, images, and tropes – in blended, transcultural borderlands and locales beyond the U.S. In cinema and elsewhere (diplomacy and economics, fashion and music), the Western or its elements emerge transformed and reconfigured, sometimes reflecting a desire to mimic or revive, sometimes reflecting a desire to subvert, and sometimes reflecting a desire to blend or bend genres. The so-called ­Camargue Westerns produced in France during the silent era constitute some of the earliest borrowing of the Western paradigm. These films embody an admiring, imitative gesture but also express anxiety at the rise of the American film industry. At other times, the borrowing takes the form of deconstruction or parody or a complete philosophical reconstruction that refigures the original into terms and language that are critical of American cinema and American ideologies, a “re-accenting” that applies the filmic dynamics of what Hamid Naficy has termed “accenting,” the borrowing and ­contestation of dominant forms by marginalized and/or exilic and diasporic filmmakers. This re-accenting, according to Neil Campbell, characterizes

2  MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz many so-called Spaghetti Westerns, those Westerns made in Italy in the postWorld War II era, creating a space in which “expectations are stretched and broken, ideologies destabilized and questioned” (2008, 121). In this way, as ­Austin Fisher has suggested, such borrowings radically “reformulate the Hollywood ­Western into an oppositional format” (2011, 5). The Western is not always a stand-in for American ideology and dominance. Fisher’s work demonstrates that the genre’s “obsessive focus on the legitimacy of violence,” along with its popularity and potential as an ideological weapon, appealed to New Left revolutionaries in Italy (2011, 2). Indeed, as Campbell argues, the American West itself is a mobile, malleable discourse that articulates a “mythic quest for rootedness, settlement and synthesis” (2011, 1) and yet “has always had a global dimension as a geographical, cultural, and economic crossroads defined by complex connectivity, multidimensionality, and imagination, even if these have been elided in favor of a more inward-looking and emotive vision” (2011, 3). For Edward Buscombe, the Western produces a fictional “world of its own” (15) or “an elaborately coded universe” (15) that projects “not merely a milieu or way of life, but another world, or at least another country” (1988, 15–16, our emphasis). The world of the Western genre is a product of transnational travel, and its conceptual baggage becomes transformed in the process, its contents, forms, and meanings shifting. This book is an attempt to explore what happens when the Western travels, not just into the figurative language of international economics or diplomacy but onto the silver screens, or television screens, or computer screens of global cultures. And it is specifically an examination of what happens when the West is deterritorialized as it rides south into those regions of the world not so well served by ideological Americana. What happens to the Western when directed by the hands (or the lens) of Perry Henzell of Jamaica, Mustapha Alassane of Niger, Mahamat Saleh-Haroun of Chad, Abderrahmane Sissako of Mali and Mauritania, Ciro Guerra of Colombia, Carlos Bolado of Mexico, Ivan Sen of Australia, and Wisit Sasanatieng of Thailand? What happens to the forms, to the images and icons associated with it? What happens to the original and its original context when the appropriated and modified form travels back? Does it discover, as Campbell suggests in his engagement with Gilles Deleuze, “a project of positive recreation” that dismantles its original frameworks? (2013, 3). In the imagined territory of the Global South, how far does the Western genre travel from its former screens or step outside of what Virginia Scharff calls the “weight of the western frame”? (in Campell 2013, 4). In order to understand why the Western travels and what happens when it does, we might first venture back to the source and try to understand what the Western means or has been seen to mean, and what image of it we, as spectators and scholars, retain. Discussion of the Western as a genre is as old as film scholarship. As Campbell notes, the classical Western has been linked to Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of a progressively expanding, westward-moving American frontier, a theory the genre reinforced through

Introduction  3 certain powerfully repeated cycles and tropes endorsing desires for settlement against the odds, establishing roots in the New World, transforming the earth from wilderness to garden, taming land taken from its “savage” populations, expressing a renewing masculinity as the source and engine for these actions, domesticating the feminine within this new Western world, and confirming through the combined power of these acts, a cosmogenesis or national identity narrative spawned out of the Western lands (2013, 11). The ideological premises of the classical version of this Western are markedly imperialist, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have demonstrated, and its various conquest fictions “played a crucial pedagogical role in forming the historical sensibilities of generations of Americans” (1994, 115–119; see also Corkin 2004). One of the most famous early studies of film genre, JeanLouis Rieupeyrout and André Bazin’s Le Western: Le Cinéma américain par e­ xcellence (1953), argued the Western film was a narrative of “naïve grandeur” that embodied American myths about the origin and development of the United States and about its role in the world. Many subsequent studies accept the basic tenets put forth by Rieupeyrout and Bazin, who read the early Western as myth or allegory and regarded its basic subject to be the mythologized history and essence of the United States. Richard S­ lotkin, in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992), reads in another direction, analyzing not how American mythology has shaped the Western but how the Western has shaped American mythology. Buscombe reminds us that in the Western’s “elaborately coded universe any departure from the norm is likely to be significant” (15). As noted above, the Western has experienced departures, disruptions, and deterritorializations. In The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (1999), John Cawelti explores the evolution of the genre from “classical” to “post-Western,” arguing the ­various mutations and incarnations of the genre reflect the shifting d ­ ynamics of the U.S.’s role in the world. Building on the work of Jacques Rancière, Campbell reads post-Westerns as “scenes of dissensus” (356) that behold a “West no longer defined by triumphalism, Turnerian dominant individualism, heroic last stands, or closed borders, but rather as a new form of community based more on vulnerability, radical openness, and becoming” (354). The shifting representations of Native Americans in Westerns is another compelling emphasis of study by scholars such as Peter Rollins and John O’Connor in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (1998), Joanna Hearne in Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (2012), and Leanne Howe, Harvey Markowitz, and Denise K. Cummings in Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins (2013). When we speak of Westerns, we are raising one of the trickiest questions in film studies, the question of genre. Although clearly acknowledged as a marketing and production concept in the Hollywood studio system, the existence of film genre outside the production and marketing context

4  MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz is less than a settled question (Altman 1999; Buscombe 1988; Neale 2000; Campbell 2008 and 2013). Although widely used in film studies, the concept of genre could be, as Robert Stam has suggested, little more than a theoretical construct, something that doesn’t really exist “‘out there’ in the world” (2000, 14). Stam’s skepticism about genre is widely shared, yet even in discussions of the Western as an unstable, mutating genre, there is still the sense the genre does circulate “out there.” As early as 1969, Jim Kitses, in Horizons West, observed that although the Western seems to be structured around oppositional pairs, such as individual vs. community or nature vs. culture, the relationship between and among these pairings shifts and converges in various ways, such that the meaning of the ­Western can’t be precisely fixed. Rather, Kitses argues, we must understand the Western as ­“thematically fertile … ambiguous … ever in flux” (1969, 18). Recent scholarship has expanded upon this divergent thrust in reading and understanding the Western. Campbell, for example, borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, argues for “Westness” as a rhizomatic form, “an unstable signifier that has been given meaning by those who have lived within it, passed through it, conquered it, settled, farmed, militarized, urbanized, and dreamed it” (2008, 41). Even in its so-called classical hegemonic form, the Western, Campbell argues, “is always already haunted by other traces and forms, critiques and extensions that challenge and mark it in many different ways” (2013, 16). The Western genre, then, may often appear to conclude with settlement but like the fluctuating idea of the West, the genre does not settle within any stable, singular cartography. Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper offer a similar reading of the Western and echo Campbell’s call for understanding the Western as a “reframed region/regionalism” (2008, 44). Looking at transnational appropriations of the Western from Ireland to Asia, they argue for the ­“unmooring of the Western” or the recognition of the “potential for the historical experiences of one culture to resonate with audiences in another” (2012, xiv). Grayson Cooke, Warwick Mules, and David Baker, in a special issue of Transformations Journal on “The Other Western,” have also explored the appropriation of the Western in international contexts, investigating “how the Western interacts with national identities … [and] the power that arises from loading up a genre with the capacity to relate to the complex question of national identity.” Similar arguments have been made by Thomas Klein, Ivo Reitzer, and Peter Schulze in their book Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western (2012). These transnational studies build on existing scholarship, including that of Buscombe, who recognized in his voluminous The BFI Companion to the Western (1988) and his more compact 100 Westerns (2006) the contributions of individual French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Thai ­Westerns. But more particularly they build on the scholarship dealing with the best-known ­example of the dislocated Western, that of the Italian or Spaghetti Westerns of directors such as Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Gillo Pontecorvo. Christopher Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and ­Europeans from

Introduction  5 Karl May to Sergio Leone  (1981), for example, already noted the appropriation of the Western form by Italian directors had produced a “radical shift” in both expectations of and understandings of the Western as form and genre (44). As Miller and Van Riper argue, the ­American Western in its various forms is preoccupied with imperialism, indigenous communities, and notions of expansionist “progress,” preoccupations that are ­certainly not unique to the United States. The Western, then, has become a malleable, targeted construct, a recodeable universe subject to multiple forms of global domestication, innovation, and reconstruction. Its story, as Austin Fisher has suggested, is increasingly one of “a variety of borderline exchanges which construct [an] account of trans-cultural borrowing, political re-­ interpretation, and generic mutation” (2012, 2). This is particularly the case when the Western heads south, where it encounters another malleable, targeted construct: that of the Global South. Like the West, the label Global South describes less a fixed g­ eographical space (in this case within the Southern Hemisphere) than a region or regionalism actively conceived and contested within the very spaces it attempts to define, appropriated as a measure of self-definition and regional ­affirmation. The Global South, akin to Native American territory in the universe of the ­Western genre, is often represented in Northern political discourses as a region to be tamed, saved, guided, and contained. Within Global South cinemas, several directors have formulated their own v­ ersions of the ­Western – a genre preoccupied with the Global North’s e­ xpansion and ­domination – to critique the global inequities manifested in ­contemporary contexts by transnational corporations, the World Bank, and Empire’s other ­postcolonial incarnations. So it is that directors in the South ­recognize they inhabit a region, like the West or the Western, bound up with the ­legacies of ­imperialism, the continued subalterity of indigenous and migrant ­subnationals, and the “precarity,” to use Judith Butler’s ­parlance, ­engendered by expanding neoliberalisms. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff write in “Theory from the South: A Rejoinder,” despite the fact it has replaced the “third world” as a more-or-less popular usage, the label itself is inherently slippery, inchoate, unfixed. It describes less a bordered place than a polythetic category, its members sharing one or more – but not all, or even most – of a diverse set of features. The closest thing to a common denominator among them is that many once were colonies, though not all in the same epochs. Postcolonial, therefore, is something of a synonym, but only an inexact one. What is more, like all indexical categories, the Global South assumes meaning by virtue not of its content but of its context, of the way in which it points to something else in a field of signs, in this instance to its antinomy to the Global North, an opposition that carries a great deal of imaginative baggage congealed around the contrast between centrality and marginality, kleptocracy and free-market democracy, modernity and its alleged absence (2012, par. 7).

6  MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz Arif Dirlik notes the shifting meanings of the appellation Global South provide “clues to both continuities and discontinuities over the last half-­ century in the global positioning of the ‘South,’ as well as in the ideological and political role assigned to it in global politics” (2007, 13). As Dirlik observes, one of the promises of the Global South is its continued, renewable self-invention as it gains visibility and recognition as a space in which global inequities are energetically contested and resisted. He observes: “… there are certain affinities between [Global South] societies in terms of mutual recognition of historical experiences with colonialism and neocolonialism, a history not yet ended of economic, political and social (racial) marginalization, and, in some cases, memories of cooperation or common cause in struggles for global justice in past liberation movements” (2007, 14). As the opening chapters in this volume demonstrate, American and ­European Westerns have been travelling throughout the Global South for quite some time. When describing their early exposure to the cinema, it is not uncommon for film directors in the Global South to recall their experiences of viewing imported Westerns. In the interviews with African filmmakers in Manthia Diawara’s African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, directors associate their early experiences at cinema houses with viewing Westerns. Yet the net of scholarly inquiry into how African directors appropriate, engage with, and undermine the tropes, narratives, and conventions of the American Western and its various European manifestations is, at the moment, far less than extensive. This book seeks to address some of the gaps in international film scholarship, mapping not only the geographic spaces from which and into which the Western has been appropriated but also the terms of engagement with both the genre and the meanings it conveys. With the emergence of booming media technologies and more accessible global distribution networks – in the form of shadow economies (Roberto Lobato), pirate modernities (Ravi Sundaram), and transnational, rhizomatic spaces such as global Nollywood (Matthias Krings and ­Onookome Okome) – it is no longer adequate to characterize filmmaking or film viewing in the Global South as peripheral. The Western film genre’s blended baggage has been carried, discarded, lost, recycled, and recuperated throughout the Global South. What happens when the Western rides south is something with an unpredictable outcome. It is an unanticipated convergence, a standoff between two armed, equally constructed global/regional paradigms. This book features a number of such confrontations and contacts across an expanse of six continents, offering a wide range of historical engagements with the Western, from Italy’s staging of Westerns in Ethiopia and Libya to more recent reappropriations of the genre, such as the Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film Daratt to the representation of the Western by Aboriginal actors in Australia in Michael Edol’s Lalai and Floating or to the genre’s global circulation back to the globalized Southern U.S. in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. These diverse films retain some of Third Cinema’s1 contestations of the forms, power relations, and hierarchies of the Global North but are also

Introduction  7 characterized by a refusal to abide by what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino saw as Third Cinema’s deliberate refusal to engage Hollywood on its own formal and aesthetic terms. They do not all meet Teshome G ­ abriel’s requirements that they develop a “radical consciousness” in the spectator or produce “a revolutionary transformation of society,” even if they do seem to satisfy the demand that they demonstrate “social relevance … ­innovative style … with political and ideological overtones” (1982, 2–4). These films also do not correspond precisely to Hamid Naficy’s concept of an accented cinema, not only because in this particular case the forms and regions have travelled outwards, not the filmmakers, but also because they do not produce what Naficy terms the “homeland’s utopian chronotopes” (2001, 155). In fact, if such films produce the dialogic effects of accenting, they do so not to reify an idealized, utopian “lost” space (this was arguably the function of some classic Westerns) but rather to destabilize and deterritorialize conceptualizations of fixed, boundaried, or rooted spaces. If we can understand these encounters of West/Western or Global North/Western and Global South/Western, we can perhaps best understand them in the tropes of the Western’s own forms as precisely a standoff, a confrontation and engagement that disrupts and refigures the dynamics of all participants but the ultimate outcome of which is unpredictable or unknown. What matters, what holds our gaze, is the confrontation, or the contact, itself. Note 1. Third Cinema is a type of revolutionary or militant cinema first described by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getano in their 1969 manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema. The characteristics of Third Cinema include Marxist politics and poetics and an anti-Hollywood aesthetic. It was presented as a counter-cinema to the “First Cinema” of Hollywood, which had already been defined, by Sergei Eisenstein and then later by the theorists of the Frankfurt School, as ideologically complicit with Capitalism. The term “Third Cinema” was originally described only Latin American cinema, but it was later appropriated by other scholars and applied to other Global South cinemas. A notable case in point is the Ethiopian theorist Teshome Gabriel, who applied the concept to post-independence African films.

References Altman, Rick. 1999. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Buscombe, Edward. 2006. 100 Westerns. London: BFI Publishing. ———. The BFI Companion to the Western. 1988. New York: Atheneum. Campbell, Neil. 2013. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. ———. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. 2008. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

8  MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz Cawelti, John G. 1999. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. “Theory from the South: A Rejoinder.” ­Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology. http://culanth. org/fieldsights/273-theory-from-the- south-a-rejoinder. Accessed Feb. 25, 2012. Cook, Grayson, Warwick Mules, and David Baker. “The Other Western.” ­Transformations Journal. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/24/ ed.shtml. Accessed Aug. 1, 2014. Corkin, Stanley. 2004. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Diawara, Manthia. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich: Prestel. Dirlik, Arif. 2007. “Global South: Predicament and Promise.” The Global South 1.1 & 2: 12–23. Fisher, Austin. 2011. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western. London: I.B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Guneratne, Anthony R. and Wimal Dissenayake, eds. 2003. Rethinking Third ­Cinema. New York: Routledge. Hearne, Joanna. 2012. Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western. Albany: SUNY Press. Howe, LeAnne, Harvey Markowitz, and Denise K Cummings, eds. 2013. Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Klein, Thomas, Ivo Reitzer, and Peter Schulze, eds. 2012. Crossing Frontiers: ­Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Marburg: Schüren Verlag. Kitses, Jim. 1969. Horizons West. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. Krings, Matthias and Onookome Okome, eds. 2013. Global Nollywood: The ­Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press. Lobato, Ramon. 2012. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film ­Distribution. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Cynthia J. and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, eds. 2012. International Westerns: ­Re-locating the Frontier. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Cinema. 2001. P ­ rinceton: Princeton University Press. Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge. Pines, Jim and Paul Williams, eds. 1991. Questions of Third Cinema. BFI Publishing, London. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis, and André Bazin. 1953. Le Western: Le Cinéma américain par excellence. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Rollins, Peter and John O’Connor. 1998. Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Harper Perennial. Stam, Robert, ed. 2001. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. Sundaram, Ravi. 2010. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. New York: Routledge.

Part I

Colonial Circulations of the Western in the Global South

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1 The Western in Colonial Southern Africa James Burns

This chapter explores the reception of American Westerns in Southern Africa during the colonial era. From the arrival of the first moving images in ­Johannesburg in the late 19th century until the decline of the cinema industry in the 1960s and 1970s, African audiences – in rural areas, in mining compounds, in cities, and on large farms – consumed a steady diet of ­American Westerns. By the end of the colonial era it was the dominant film genre across the continent. To many Southern African people the Western was synonymous with the movie, and the cowboy was synonymous with Americans. Westerns became so popular in part because they were cheap and plentiful and were seen as an anodyne form of entertainment that pleased censors, distributors, and audiences alike. Long after audience enthusiasm for the genre had waned in the West, the cowboy aesthetic lingered on in Southern Africa. Southern Africa’s cinema history began in the late 19th century, when a travelling magician named Carl Hertz brought movies to the South African Republic as a part of his act. (Hertz 1924). Hertz and the itinerant entertainers who followed him were drawn to the Union of South Africa by its dense urban populations. This meant South Africa and the territories connected to it by the railway became exposed to movies a generation earlier than much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. These pioneering picture-show men screened short films initially in hotels and rented auditoriums. In the early years it was mainly an entertainment for white urban elites. Gradually entrepreneurs brought movies to smaller towns and villages in rural areas. At the same time, businessmen in cities began building new theatres or adapting existing structures to the showing of movies. The first cinemas in South Africa were music halls and vaudeville houses that gradually converted to showing movies exclusively.1 By 1913 Cape Town had several venues devoted exclusively to showing movies while Durban had eight theatres, Port Elizabeth had twelve, and most small towns had “at least one picture house” (The Moving Picture World 1913). Johannesburg had the most dynamic cinema-going culture, with tens of thousands of people seeing the most popular movies weekly by 1920 (Stage and Screen 1920). From there, the cinema followed the rail line north to Southern Rhodesia, where entertainment halls were advertising nightly film shows in the major

12  James Burns cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo by 1913 (Rhodesian Herald 1913). Farther north, in Blantyre, Nyasaland, the first cinema advertisements appeared in the Nyasaland newspapers in 1917 (Nyasaland Times 1917) while in Northern Rhodesia, the local press advertised the screenings at the Grill cinema by 1920. To the West, the Bechuanaland Protectorate built its first cinema in 1913, (Parsons 2004) while by 1914, German South West Africa, a territory that would be absorbed into the Union of South Africa after the World War I, had opened its first movie house (Gordon 2005). When evaluating the influence of the Western in colonial Southern Africa, it makes sense to treat the region stretching from Cape Town to Northern Rhodesia in the north, and from Zimbabwe in the east to Namibia in the west, as a single cultural zone. This vast British territory was linked by the continent’s largest rail system, which connected the Cape of Good Hope in the south to the copper mines of modern Zambia two thousand miles to the north. Mining dominated the regional economy and encouraged the creation of a transportation infrastructure that linked these areas. Migrant labor was and remains an important component of social and economic life in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the modern nations that comprise southern Africa. The shared cinema history of all of these countries is reflected in the continued use of the term “bioscope” for both the technology of moving pictures and for the location where they are screened. The use of the term hints at the early date at which moving pictures arrived in Southern Africa, as it went out of common parlance in the U.K. and the U.S. by 1910. Bioscope was unique to Southern Africa and was not used in French or Belgian colonies; nor is it found in British West Africa, where the cinema arrived much later (Georg 2007). The history of the Western, and film culture in general in southern Africa, must be understood within the context of the system of racial segregation associated with South African apartheid. This was a program of geographical separation of the races in the Union of South Africa undertaken by the National Party after their narrow electoral victory in 1948. Apartheid, which means “separateness” in Afrikaans, racialized all spaces in the Union, including movie theatres. It was a policy rooted in the assumption that European and African cultures were fundamentally incompatible. Thus its defenders claimed to be protecting Africans from Western cultures that would prove corrosive to their traditional way of life. But though apartheid was the most apparent manifestation of settler segregation, to a large extent it codified racial policies that were already in place in many regions of Southern Africa at the dawn of the cinema era. To be sure, segregation practices were a patchwork throughout the region, dictated by local history, custom, demographics, and economics. But though colonists in Northern and Southern Rhodesia claimed to practice less severe discrimination than the Union of South Africa, racial segregation of public spaces in all of these regions during the colonial era meant Africans living in these colonies rarely saw films in the company of white patrons. Segregation was most effectively achieved

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  13 in the smaller towns and villages of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia where settler elites were able to police segregationist traditions and policies. Within the cities of the South African Union itself, segregation frequently broke down in urban areas, where the lines of racial identity became blurred in neighborhoods like District Six in Cape Town. Thus while cities such as Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, or Johannesburg, South Africa, might have rigidly segregated audiences, theatres in poorer neighborhoods of Cape Town experienced a relatively high degree of ethnic and racial diversity. Film distribution in the region was dominated by the Schlesinger Company, which purchased films from American and British companies and circulated them the length and breadth of South Africa, Botswana, and the two Rhodesias. I.W. Schlesinger was an American businessman who arrived in South Africa in 1894 virtually penniless. Within ten years he had made his fortune in the insurance business and real estate. In 1912 he acquired the bankrupt Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. From this beginning, he built Africa Consolidated Theatres, which embarked on an aggressive program of purchasing cinemas throughout the Union. By 1914 he held a near monopoly on the cinema business, which allowed his company to dominate film distribution as well. When, in 1917, Schlesinger created a film production company (African Films Ltd.), he controlled all three aspects of the movie business, making him a pioneer of vertical integration several years before Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures accomplished the feat in the United States. The Schlesinger Company enjoyed almost complete dominance of the cinema business in Southern Africa until the 1950s. Though Schlesinger never made Africans a focus of their marketing, his control of distribution meant his company determined what they saw at the movies. Cinemas for non-Europeans in Southern Africa were few and far between before the 1930s. Though a theatre for “Coloureds” appeared in Natal in 1908, economics dictated that most movie houses catered to the ­relatively affluent settler communities. The greatest concentration of cinemas for ­ eighborhoods “non-whites” was found in Cape Town, where highly diverse n like District Six boasted several “mixed” theatres by the 1920s. Beyond the major cities, during the silent era there was a handful of cinemas in ­African townships and some “European” venues held occasional screenings for ­Africans. But for the most part, Africans saw movies on plantations, in social-welfare halls, and especially in mining compounds. The expansion of the movies from being the preserve of the settler elite to a mass phenomenon in Southern Africa coincided with the ascent of the American Western as the most popular Hollywood genre. Indeed, the first film advertised in South Africa in 1895 was a film of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (Reynolds 2005, 401). By the eve of World War I, the Western was making inroads into local markets all over the globe. For example, in 1912 The Straits Times of Singapore announced the people of the colony “are getting tired of seeing Cowboys and American dramas” (1912) while in the Caribbean, the Jamaica Gleaner complained of the incessant local showing

14  James Burns of American Westerns (1913). And in Central America it was reported that in the early days of the cinema, people in Honduras assumed from the movies that all Americans were cowboys (Bottomore 1996, 14). After the war, as Hollywood carved out a commanding share of the global cinema market, the flow of Westerns across the world became a flood. In South Africa, by the end of the 1920s the Western was firmly established as the genre of choice among African audiences. As an official at the American consulate in South Africa explained: “American western pictures, with their intense activities, appeal particularly to the natives” (Vasey 1997, 149). We can get a sense of the growing reach of the Western in the region by examining movie advertisements for theaters in the Rhodesias. Since the films advertised originated in Cape Town and made their way throughout the theaters of the region, we can assume a film showing in Southern ­Rhodesia would have been screened widely throughout Southern Africa. Already, on the eve of World War I, Westerns were beginning to appear on local programs. The Rhodesia Herald on June 6, 1913 advertised the showing of The Ranger and his Horse at the Electraceum cinema. The film was one of several features being advertised in town, though it was the only Western (1913). Ten years later, the Bulawayo theaters were advertising a bill of almost entirely Western programs, including Pinto (1920) and True Blue (1918), which was advertised with the description “Why should a prince of cowpunchers and king of the range abandon his Arizona realm to be an English Earl? William Farnum in ‘True Blue’ gives us the answer in typical American word and action” (Bulawayo Chronicle 1923). Southern Rhodesia’s major cities had strictly segregated cinemas by 1918, and few Africans would have been permitted to view these Westerns in theaters. But the African audience for movies in Southern Rhodesia and throughout the region would expand dramatically in the decade following World War I. Some of the earliest African audiences for the movies appeared in the mining compounds of Johannesburg, where during World War I, an American missionary named Ray Philips began showing movies to the migrant laborers. Philips had been tasked by the owners with finding forms of entertainment for the miners, who lived in all-male compounds, which would discourage them from drinking, fighting, or participating in other behaviors that were antithetical to the smooth operation of the mines. Philips was the first of many colonial agents who would weigh the potential dangers and opportunities that cinema posed to African communities. While the movies promised a salutary alternative to the drinking and “faction fights” that plagued the mining industry, it was unclear what effect this new medium would hold over these audiences in the long run. To Phillips, a well-censored show proved an invaluable asset to mine-owners. He later recounted the effect of showing movies to the miners: The result was immediate and gratifying. The thousand gathered around the screen and showed their appreciation by filling the

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  15 compounds so full of joyful sound that outsiders often decided that a riot was going on. With amazed delight the happy crowds went off on trips on the modern magic carpet to other lands (Couzens 1982). As labor historian Charles van Onselen has written of these mine shows: For a largely illiterate audience, films, as a form of cheap mass entertainment, readily suggested themselves to mine managers. Not only was the cost moderate but if screened at peak drinking hours on a weekend evening they also had the beneficial effect of making inroads into the total cases of Monday morning hangover. Further, and again unlike alcohol, films were unlikely to lead directly to violence (van Onselen 1976, 89). Other mine managers followed Philips’s example and by the end of the decade, movies were becoming a fixture of life in mining compounds across Southern Africa.2 During the 1920s a few permanent theaters for Africans emerged in urban areas. According to scholar David Coplan, by 1920, blacks in Johannesburg “could get an idea of how American show people dressed and acted from film shows at the BMSC or the Good Hope and Small St. commercial ‘bioscopes’” (Coplan 1985, 124). In the Southern Rhodesian city of Bulawayo, local authorities had unsuccessfully tried to establish a movie theater for Africans in 1913 (Bulawayo Chronicle 1913). But immediately after World War I ended, they renewed their efforts, and after much debate, by the end of the decade there was a permanent bioscope show in the African social hall. By 1929 there was a fixed venue for movie-going for Africans in most large towns and cities. While some members of the public protested against the opening of these theaters, the Police Superintendent for Southern Rhodesia supported them, arguing, “There is nothing wrong in a well-conducted bioscope” (Zambian National Archives/ZNA 13 January 1930). Indeed, it was apparent to authorities in Southern Rhodesia that the popularity of the cinema had grown to such an extent among black workers that it would be problematic to try to discourage it. As the Superintendent of Native Affairs put it: “I doubt … whether we can stop these performances” (ZNA 10 January 1930). In new theaters in towns and on the mines, African audiences developed their enthusiasm for Westerns. From the inception of the shows run by ­Philips, the Westerns were a staple of mining-compound programs. Writing in 1946, South African cinema historian Thelma Gutsche observed that the one constant in the movie-going habits of Africans over the past generation was their “affection for ‘Wild Westerns’” (Gutsche 1946, 379). “Twenty years of film exhibitions on the mine circuit failed to cure the ‘boys’ of their affection for a mythical cowboy called ‘Jack’ (no matter what his real name) and his always successful deeds of daring” (Gutsche 1946). Her observations were born out by colonial officials throughout southern African in the post-war era (Parsons 2004, 7).

16  James Burns The movies supplied to these venues were the same ones the Schlesinger organization had circulated to the theaters that catered to settler audiences. Once they had made their run through these theaters, the copies of the Westerns, by this time well worn, scratchy, and often clumsily edited, were purchased by mine managers and by small businessmen who showed them in makeshift regional theaters or in travelling cinema shows. This distribution network helped make the cowboy an iconic figure in some of the most remote regions of Southern Africa by the end of World War II. The films that circulated throughout colonial Africa were invariably B  Westerns, which Hollywood mass-produced in the 1920s and 1930s. They starred long-forgotten journeymen actors and were produced by minor studios such as Universal and R.K.O. These Westerns dominated the shows of African mine audiences in part because they were so inexpensive and relatively plentiful. They were subject to ruthless censorship, which often made their story incomprehensible to audiences. But despite that they were filled with fist fights and gun play, which unnerved many colonial observers, they were seen as preferable to films that portrayed intense or inter-racial violence, criminal techniques, or scantily clad white women in ­compromising positions. (For a discussion of censorship in British Africa, see Burns, 2013.) If we look once again at the movies that were showing in the firstrun theaters during the early talky era, we see the Western was becoming eclipsed by other genres. A survey of movie ads in the late 1930s in Southern Rhodesia demonstrates Westerns no longer formed a majority of the films shown in theaters.3 Neither were they the majority in South Africa, where, according to Gutsche, there were almost no Westerns among outstanding films shown in the country during the 1930s (Gutsche, 228–230). But Westerns still appeared occasionally on the bills of first-run theaters, and since Schlesinger’s company provided the films for the mining compounds, we can assume these were some of the films shown on those circuits. While major Westerns like the Academy Award-winning Cimarron (1931) might show in South Africa the year they were released, lesser known cowboy films might not appear in Southern Africa until years later.4 But if enthusiasm for Westerns was waning among settlers during the 1930s, their popularity was growing among Africans. They were particularly influential on young men, who formed their primary audience. Their influence was reflected in the growing popularity of cowboy dress and jargon among African audiences. Indeed, the phenomenon of urban Africans adopting Western dress and slang has been documented by historians across Africa. In Nigeria, historian P.E. Hair noticed the phenomenon during the 1950s in the emergence of gangs of young men dressing in cowboy costumes. Hair attributed the dress of these gangs to the pre-war spread of the cinema in Nigeria, even though he believed many of these gang members “have never seen a film cowboy” (Hair 2001, 93). In Zanzibar, they proved unnerving to colonial authorities, who feared they signalled an anti-colonial

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  17 attitude on the part of youth (Brennan 2005). Similarly, in the Belgian Congo, young men dressed as cowboys formed gangs in the immediate postwar era (Didier 2012). But nowhere did the Western have a more apparent influence on African culture than in the urban and rural areas of Southern Africa. Here the cowboy became an icon of masculinity, empowerment, and, in the eyes of some observers, anti-colonialism. Indeed, no product of Western culture could challenge the popularity of the cowboy in the waning decades of the colonial era. Men watching Westerns in Northern Rhodesia mining compounds acted out the fighting techniques of the heroes, to the consternation of mine officials. Tsotsi gangs in South Africa adopted the names and dress of cowboys in the townships of Johannesburg (Gasser). And Coloured fans met each other with the greeting “Pardner” as they waited outside the British Bioscope in District Six for the show to begin (Nasson 1989, 289). The popularity of the cowboy film proved disturbing to many colonial officials, mine managers, and European settlers. In part this was because audiences did not sit passively watching these films. The showing of ­Westerns was as a highly voluble, interactive, and at times raucous experience. ­Africans frequently called to the hero on screen, whom they invariably referred to as “Jack,” often warning him of impending danger or emulating his fighting style. This enthusiasm was much commented upon at the time. Europeans carried on a spirited public discussion over two generations about their appeal and influence. This debate reflects the anxieties the cinema engendered in a colonial setting. But it also speaks to the remarkable connection that developed between African audiences and this most iconic of American film genres. As the cinema spread in popularity during the 1920s and 1930s, most colonies enacted strict censorship legislation to limit African’s access to “inappropriate” films. They also created censorship boards, which were usually made up of members of the colonial police force, missionaries, and often the wives of colonial officials, who either rejected inappropriate films or cut out objectionable scenes. Westerns also proved unnerving to African elites, who saw in the enthusi­ asm of audience a danger to social order. As one African politician in N ­ orthern Rhodesia complained in 1954: Cowboy films … are a damage to the country. They show fighting and stealing. At the present stage we are not concerned with stealing and fighting, but we are concerned with proper character training. The young people today should not be trained how to fight and steal, but we have to train them how to behave and grow into better citizens of ­Central Africa. … Please avoid bringing in these cowboy films which are a nuisance and a damage to the country (Parliamentary Debate, 1954). Colonial observers of African audiences generally arrived at one of three conclusions about their enthusiasm for Westerns. The first held that Africans

18  James Burns did not understand the plot or message of Westerns but merely enjoyed the frantic action, particularly the violence, which they were prone to imitate. A second position posited they adopted an oppositional stance in viewing that led them to relate to the victims of the cowboys (predominantly Native American characters).5 This “resistant spectatorship” was articulated by some African viewers and by the cinema scholar Manthia Diawara. It has also surfaced in post-colonial representations of African movie-going. (See Burns 2002, 157.) And a third view held that Africans understood and related to the cowboy as an outsider, an American, and a man of action, and adopted his style as a form of anti-social or anti-colonial posture. The merits of these readings were extensively and at times hysterically debated in public during the colonial era.6 In the 1950s, several anthropologists conducted studies of Southern ­African societies in the process of urbanization and detribalization, and many of them attempted to make some sense out of the apparent popularity of American Westerns. In Northern Rhodesia, the American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker studied the influence of movies on African mining communities. She attended weekly cinema shows and made a systematic study of audience reactions. Film shows had been a fixture of Northern Rhodesian mines since 1928, and most screenings featured “a cowboy film (old and grade B)” (Powdermaker 1962, 254). Powdermaker found audiences preferred the Westerns over all other genres, an appreciation that was shared equally by men and women, well educated and illiterate. She noted in particular the animated behavior of Africans at the movies: During this film men, women, and children rose to their feet in ­excitement, bending forward and flexing their muscles with each blow the cowboys gave. The shouting could be heard several miles away (ibid., 258). But while many colonial observers viewed the African obsession with cowboys as irrational, Powdermaker argued their appeal was perfectly logical: Through the cowboy films, pent up aggressions were played out in a group; and the African became free and triumphant. The individual’s enjoyment was heightened by the sharing of his feeling with a thousand or more others, who were shouting their reactions. There was much greater excitement and overt emotional participation at the movies than at the Sunday afternoon tribal dances (ibid). In Powdermaker’s view, this identification was particularly strong with cowboy films because of the life experience of the miners: It was not difficult to understand why the Africans strongly identified with the cowboy hero, Jack, or Jake as he was also called. In the past,

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  19 intertribal wars were part of African life, and success in fighting was one way of gaining prestige. But we do not have to look only to the past. Probably even more important is the manner in which identification with the cowboy hero fits into the present power relationship between European and Africans. It was obvious that Africans resented their low political, economic, and social status in relationship to ­Europeans and that there was relatively little outlet for the consequent aggressive feelings. The hard-fighting cowboy, moving freely on his horse in wide-open spaces, surmounting all obstacles and always winning, is indeed an attractive hero for a people intensely fearful of losing some of their wide-open spaces to Europeans, who until recently held all the power. The cowboy is white, but not European. Through identification with him, the African can fantasy [sic] unconsciously or consciously, being as white as the dominant group and always winning over them. The film likewise gave him an opportunity to learn the popular skill of boxing, which he could then use immediately in intra-African fighting (ibid., 261–2). In Southern Rhodesia, anthropologist B.W. Gussman carried out a similar study in Bulawayo. There he found the local cinema showed “invariably a Western” and often repeated the same films frequently because there were so few available. As Gussman described it: All films shown to Africans in Bulawayo are censored by a special Board who have the right to ban a film or to cut it where and how they think fit. This board takes its duties seriously and a high proportion of films offered by the exhibitors are refused altogether. Many of those that are passed are so cut as to destroy their continuity completely. … Partly as a result of the Census Board’s activities and also because of the lack of any large-scale film production for African audiences, there is a severe shortage of suitable films. Many films are, therefore, often repeated. Gussman concluded cowboy films had no apparent negative influence on their audiences: There is no evidence that the Western films or those shewing E ­ uropeans in an undesirable light do the harm to the African audiences that some critics would suggest. If the African wishes to see the ­European in a bad light he does not have to go to the pictures (Gussman 1953, 240). In the Durban area of South Africa, an African anthropologist named ­Absalom Vilakazi touched on the influence of Westerns in his study of Zulu urban communities. Vilakazi found the Westerns exerted a pronounced influence

20  James Burns on the young men in urban areas (Vilakazi 1962). Unlike ­Powdermaker and Gussman, Vilakazi explored the cultural influence of the Westerns on the urban Zulu populations, rather than simply considering the question of whether or not they encouraged crime, and demonstrated the cowboy image helped shape the aesthetics of township gang culture. Over the past two decades, several scholars have become interested in these debates about African film reception. Charles Ambler’s path-­breaking 2001 article about cinema-going in Northern Rhodesia was one of the first scholarly works to recognize the influence of cowboy films on ­African audiences. He was also one of the first to evaluate the popularity of these films. Arguing against the idea of a resistant spectatorship, Ambler suggested Africans constructed their own narratives from the heavily edited films that defy neat categorization. According to Ambler: “African audiences seem to have appropriated elements of westerns and other action movies in ways that subverted the narrative and racially defined principles of censorship” (Ambler 2001, 86). This was in part because of the unique conditions of spectatorship in the mining compounds. As he observed: “The people who eagerly attended outdoor cinemas on the Copperbelt generally had little if any formal education; not many had traveled outside the territory; most were little educated to the symbols, customary behaviors, and settings that contextualized these films for Western audiences or even for relatively ­better-off and better-educated Africans across southern Africa. Certainly, few moviegoers had sufficient knowledge of colloquial spoken American or ­British English to comprehend the dialogue – even if it had been discernable in the noisy atmosphere that characterized these film shows” (ibid., 82). As Ambler recognizes, this analysis is not applicable for all of Southern Africa, as the literate, cosmopolitan movie fans of Soweto or District Six certainly had a better frame of reference for relating the movies to other aspects of American culture. But it does illuminate the challenge of evaluating what these films meant to their African consumers. Historian Glenn Reynolds has provided the most extensive and nuanced exploration of the cowboy phenomenon in colonial Africa in his article “Playing Cowboys and Africans: Hollywood and the Cultural Politics of African Identity.” Reynolds relates the enthusiasm of Africans for Westerns to the broader process of adapting to the industrial regiment of the mining compounds. As Reynolds puts it: “Africans appropriated the paraphernalia and panache of the Wild West hero as resources for constructing, ironically, new urban identities to distance themselves from those left behind in local villages.” Reynolds also suggest that colonial critics were correct to perceive in the cowboy an “anti-colonial or proletarian resistance channelled through African film-going practices” (Reynolds 2005, 407) . The 1930s were the great age of the Hollywood Western. During and after the war it gave way to other genres, including war films (particularly popular during the 1940s and 1950s), biopics, film noir, and epics. Though they continued to be produced in the 1950s and 1960s, the torrent of cheap Westerns abated and African movie viewers began to consume new genres

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  21 from all over the world. In the townships of South Africa the raffish gangster films of the 1940s and 1950s supplanted the Western in the enthusiasm of African youth. (See Nixon.) Among white audiences at first-run theaters, by the 1950s the Western was relegated to Saturday afternoon children’s matinées. (See Jowett 2006, 12.) In the mining compounds, the Westerns retained their popularity into the early 1960s7. But by the end of that decade, the great era of the cowboy picture was clearly winding down. For much of Southern Africa, movie-going began to decline precipitously in the 1960s. Only in South Africa, where television was forbidden by the apartheid government until 1976, did a robust movie-going culture remain (Tomaselli 1988). And there, strict censorship and a governmentsubsidised internal film industry that produced cheap crime films for black audiences eclipsed the popularity of the Western. However, the cowboy’s image remained strong in Southern Africa after Africans were no longer seeing Westerns in the cinema. But the Western retained its hold on popular culture, and continued to surface in such diverse places as comic books (see Saint) and beer commercials (see Milani 2013, 134) right up to the end of apartheid in 1990. Today the cowboy’s image endures in Southern Africa, appearing in everything from restaurant chains8 in South Africa to biker gangs in Botswana.9 Notes 1. The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 by the unification of Natal, The Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, and the South African Republic. 2. As of 1929 there were regular shows at “native locations” in Durban, Pretoria, Benoni, Randfontein, and Krugersdorp, as well as at mines throughout South Africa and the Rhodesias. See Christianity and the Natives of South Africa: A yearbook of South African missions 1929. General Missionary Conference of South Africa (Lovedale Institutions Press, 1929) p. 148. 3. For example, of the dozens of new movies advertised in Southern Rhodesia between December 1937 and February 1938, fewer than one in eight were Westerns. 4. For example, the 1931 release of The Arizonian (1931) did not show in S­ outhern Rhodesia’s main theatres until 1937. 5. This “resistant spectatorship” was articulated by some African viewers and by the cinema scholar Manthia Diawara. It has also surfaced in post-colonial representations of African movie-going. See Flickering Shadows (Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 157. 6. For a discussion of colonial theories of African spectatorship, see my article “Watching Africans Watch Movies: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa” in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, June 2000. 7. As late as 1960 the Western still dominated the Copper belt in Northern ­Rhodesia and in urban Southern Rhodesia. See Flickering Shadows. 8. For example, the founder of the South African fast-food chains Golden Spur and Steers, which share a Western motif, sought to play on African enthusiasm for American popular culture when he started the business in the 1970s. See “Real

22  James Burns Business made real good: The story behind Steers.” http://www.mweb.co.za/ Entrepreneur/ViewArticle/tabid/3162/Article/7947/Real-business-made-realgood-The-story-behind-Steers.aspx. Accessed Sept. 1, 2014. 9. For example, today in Botswana, cowboy outfits remain popular with African biker gangs. See “Botswana’s Heavy Metal Cowboys.” High Life, Jan. 2013. http://highlife.ba.com/Curious/New-tribes-Botswanas-heavy-metal-cowboys. html. Accessed Sept. 1, 2014.

References Ambler, Charles, 2001. “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia.” American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 1, 86. Brennan, James R. 2005. “Democratizing Cinema and Censorship in Tanzania, 1920–1980.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38:3, ­September 1, 488–511. Burns, James. 2013. Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1985–1940. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Burns, James. 2002 Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial ­Zimbabwe. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bottomore, Stephen. 1996. “The Coming of the Cinema.” History Today, 46, ­January 3, 14. Coplan, David B. 1985. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 124. Couzens, Tim. 1982. “Moralizing Leisure Time: The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg 1918–1936.” Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: Africa class formation, culture and consciousness 1870–1930, Richard Rathbone and Shula Marks, eds. Longman, London. Didier Gondola, Charles. 2012. “Tropical Cowboys Western Movies and the Making of Kinshasa’s Bills.” Afropolis—city, media, art, Kerstin Pinther, Larissa Förster, and Christian Hanussek, eds. Berlin: Goethe Institute, 218–223. Georg, Odile. 2007–8. “The Cinema, a Place of Tension in Colonial Africa: Film Censorship in French West Africa.” Afrika Zamani, 15 & 16, 27–43. Gordon, Rob. 2005. “Battle for the Bioscope in Namibia.” African identities 3(1), 37–50. Gussman, Boris. 1953. “African Life in an urban area: A study of the African ­Population of Bulawayo.” Bulawayo: Federation of African Welfare Societies in S­ outhern Rhodesia. Hair, P.E. H. 2001. “The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (Ca. 1950).” History in Africa, 28, 83–93. Hertz, Carl. 1924. A Modern Mystery Merchant: the Trials, Tricks, and Travels of Carl Hertz. London: Hutchinson & Co. Jowett, Garth. 2006. “Apartheid and Socialization: Movie-Going In Cape Town, 1943–1958.” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. Milani, Tommaso M. 2013. “A New South African Man? Beer, Masculinity, and Social Change.” Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lilian Lem Atanga, Sibonile Edith Ellece, Lia Litosseliti, and Jane Sutherland, eds. John Benjamins Publishing. Nasson, Bill. 1989. “She preferred living in a cave with Harry the Snake catcher” – Towards an Oral History of District Six.” Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality

The Western in Colonial Southern Africa  23 and Culture in 19th- and 20th-century South Africa. Philip Bonner, Isabel Hofmeyer, Deborah James, and Tom Lodge, eds. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Press, 285–309. Nixon, Rob. 1994. Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African culture and the world beyond. Routledge, New York. Parsons, Neil. 2004. “The Kanye Cinema Experiment, 1944–46.” http://www.thuto. org/ubh/cinema/kanye-cinema.htm. Accessed Sept. 12, 2014. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1962. Copper Town: Changing Africa; the Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. New York: Harper & Row. Reynolds, Glenn. 2005. “Playing Cowboys and Africans: Hollywood and the ­Cultural Politics of African Identity.” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25:3, 399–426. Saint, Lily, 2010. “Not Western: Race, Reading, and the South African Photocomic.” The Journal of Southern African Studies, December, 939–958. Tomaselli, Kenyan. 1988. The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South ­African Film. Chicago: Smyrna/Lake View Press. van Onselen, Charles. 1976. Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933. Pluto Press, London. Vasey, Ruth, 1997. The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Madison: ­University of Wisconsin Press. Vilakazi, Absolom. 1962. Zulu Transformations: a study of the dynamics of social change. Durban: University of Natal Press.

Journals Bulawayo Chronicle 27 May, 1923 p. 8. Bulawayo Chronicle 27 November, 1913, p. 9. The Moving Picture World 4 October, 1913 Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 36. Stage and Screen 18 September, 1920 p. 7. Rhodesian Herald 6 June, 1913 p. 7. Nyasaland Times 15 February, 1917 p. 1. Straits Times 12 November, 1912 “All British Films.” ‘Movies’ Jamaica Gleaner 9 December, 1913 “Movies.”

Archival documents Zimbabwean National Archives (ZNA) ZNAS2784/3/A-Z. ‘Cinematographic ­Censorship,’ C.N.C. H.M. Jackson to Superintendent of Natives, Matabeleland, 13 January, 1930. “Bioscope: Bulawayo Municipal Location”. Zimbabwean National Archives (ZNA) ZNAS2784/3/A-Z. “Cinematographic Censorship,” Carbutt, Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, 10 January, 1930 to CNC Salisbury. “Bioscope: Bulawayo Municipal Location.” Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland Parliamentary Debate, Vol. 1, 1954–55, column 2278, 5 August 1954.

2 Cassava Westerns Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa Tsitsi Jaji

This essay considers how mythologies of the outlaw from classic and, to a lesser extent, Spaghetti Westerns have circulated in Africa, generating a variety of local tropes across media including film, photo-comics, popular fiction, and novels. Taking a set of West African iterations of the outlaw figure in the period leading to and immediately following independence (1952–1972), new insights about popular critical spectatorship and the insurrectionary potential of the ludic emerge. Rather than revisiting the rich body of historical work on the reception of Westerns, I outline how leisure functioned as an important alternative site of public civility where non-elite African subjects could play out scenarios of personal and political freedom in which they were central actors.1 Such popular forms opened up performance spaces beyond the moral high ground of anti-colonial nationalism, allowing for important future critiques that stood outside the center of legal systems largely inherited from the colonial era – the postcolony, in Achille Mbembe’s terms. My approach to the Western is informed by Karin Barber’s seminal work on popular culture and particularly popular audiences in Africa. In her 1997 essay “Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa,” Barber notes popular art forms elicit creative acts of interpretation, consumption, and reconfiguration that audiences engage in when they make meaning out of such forms, and these activities have as much to teach us as about the popular arts in Africa as texts, performances, and objects themselves. She cautions: “We should not decide too hastily that works which appear conservative are completely and impenetrably so. They may conceal criticisms of, or reservations about, the status quo which people have good reasons not to express openly” (7). Barber’s attention to audience practices coheres with the contemporaneous call in Judith Mayne’s Cinema and Spectatorship to embrace the insights of actual audiences rather than abstracted subjects of spectatorship. Where Mayne shows how such approaches open new approaches to feminist film criticism, Barber demonstrates how we might attend more closely to the sensibilities and critical negotiations of African film viewers.2 A similar turn is made in Jacqueline Stewart’s work on black movie spectatorship in early to mid-20th century Chicago, and it is in this vein that I turn my attention to black African audiences consuming largely white-cast Westerns to their

Cassava Westerns  25 own ends, inventing, in the meantime, alternative and counter-readings of the genre. I find Lily Saint’s attention to the ethics of cultural consumption and the practices of identification with “representatives of power” timely and productive, and build upon her rich work on African Western films and photo-comics. However, I am less concerned with the trans-racial dimensions of African identification with white cowboys and more interested in how classic Western scenarios provide allegorical scrims onto which unruly and often anarchic proposals for subjecthood are projected by artists and audiences (Saint 205). As Steve Neale has noted, genre in film, as in other media, operates as a system that grounds anticipation, with audiences seeking two forms of verisimilitude: first, a believable visual and audio representation of characters, landscape, and the like – in other words, an understanding of film as uniquely realist. And secondly and also importantly, a conforming to the conventions of a given genre – in other words, a generic verisimilitude. As Neale notes: “Regimes of verisimilitude vary from genre to genre. (Bursting into song is appropriate, therefore probable – therefore intelligible, therefore believable – in a musical. Less so in a thriller or a war film.) As such these regimes entail rules, norms and laws” (46). In this essay I am interested in both the narrative function of the law and its open defiance in what I call Cassava Westerns but also in a meta-question about how African artists tangle with the “rules, norms and laws” of the Western to reinvent the genre. The essay works through a series of scenes of encounter. I begin with two vivid and sometimes overlooked sources on African spectator practices: the accounts of Western screenings in Accra in the travel narratives of ­Richard Wright (Black Power, 1954) and George Lamming (Pleasure of Exile, 1960). Wright and Lamming track how viewers not only responded vocally to action on screen but also moved swiftly to role-play, re-enacting scenes on the streets outside the theaters. Their notes on role-play are vividly illustrated in Mustapha Alassane’s remarkable Afro-Western Le retour de l’aventurier. Released in 1966, Alassane’s medium-length fiction film has often been read as a scene of conflict between a village’s gerontocratic traditional power structure and a band of youths corrupted by Western modernity, as symbolized by their adoption of cowboy dress. However, a close reading of the plot shows competing codes of morality and honor do not map neatly onto a dichotomy between elders and youth but rather the tropes of the Western enable a range of pleasures that exposes and brings to crisis the question of who holds a monopoly over violence in modern African states immediately following independence and what the relationship between rural and urban legal codes might be. A similar move from the reception of imported Westerns to the invention of local variations is legible in a shift from the circulation of Pedro (a s­ yndicated Western comic with no African content), published serially in the widely circulating Francophone magazine Bingo in 1959, to the genderbending Reine des Bandits photo-comic (1969) featuring an African Bandit

26  Tsitsi Jaji Queen and her partners. Returning to an Anglophone context, I consider the border-jumping Adventures of the Four Stars in J.A. Okeke Anyichie’s Onitsha novella (c. 1971), where the generic conventions of the Western seem occluded by other forms of crime and gangster fiction, and weigh why ­Anyichie insists so ardently that his licence to narrate emerges from ­“profound practical experience of what happened in the Old ­Western ­Countries, the era of the Texas gunslinger, the Cow Boys and the Red ­Indians” (Anyichie 4). What are the pleasures of playing the Western outlaw and how, writing in the wake of the Biafran war, might the world of the Wild West serve ­Anyichie with imaginative resources so distinctive from the more elite writings of his Nigerian contemporaries, including Achebe, Soyinka, Clark-Bekederemo, and Okigbo? My title, “Cassava Western,” is a playful take on the familiar Spaghetti Western and responds to a rising scholarly interest in the Western as a global genre. Cassava is a widely consumed starch used in parts of Africa and the Caribbean but also a catachrestic and insufficient synechdoche to encompass these entire regions. Cassava thickens on cooking into a stiff and gummy texture much as the black takes on the Western complicate dominant assumptions about the genre in this essay. Cassava Western serves as a shorthand for local adaptations of elements from a global genre. The fact that Westerns circulated narratives of banditry and alternative justice in the visual medium of cinema, rather than as texts, meant that in regions where literacy was limited, they reinforced a popular media landscape where visual content was highly valued, as evidenced by the rise of illustrated or pictorial magazines like Drum, Bingo, Zonk, Parade, and others, beginning in the late 1940s. Indeed, the popularity of film is evident in the success of African Film Magazine and other photocomic series that transferred the logic of cinema to the graphic page. Films had been subsidized first by colonial and mission officials and later by a network of local and American companies operating as the AMPECA (American Motion Picture Export Company - Africa), and its potential influence was recognized by colonial and early independent governments as well as by visiting writers.3 Invariably, colonial and other international observers noted the popularity of Westerns with surprise, if not alarm, fearing the violence and competing systems of morality featured in the films might inspire all sorts of rebellion in their predominantly young, male, non-elite urban audiences. West Africans have embraced the pleasures of role-playing outlaw figures actively engaged in processes of dispossession – whether of money, cattle, or land – to work through local crises of material and legal security, increasingly policed frontiers, and the fluidities and strictures of gender as theorized from the South. My focus on a particular set of thematic concerns in the Western reflects a set of theoretical and historical concerns with law, legality, criminality, and the legitimacy of the state that have been apparent in work of thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Mahmood Mamdani, and Jean and John Comaroff.4 As the Comaroffs have pointed out, the line between “politics and crime, legitimate and illegitimate agency … is a frontier in

Cassava Westerns  27 the struggle to assert sovereignty or to disrupt it, to expand or contract the limits of the il/licit, to sanction or outlaw violence.” With constitutions and governance structures largely cobbled out of colonial models, “most ­postcolonies … bear the historical traces of overrule that either suspended legalities or deployed them to authorize predation and criminalize opposition” (Comaroff and Comaroff, Law and Disorder, 11). While they trace recent formulations of law and disorder to post-Cold War neoliberalism, which cloaks hyperexploitation in the guise of legality and regulation, the Comaroffs usefully identify the figuration of crime as a site where many of the most pressing crises of decolonializing citizenship and subjectivity come to a head. Grounding their discussion in C.L.R. James’s study of detective fiction in American Civilization, they remind us how reckonings with crime conducted outside the state’s policing and judicial structures “made it possible to imagine a social order wrought by heroic action in the cause of a greater moral good” (Comaroff and Comaroff 277). While the differences between detective and Western genres are significant, I would argue the outlaw, as a figure who instantiates an alternative legal and moral code, also served as an important imaginative motor for reparative justice. Indeed the outlaw’s justice held more ambitious promise for non-elites than the immediate post-independence governing parties, who kept large portions of colonial legal codes intact even in their new constitutions. As Alexie Tcheuyap notes, crime in African film has not garnered much attention but the prevalence of gun and interpersonal violence in Westerns makes it a central category. For Tcheuyap: “Homicides and manslaughters, especially when they target lecherous postcolonial authorities, speak to a new social, aesthetic, and political order in which legal and social concepts of crime take completely new rationality” and thus one reason to attend to crime in African film is to note “the ways it fosters new subject positions and challenges dualistic thinking” (98). Tcheuyap argues that in postcolonial Africa, where the police force is often repressive and haunted by colonial power relations, readers and viewers do not “sympathize with the ‘law and order’ which structures the genre. They instead sympathize with the dissident criminal who ensures collective salvation” (103). It is this insight into the sympathetic role of the dissident criminal that I will elaborate in the following pages, through West African instances of the classic Western figure of the mysterious outsider who acts outside the laws of the state.

The Pleasures of Exile: Wright and Lamming on Cowboy Spectatorship in Accra In 1954, Richard Wright published his reflections on a trip he had made to the then Gold Coast in a travelogue entitled Black Power. The book focused largely on the political energies of the day, with rare insights into the private exchanges of power brokers surrounding Kwame Nkrumah on the cusp

28  Tsitsi Jaji of independence. In his interactions with less elite Ghanaians, Wright had become aware of how influential Hollywood movies were. Cinemas there had been established during the colonial era, and James Burns notes that by as early as the 1930s, there were eight theaters in the Gold Coast showing movies to approximately twenty-five hundred people per week.5 From 1939 onward, mobile cinema units expanded viewership beyond urban centers and thus Wright discovered a distinctive Ghanaian fan culture during his travels. After attending a screening of a Western, Wright offers a detailed account of spectator practices at “the biggest movie house in Accra,” an account worth quoting at length, given how rare such perspectives on local African cinema cultures of the period are. Entering the dimly lit smoke-filled theater Wright notes: I sat and became aware that an uproar was going on about me and I looked at the screen to see what was causing it. … [The audience watching a beer advertisement] seemed amused no end to hear an alien voice telling them about something that was a daily familiarity in their lives. This quality of uproarious detachment continued when the main feature was projected. Indeed, the laughter, the lewd comments, and the sudden shouts rose to such a pitch that I could not hear the shadowy characters say their lines. … It soon became clear that the story was of minor interest to them. It was upon each incident that they were concentrating with such furious noise. … It was a Western movie, packed, as they say, with action. Wright views the audience commentary as “a Greek chorus,” especially animated in scenes of violence, whether fistfights or gunfights, adding its own vocal sound effects to the action on screen regardless of “whose hands held the smoking guns – the hand of the law or outlaw” (215). Films were shown repeatedly, and Wright remarks the audience “derive[s] great joy from seeing the same action performed time and again!” and greets the entrance of a familiar character “like an old friend” (215). He goes on to note that scenes filled with suspense caught them up totally. … Elements of surprise delighted them, when the hero’s bullets had run out and the trigger clicked on empty chambers, the tongues in the audience went: “Click, click, click. … ” The impossible made them stand up and cheer … [with such enthusiasm that they] drowned the soundtrack (215). The visit to the Accra cinema leaves Wright “a little dazed” but also prompts him to distance himself as a self-avowedly modern diasporic subject from the curiously generalized imaginary of the African, whose sense of time is oriented not towards the future but rather oscillates “between

Cassava Westerns  29 the present and the past” (215). Reading some sixty years later, Wright’s tone seems bracingly condescending, especially when we recall that this distancing gesture also had material political implications,6 for Wright’s last act in the Gold Coast was to deposit a four-page memorandum outlining privileged information about the Gold Coast political scene of interest to the State Department, including the degree to which Nkrumah’s CPP was “a ­Communist-minded political party.” Yet it is Wright’s letter to Nkrumah on his departure from Ghana that closes Black Power. In it, he urges Nkrumah to lead G ­ hanaians in finding their own paths, their own values: “Above all, feel free to i­mprovise!” ­Re-reading his account of the audience at the ­Western movie, it would appear the impulse towards improvisation found strong, spontaneous, collective expression in the ­cinemas of Accra. Writing six years later, George Lamming reiterates Wright’s fascination with the identification of African audiences with cowboys at the movie theater. Describing the everyday routines of fan culture, he writes: “Opposite Hotel de Kingsway where the taxis wait for hire, you will hear the young men speaking about the films they saw last night. They do not discuss it – for discussion is a kind of dismissal of the thing you are discussing – they dramatise the contents of their memory” (167). While Lamming overlays his observations with an extended discussion of postcolonial resonances with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a theme that runs throughout the book, he is ultimately interested in the gulf between the ludic possibilities and imaginative scope of fan re-enactment, where these young men can re-member themselves as participants in a heroic narrative rewarded by “the Sheriff’s virgin Miranda,” and Accra’s regulated space where the newly independent state maintains its monopoly on violence and polices the boundaries of private property. The pretend world of re-enactment tips into an actual fistfight, unleashing the full weight of the law: Stranger-Man broke Bad Man’s nose; made a bloody mess of his own shirt; and for the first time they found themselves surrounded by an audience. The police had arrived. … But how could the Law recapture the truth of each moment which those Boys had lived, once from memory and later as fact? When the easy-going magistrate asks what happened, they are dumb. … That silence is evidence of those Boys’ speechlessness in the whole predicament. They don’t know where to begin the explanation. The easiest way out is to say guilty … for the Law is exceedingly literate; but it cannot see. It has no sight. A mother will weep; a cousin will take some fufu, kenke and salted nuts to the cell; but society will not notice their absence from this corner. Vagrant, free and defenseless as the birds, they are learning to travel from moment to moment, from accident to accident. Their desires may grow lawless as the celluloid gangsters they dramatise; for their energy is great, but their hands are idle (172–3).

30  Tsitsi Jaji It is with these words Lamming closes the section of The Pleasures of Exile devoted to his stay in Ghana, suggesting that for him, the Western as a genre can do unique work in exposing the gaps between acts of individual self-fashioning and subject formation among a generation of urban underemployed youth whose senses are fully engaged by the global media of modernity and yet whose imaginative capacities are left unfulfilled by an economy that offers them no meaningful work and a state that fails to recognize its citizens as legible subjects but rather extends patterns of predation and exclusion that outlive the official practices of extractive colonialism. The pleasures of re-enacting the Western rapidly collapse onto the consequences to which their bodies under arrest are subject. However, Lamming astutely notes the moment of arrest is also the moment in which Bad-Man and Stranger-Man suddenly have an audience. For witnesses on the street, the arrest is experienced vicariously as what Alison Young has named the “pleasure of becoming a legal subject” (13). However, as the moment where the state’s failure to provide for its citizenry, whether employment or provisions while imprisoned, this moment is full of political potential where, free and alert to the revolutionary possibilities of the present, the young men and their extended family-support networks are in touch with desires that may exceed the law. This, I would suggest, accounts for why Lamming is far less interested in suggesting Stranger-Man and Bad-Man’s choice of a Western as imaginative grist demonstrates alienated tastes than in excavating the scene as emblematic of his strongest impressions from his sojourn in Ghana.

Mustapha Alassane’s Le retour de l’aventurier: Outlaws on the Range Nigerian Mustapha Alassane’s Le retour de l’aventurier, a ­medium-length feature film released in 1966, is the first and most original African ­ ­improvisation on the Western genre. As Alassane himself has specified, it is not an “African Western, but rather a parody of the Western film genre” and as such, much of the pleasure it generates in viewers depends on our recognition of deformations of familiar Western tropes. The film’s plot ­follows a group of youth who, clothed in the cowboy outfits their recently returned friend, Jimi, has brought them from abroad, enact s­ everal ­archetypal ­Western scenes, rustling livestock, fighting in a “saloon,” brawling and shooting each other over a breach of honor, and confronting the collective ­authority of the ­village with all the disdain of outlaws for a sheriff. Le retour de l’aventurier is not merely a parable of alienated modernity or the anomies of youth pitted against a patriarchal order of tradition whose elders carry the day. Rather, the relationships are agonistic among the v­ illage youth and much of the chaos they provoke in the village comes from a troublemaker named John Kelley (S. Boubakar), who shows his true colors before Jimi, the adventurer, ever returns.

Cassava Westerns  31 For the parody’s comic effect to work, a gap between convention and realization must be perceptible to the audience. Numerous film critics point to Alassane’s distinctive comic genius. Marie Benesova notes “his visual impressionism, clear presentation of the story line, and sense of humor,” Guy Hennebelle and Catherine Ruelle find the film “delightfully satirical,” and Lizelle Bisschoff calls it “hilarious.”7 Yet critics have also judged it as clumsy and poorly acted, with intended spontaneity coming across as “spluttering.”8 I would argue that attending to the parodic intentions of Alassane’s art allows viewers the pleasure of recognizing the gaps between slick production values of classic and even B Westerns on the one hand and a scenario that focuses on the play of pretense as well as the more straitened production context of Le retour as a crucial element of the film’s project. Alassane succeeds in aestheticizing an amateur acting style, sound effects for punches that are far from realistic, and comically stilted timing in choreographed fistfights as part of a slapstick approach to the Western. Flirting with the conventions of the genre through such set pieces as the saloon scene, the brawl in a stream, and the scenes of horse and cattle rustling demonstrates Alassane’s familiarity with the cinematic rules of the Western as well as his expectation that these rules are familiar to his viewers, if not to the characters in the film. Yet Alassane casts himself as an outlaw director and smuggles contraband narrative twists into the Western, hijacking it in order to tell a complex story about a set of young people whose rivalries and rebellions pre-date Jimi’s arrival with a suitcase full of cowboy outfits and about a set of elders who are not above using deception to incite violence among the youth in the name of restoring order. The film opens with shots of a group of young men playing ball in an unnamed village. Dressed in traditional tunics, they jostle each other for the ball and manage to tangle with an elder community member as well as a young woman, Reine Christine (S. Zalika). The young men pause to admire a saddle one of them, Black Cooper (Y. Ibrahim), has procured for his father. When they hear their friend Jimi (M. Djingarey) will be returning from abroad, John Kelley proposes to steal a sheep from a neighbor and roast it as méchoui to welcome him. The film cuts to an image of a plane landing, then to the young returnee, Jimi, seated in the back of a taxi, commenting on how much the city has grown as images of the wide streets of Niamey flash by. He is dropped off in front of a multi-story apartment building but the remainder of the film’s action takes place in the more rural setting seen in the opening footage, and Jimi is soon seen disembarking from a lorry with suitcase in tow, having left the city behind to reunite with his friends. Jimi has brought cowboy outfits as gifts, and although they quickly take to his directorial instructions, donning their costumes and accepting the nicknames he assigns as if casting a movie, the film suggests Jimi’s friends are not familiar with Westerns. One friend asks, “Mais qu’est-ce que c’est tout ça (But what’s all this)?” to which Jimi replies, “On appelle ça des tenues cowboys (These are what are

32  Tsitsi Jaji called cowboy outfits).” Shooting lessons and an ad hoc decision to secure horses – or, as a temporary stop-gap measure, a donkey – are taken. While it is certainly true the friends engage in multiple acts of theft and violence in their new guise as cowboys, critics have downplayed the fact that much of the trouble is instigated by John Kelly, the young man who is already well enough known as a troublemaker that Jimi expresses no surprise when he hears it was John Kelley who stole the sheep for the welcome feast. In other words, the cowboy outfits do not introduce a new pattern of misbehavior and disrespect for the community’s moral codes but rather add a stylized performative dimension to generational tensions, and ironically, even those members of the group who are less confrontational become highly visible as part of the posse.

Figure 2.1  Black Cooper (Y. Ibrahim) practices drawing a gun in Le retour de l’aventurier (1966), dir. Moustapha Alassane.

If we consider Alassane’s film not simply a moralistic tale about the alienating effects of imitating exogenous cultural values – and surely, a stern lecture would be a more effective way to deliver such a message than a film as entertaining and visually engaging as Le retour – but rather as an investigation into the pleasures of cinematic spectatorship, role-play, and experimenting with outlawed behaviors and comportments, we discover a nuanced theoretical lens with which to examine the appeal of the Western in post-independence Niger and beyond. The cowboy outfits offer sartorial pleasures, marking the group as part of a close-knit sub-culture but also individuating each one through differences in color, fabric pattern, texture, and the like. Dress becomes a marker of the flexibility, or even lability, of

Cassava Westerns  33 identity, and the camera’s close-ups linger on details in clothing, such as a shot from the rear focusing on bullets in a belt or the black leather coat that sets John Kelley apart from his comrades. This use of close-ups, along with landscape shots that capture the posse on horseback and the soundtrack dominated by an acoustic-guitar cowboy song by Enos Amelonlon, display the cinematic conventions of the genre but with quirky differences that keep the parodic dimension live, as when the mounted posse rides alongside a startled giraffe. When the group is summoned before the elders after John Kelley assaults the owner of the roasted sheep, John Kelley adds insult to injury by plucking the red tasseled hat lined in Arabic sayings off the head of the village chief and primping as he models it instead. Black Cooper goes further, and far from expressing contrition, he announces to the elders that it is good they now know the cowboys by sight, for they never let anyone forget them, adding: “Garde-nous une place dans votre emploi de temps (Save us a spot in your daily schedule).” Black Cooper’s bluster recalls a classic Western outlaw boasting of the bounty on his head, but it turns parodic when, in the next scene, we witness him shedding his holster and cowboy hat to adopt the posture of the dutiful son (Ibrahim) as he visits his father and shows him the saddle he has obtained for him. It is eventually this filial piety the elders use to outsmart the young cowboys. Tensions between the young men escalate as Billy Walter fights John ­Kelley over accusations of being a thief, first by demanding change for a drink he hasn’t paid for in the saloon and later by agreeing with Black Cooper that John Kelley has stolen his father’s horse. The elders manipulate the tools of the posse’s self-construction as cowboys with a code of honor to trick the posse into changing course. They strip Black Cooper’s father of his boubou (robe) and present it to him, in the presence of his friend Casse-Tout, as proof that John Kelley has murdered his father. Ibrahim feels honor bound to avenge his father’s death, and displays his gun before the elders as a promise of action to be taken, with Casse-Tout brandishing his own weapon in support. It is clear, as the elders do not raise any objections, they have joined the semiotic world of the Western, playing on the codes of honor and bravura they have decoded in order to incite a resolution that suits their interests. Indeed, the young men go on to take vengeance. Rachel Langford interprets the film’s ending as leaving only two options to the surviving young people: bow to patriarchal order, as Black Cooper does in returning to his identity as Ibrahim, or go into exile, as Jimi and Reine Christine do. In Langford’s view, Reine Christine finds liberation from gender norms in departing for further adventures with Jimi, who “has been too long in the West to give up the destructive pleasures of individualism for the quietude of patriarchal village life” (Langford 86). However, I would suggest that attention to the parodic dimensions of the film, as well as to the ruses that both the elders and the youth engage in, might call for a less moralizing interpretation, one that lingers in the pleasure of playing the outlaw.

34  Tsitsi Jaji As Bingo magazine’s film correspondent noted in 1969, referencing the global youth movements of 1968: through this uncommon story which Mustapha Alassane uses to paint a veritable social tableau where we must understand that African youth, like other young people across the globe, long to escape the confines of everyday life to live an adventurous life beyond custom and tradition. Two years ahead of its time it was a work on youth uprising (Bingo 48, my translation).9 Adventure, for Alassane, seems less a matter of choosing modernity over tradition and more a question of the imaginative potential of the extraordinary. And the cinematic language of the Western – the costumes, the possibility of shifting focus between broad landscapes and intimate close-ups, the mobilities enabled by horses and other livestock, the existential absolutes made tangible in interpersonal violence – perfectly captures that potential. Playing the outlaw renders accessible vivid modes of subjectivity to characters whose youth and gender disqualify them from participating in the civic life of the village as political subjects or in its economic modes of production except as filial lieutenants.

Of B Movies, Photo-Comics and Trashy Novels My focus thus far on the figure of the outlaw has elided one of the more unsettling factors in the popularity of Westerns in Africa and, indeed, elsewhere on the continent: the fact that spectators are largely reported to have identified vocally with white cowboys in a genre well known for its ­fabulation of violent settler colonial processes on the frontiers of conquest. In this section I want to note how popular print tracks a shift from a passive republication of internationally syndicated Western comics that did, indeed, traffic in the paternalist attitudes of U.S. settler colonial romance in the 1950s to more complicated rewritings of the genre through shortlived African iterations that suggest the Manichean qualities of the Western made it an attractive form for rehearsing other allegories of power, whether along gender, class, or criminal lines. To make this case I move from internationally syndicated Western comics published in Bingo in 1959 to an original black-cast photo-comic published in Bingo, “La Reine des Bandits” (­January 1969), to a Nigerian Onitsha novel, Adventures of the Four Stars (date unknown, c. 1971). All of these texts reflect African identification with white cowboys in ways that are disquieting for the postcolonial pieties of our current critical climate, but as Lily Saint suggests, such identification “simultaneously buttresses a dichotomous moral approach to the world (good or bad cowboys or ‘Indians’), while also providing the occasion for a blurring of distinctions between racial categories, thus depleting them of their narrative and social hold” (205).10 I would add, however, that the

Cassava Westerns  35 Western as genre and topos also comes close to exposing some of the most fundamental contradictions in formal conceptions of personhood, property, and sovereignty in American law. When African audiences have embraced U.S. cultural commodities as signs of an alternative to the formerly colonial presence, they are often astutely reading a history of representations of the U.S. in imperial adventure films that portray it, as Shohat and Stam explain, as “at once an anticolonial revolutionary power in relation to Europe, and a colonizing, h ­ egemonic power in relation to Native American and [enslaved] African peoples” (113). The ­Western has naturalized the genocidal violence through which much of the U.S. was conquered and settled by focusing on the only period since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, when there were regular Native ­American raids on cavalry forts in the wake of forced displacements (1850–90), ­making the cavalry raid a “staple topos in American westerns” (Shohat and Stam 116). Alexander Weheliye reminds us this was also the era of the Dred Scott case when, in 1857, the Supreme Court decided Scott’s writ of habeas corpus was invalid, since an escaped slave could not be considered a legal person. ­Weheliye notes Chief Justice Taney’s decision proceeds by contrasting the legal possibilities of citizenship for black and Native Americans: While slaves were not accorded the status of being humans that belonged to a different nation, Indians could theoretically overcome their lawful foreignness, but only if they renounced previous forms of personhood and citizenship. … In other words, the legal conception of personhood comes with a steep price, as in this instance where being seemingly granted rights laid the groundwork for the U.S. g­ overnment’s genocidal policies against Native Americans (Weheliye 78). In other words, the recurring trope of cowboys and Indians is generated by representations of a period when U.S. legal codes of sovereignty most starkly employed “the same racializing juridical assemblage that differentially produces both black and native subjects as aberrations from Man and thus not-quite-human” (79). I would suggest it is certainly no accident that a genre fetishizing this central contradiction in a U.S. theory of sovereignty would appeal to African viewers at precisely the moment of decolonization. The period from 1954–70, from which the examples in this essay are drawn, saw African nations acquiring independence and confronted with their own challenges of dismantling colonial systems of commandement that, as Mbembe shows, were based on a departure from the common law to differentiate between citizens and subjects on a continuum that effectively left many colonial subjects outside the categories of Man (that subject of human rights) and indeed the human.11 The parallels between these colonial forms of sovereignty – which, all too soon, it was clear would live on in the constitutions and forms of governance

36  Tsitsi Jaji of most independent nations – and the U.S. situation in the era in which most classic Westerns were set were surely not lost on African audiences. As a shift takes place from circulating internationally syndicated cartoons, to locally produced narratives, to pastiches that reference the Wild West but only in the most oblique ways, one crucial dimension of each of these acts of creative repurposing is the exercise in imagining other possible worlds. This generation of alternatives, it seems to me, overrides the specific contours of what those alternatives might be and suggests variations on the topos of the Western rather than on specific films or scenarios should interest us, and it is why I want to propose that even improvisations on the outlaw figure can and should be read as tangling with the knotted mythologies of settler colonialism, masculinity, and land title. Founded by Ousmane Socé Diop in 1953, Bingo: l’illustré africain : revue mensuelle de l’activité noire (Bingo: The African Illustrated: Monthly Review of Black Affairs) appealed to a broad and varied audience. Initial issues were primarily devoted to politics, commerce, emerging new gender roles, music, and sport. As the first and, for a long time, only Francophone magazine with a global black audience, Bingo devoted considerable space to cultivating its viewers. Readers could join Club Bingo, send in photographs and captions that served as personal advertisements, submit letters, poems, and other copy, and were encouraged to participate in reader surveys on topics ranging from readers’ tastes and demographics (November 1959) to youth views on marriage (January 1960) to reasons for going to the cinema (August 1960). The visual dimension of the magazine was, as I have already noted, one of its distinguishing features, but it was not until the late 1950s that Bingo began to include graphic narratives, both hand-drawn and photo-comics, alongside the lavishly illustrated current affairs and biographical feature stories and copious advertising copy. Beginning in 1959, Bingo featured Western comics in the tradition of Italian fumetti like ­Sergio Bonelli Editore’s Tex Willer series, founded in 1948. The first, relatively short run was a hand-drawn comic strip entitled “Old Bridger et la Loyauté l’Aigle Rouge” (“Old Bridger and Red Eagle’s Loyalty”). Its panels featured dialogue boxes and a classic-style narrative in which a Native American character, who, in the model of the “noble savage,” saves the daughter of his military opponent in recognition of her kindness to his son years earlier. The dialogue print competes for visibility with the large “COPYRIGHT MONDIAL – PRESSE” announcement at the end of each row of panels, and because the magazine published several rows of comics in a single issue, this copyright notice appears as many as four times on a single page. Ironically, the globally circulating form of the Western, refracted twice already through its Italian and then French iterations in the comics form, becomes an even more emphatic sign of a global youth fan culture, offering Bingo’s readers repeated assurances of their participation in a modern coeval media culture linking them with Western fans in the metropolis and beyond. Bingo was in many respects a soft pan-Africanist publication, running cover stories on each African nation as it gained independence, featuring

Cassava Westerns  37 many of the most respected literary and political voices of the African continent and the Caribbean, and advocating a sense of solidarity with African Americans and Anglophone Africans by republishing articles form Ebony, Drum, and other magazines. But it was also undeniably a consumer magazine sustained by advertisers who were very interested in reaching an emergent African middle class. As I have described more fully elsewhere, the glossy pages of Bingo invited readers to engage in “sheen reading,” linking the glamor of entertainment-oriented stories with advertisements for products that often reproduced tropes from film or music to suggest consuming a product would render the reader/consumer modern and transfer the sheen of the new product to the surfaces of the reader/consumer’s everyday life. In this sense, the copyright notice is not a visual distraction so much as part of the sheen of the comic. Indeed, in a 1966 edition one can find a cowboy promising the Lucky Strikes man “virile satisfaction” from a “virile flavor.” For Bingo’s publishers, the added value of the Western comics was that, as a serial form, they reiterated the message so essential to the magazine’s survival: “à suivre” (more to follow) and “le prochain mois de nouvelles aventures” (next month’s new adventures) (April 1959, 21). Reading became adventuring. And the Western appears to have been a popular genre, as “Old Bridger” was followed by “Pedro,” an Opera Mundi comic featuring less cowboys-and-Indians action and more rodeo and romance. Bingo continued to explore the pleasures of visual storytelling while calibrating a growing readership with sometimes diverging expectations and adapting to changes in editorial leadership. Photo-comics based on g­ angster narratives had appeared alongside the Western comics from the late 1950s onward, and in both cases these were remarkable in part because they were almost the only images of white figures in the pages of the m ­ agazine. In 1968, Bingo introduced a series of black-cast photo-comics.12 For five issues, beginning in September 1958, a series of photo-comics or, in the magazine’s terms, roman-films were featured, treating readers to stories about a brave police commissioner confronting a gang with a flying car at its disposal, a doctor with super powers, culminating in January 1959 with the crossdressing swash-buckling Queen of the Bandits. La Reine des Bandits is a nineteen-page photo-comic the plot of which follows the widow of an infamous outlaw. She announces at his graveside that she will take vengeance on the Stranger-Man (to return to Lamming’s phrasing) who murdered her husband, declaring herself the Queen of the Bandits. She trades in her rather dowdy long dress for fitted jeans (much like Reine Christine in Le retour de l’aventurier) and a less-than-effective eye mask. In her new disguise, and sporting a short-cropped, natural hairstyle iconic overseas in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, she seems to be the very figure of a pioneering modern African woman. She commands absolute authority over her gang, who are afraid to lend her any help when she confronts her nemesis, the Stranger-Man, as they suspect she wants to exact vengeance herself. She overestimates her powers when she taunts the

38  Tsitsi Jaji lawman, prefacing a surprise kiss by bragging she will show him how a woman kills. One might argue that when the Stranger-Man overpowers her and places her entire gang under arrest, it is not simply that good wins over evil but also that a conservative set of patriarchal power relations has been reinstated. The feminist politics of La Reine des Bandits are clearly constrained. The possible intertextual links between the comic and Alassane’s film are reinforced by the final panel, where the Stranger-Man and his horse appear in the foreground, with a caption noting he departs singing while a scowling Queen of the Bandits voices her superfluous grudge: “J’espère qu’il ne revient pas!” (I hope he won’t be back), leaving us to wonder if her threat in the previous frame – “Je vous aurai un jour” (I’ll get you one of these days) – might not be laced as much with the erotic passion of the kiss as with the rancor of revenge. Readers who would read the feature article on Alassane in October 1969 may well have been reminded of this panel that had appeared nine months previously as they read of Alassane’s Western, which ends with the acoustic guitar and voice that dominate the soundtrack playing behind the wry comments: “Cheval volé, cheval fourbu. Jamais nos cavaliers ne nous ont donné tant d’émotion” (Stolen horse, lame horse. Never have our cavaliers spoiled us with such emotion). The raw value of unfiltered emotion lingers at the edges of the film, as at the edge of the photo-comic’s frame, an excess pleasure that exceeds accounting. Her demise at the hands of the law was also the demise of the photo-comic form in Bingo’s pages, but a post-mortem survey published indicated that of the four hundred readers surveyed, eighty-one percent claimed to be interested in photo-comics, although police stories, love stories, and general adventures ranked well ahead of cowboy adventures in popularity. In fact, only sixteen percent of readers expressed a preference for cowboy narratives. These votes may well have been in line with the declining popularity of Westerns more globally, and indeed it was only a few months later that Barboni’s historic film They Call Me Trinity (1970) appeared. Critics have argued the film, along with its 1971 sequel, I’m Still Called Trinity, pushed the arch-satirical potential of Spaghetti Westerns to a point of no return. While space does not allow a more extended discussion of The Adventures of the Four Stars, a Nigerian novella published sometime in the early 1970s by Onitsha-based writer J.A. Okeke Anyiechie, it is worth noting the ways in which the Western has been reduced from topos to mere surface effect, remaining an essential patina of glamorous outlaw sheen even while the plot and details of sartorial and other consumption settle on the tropes of gangster films and noir fiction, revolving around smuggling, smut, and swagger. It is all the more striking, given these references disappear after the first couple of pages, that the novel opens with an authorizing gesture that claims the Western as its genealogy: “It is with profound practical experience of what happened in the Old Western Countries, the era of Texas gunslinger, the Cow Boys [sic] and the Red Indians; the idea with which I set to write this Adventures

Cassava Westerns  39 of the Four Stars depeicting [sic] African guys in a set of Old Lagos Surburb [sic]. In the Western Countries of America they call it Wild Old West, but here in Africa, it is the era of the dope addicts and peddlers, the Bad Boys of Tinubu Square, the Wild Takwa Bar-Beach Boys and the jayi-jayi addicts of Idi-Oo. Read them in a thrilling and fascinating adventures packed in one” (4). The muscular reinvention of English in Anyichie’s linguistic and typographical style is not exceptional within the forms of popular print associated with the Onitsha market pamphlet schools that scholars like E ­ mmanuel Obiechina, Ono Onookome, and others have analyzed so expertly.13 ­However, I want to argue that the prose here also displays on its very surface the pleasure of playing the outlaw with language, fleecing English of its postcolonial authority by both relocating the axis of narrative reference from the United Kingdom to the United States and by cramming the language with orthographic, typographic, and grammatical anarchy and a glorious explosion of local monikers, nicknames, slang, and geographic markers. Bill Ashcroft might call this a postcolonial transformation, a discursive interpolation in which the oppositional dimensions of writing seem more apparent in this popular text than in the smoother prose of a more elite novel. As Ashcroft puts it: “Writing appropriates the language, commands the tools or representation; takes over the genre; claims a voice in capitalist institutions such as publishing, and in state institutions such as education, and by these means discursively constructs its audience as participant in its practices” (55). In Anyichie’s prose, the pleasures of playing the outlaw and writing outlandishly coincide. The Adventures of the Four Stars partakes in a tradition of linguistic highwaymen and fabulating wheeler-dealers initiated by Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard. Perhaps Lamming was right after all, and Caliban was the original Bad-Man, robbing Prospero’s langue to return his ill-gotten riches to the langage of adventure. Notes 1. For a more anthropological or historical take, see Ambler, Burns, Gondola, and Powdermaker. 2. See especially Judith Mayne’s discussion of the “Spectatorship Reconsidered” and “Paradoxes of Cinema” in Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993), 53–76, 77–102. Mayne offers a succinct discussion of the ways in which gaps between address and reception generate a range of spectator stances and proffer audiences opportunities for “negotiation” that are significantly more complex than the dichotomies between “critical” or “radical” viewing practices on the one hand and “complicit” ones on the other (see p. 91–102). 3. Lynne Macedo’s study, Fiction and Film: The Influence of Cinema on Writers from Trinidad and Jamaica, traces a detailed history of a similar phenomenon in the Caribbean, building from meticulous research into cinema construction,

40  Tsitsi Jaji audience numbers, and newspaper listings to construct a convincing case for the significance of film and the particular popularity of the Western. 4. See especially Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, Mahmood Mamdani’s ­Citizen and Subject, and John and Jean Comaroff’s Theory from the South. 5. See James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940, 150. 6. See Hazel Rowley, “Richard Wright’s Africa.” 7. See Lizelle Bischoff, “Recovering lost African film classics” (2007), cited in Lily Saint. 8. See Françoise Pfaff’s summary of criticism in Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio-Bibliography. 9. Bingo: “Un jeune cinéaste nigérien: Mustapha Alassane ‘réinvente’ le cinéma.” Oct. 1969, 48–49. Original: “à travers cette histoire hors du commun M ­ ustapha Alassane en profite pour brosser un véritable tableau social où il nous faut comprendre que les jeunes Africains comme les autres jeunes du monde entier veulent sortir du cadre de la vie de tous les jours pour vivre une vie aventureuse loin de la coutume et des traditions. C’est deux ans avant la lettre une œuvre sur la contestation de la jeunesse.” 10. See Lily Saint, “‘You Kiss in Westerns’: Cultural translation in Moustapha Alassane’s Le retour d’un aventurier.” 1 1. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony. Durham: Duke UP, 2004, 29. 12. During the same period, Anglophone audiences enthusiastically embraced the photo-comic detective Lance Spearman and the other heroes of African Film magazine, a subsidiary of the South-African-based Drum magazine. 13. See especially Emmanuel Obiechina’s An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973) and Onookome Okome’s “Reading the Popular: Onitsha market Literature and the Practice of Everyday Life” in Teaching the African Novel. (Chicago: The Modern language Association of America, 2009) 386–404.

References Ambler, Charles. 2001. “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia.” The American Historical Review, 106.1, 81–105. Anyichie, J.A. Okeke. c. 1971. The Adventures of the Four Stars. Onitsha: Highbred Maxwell. Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-colonial Transformation. London: Routledge. Barber, Karin. 1997. “Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 67.3, 347–62. Benesova, Marie. 1975. “Film in Niger.” Young Cinema and Theater, 1, 28–30. Bisschoff, Lizelle. 2007. “Recovering lost African film classics.” Accessed Jan. 1, 2015. http://www.africa-in-motion.org.uk/2007/lostclassics.html. Burns, James. 2013. Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2002. “John Wayne on the Zambezi: Cinema, Empire, and the American Western in British Central Africa.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35.1, Special Issue: Leisure in African History, 103–117. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, How EuroAmerica Is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder and London: Paradigm.

Cassava Westerns  41 ———. 2006. “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction.” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–56. ———. 2006. “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder.” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean C ­ omaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 273–298. Diallo, Elisa. 2009. Moi Qui Vous Parle: Identité et énonciation dans l’écriture de Tierno Monénembo. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden. Diawara, Manthia. 1998. In Search of Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Gondola, Charles Didier. 1996. Villes Miroirs: Migrations et identities urbaines à Kinshasa et Brazzaville, 1930–1970. Paris: Harmattan. Hennebelle, Guy and Catherine Ruelle. 1978. “Alassane Mustapha.” L’Afrique Littéraire et Artistique, 49.3: 15. Lamming, George. 1992. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arber: University of Michigan Press. Langford, Rachael. 2009. “The Post-Colonial Cowboy: Masculinity, the Western Genre and Francophone African Film.” Mysterious Skin: The Male Body in Contemporary Cinema. Santiago Fouz-Hernandez, ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 77–92. Macedo, Lynne. 2003. Fiction and Film: The Influence of Cinema on Writers from Trinidad and Jamaica. Chichester: Dido Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Neale, Steve. 1990. “Questions of Genre.” Screen, 31.1 Spring, 45–66. Obiechina, Emmanuel. 1973. An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okome, Onookome. 2009. “Reading the Popular: Onitsha Market Literature and the Practice of Everyday Life.” Teaching the African Novel. Chicago: MLA. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1962, Copper Town, Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. New York: Harper and Row. Le retour de l’aventurier. 1966. Dir. Mustapha Alassane. Argos Films. “La Reine des Bandits.” 1969. Bingo, January, 31–49. Pfaff, Françoise. 1988. “Mustapha Alassane.” Twenty-five Black African Film-­ makers: A Critical Study, with Filmography, and Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood, 1–9. Rowley, Hazel. 2000. “Richard Wright’s Africa.” The Antioch Review, 58: 4 (Fall 2000), 406–421. Saint, Lily. 2013. “‘You Kiss in Westerns’: Cultural Translation in Moustapha Alassane’s Le retour d’un aventurier.” Journal of African Cinemas, 5: 2, 203–217, doi: 10.1386/jac.5.2.2031. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Tcheuyap, Alexis. 2011. Postnationalist African Cinemas. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. Wright, Richard. 2008. Black Power: Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man Listen. New York: Harper. Young, Alison. 1996. Imagining Crime. London: SAGE.

3 The Italian (Southern) Western From colonial cinema to spaghetti western Giovanna Trento

Introduction Western films produced, or sometimes co-produced, by Italian studios in the 1960s and 1970s – the so-called Spaghetti Westerns1 – are, in their whole as a sub-genre, the best known and most studied Italian contribution to and reinvention of the American Western genre. Between 1964 and 1978, hundreds of Westerns were produced in Italy: at least four hundred and fifty Spaghetti Westerns, including dozens of B-movies in the 1970s. But this chapter does not aim to provide a comprehensive overview on such an ample phenomenon.2 Instead, it intends to set some milestones with the goal of re-examining the reinvention of the American Western in Italy from a wider historical and cultural angle that traces the fluidity between Fascist and post-Fascist Italian cultural productions and between colonial and postcolonial periods. The Spaghetti Western was neither the first example of the Euro-Western nor an isolated phenomenon in Italy, as elements taken from the ­American Western genre were already widely circulated in Italian cinema before and during Fascism (1922–1943). By investigating the Italian reinvention of the American Western, and by studying such reinvention within the complexity of the Italian case, this chapter argues that between Italian colonial cinema (particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, during Fascism) and the emergence of the Spaghetti Western (in the 1960s and 1970s, in post-Fascist Italy) there has been a certain degree of continuity that has remained, so far, ­unnoticed by scholars. Such a continuity can be highly problematic, at times paradoxical, and, simultaneously, peculiarly Italian and indissolubly connected to transnational and international factors. As Marcia Landy points out, one of the main contributions of Christopher Frayling’s pioneering study on the Spaghetti Western (1981) is his suggestion that “global interdependency” is inscribed in the Western all’italiana, so much so that “Italian westerns have assimilated and appropriated ­Americanism to their own ends” (Landy 2000, 182–83). Whenever in the twentieth century Italian cinema took inspiration from the American Western, global interdependency and dynamic tensions between local and transnational factors were always foundational elements for Western-driven Italian films. This

The Italian (Southern) Western  43 happened both during the 1960s to 1970s, when in Italy there was a very strong communist party and the majority of Italian intellectuals supported different forms of Marxism,3 and during Fascism, when the regime strove to strengthen a colonial popular culture. Whereas ­Spaghetti Westerns, especially those produced around 1968–1970, were partly the product of ­Marxist, at times revolutionary4 discourses that were widely circulated in Italy at that time, Italian colonial films were meant to pursue n ­ ationalist Fascist propaganda and also set a dialogue with international cinema: ­Western, colonial, and war films in particular. Since both Italian colonial cinema and the Spaghetti Western had both a local and a transnational soul, an additional goal of this chapter is that of implicitly pointing out the necessity of deeply and critically studying the fluidity between Fascist and post-Fascist Italian cultural productions and that of colonial and postcolonial periods.5 The Western Goes to Europe European filmmakers were making Westerns prior to the Western all’italiana boom of the 1960s and 1970s. In France in 1912–1913, Gaumont distributed a series of Western films starring Jean Hamman – better known as Joë – who played a cowboy known as Arizona Bill. These Westerns were filmed in the Camargue region in France’s southwest. According to Lorenzo Codelli, Le railway de la mort, the first of these Camargue Westerns, provided numerous variations of the American Western canon and thus can be considered a precursor of the Spaghetti Western. Successful Westerns were also made in Germany in the late 1910s, the 1920s, and the 1930s and later, in 1962, when film producer Horst Wendlandt bought the rights of all Karl May’s Western novels (Codelli 1999, 923–27). Italy also saw early Westerninfluenced films being produced. In 1913, three Italian films openly focused on the West: Due vite per un cuore / A Sister’s Ordeal (starring Amleto Novelli), Sulla via dell’oro / The Human Bridge (produced by Cines studios, starring Olga Mambelli), and, most of all, La vampira indiana / The Indian Vampire Woman (by Aquila film) (Giusti 2007, XVIII). La ­vampira indiana, interestingly, was directed by Sergio Leone’s father, ­Vincenzo Leone, who had adopted the stage name of Roberto Roberti, and starred Leone’s mother, Edvige, who had adopted the name of Bice ­Walerian ­(Frayling 2005, 15). In the 1950s, popular Western themes were appearing in Japan: Akira Kurosawa directed such films as Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962), which had a big impact beyond Japan, especially in Europe (Hughes 2010, 12). So much so that film directors Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci – leading figures of the Spaghetti Western sub-genre – drew their inspiration from both American Western cinema and Japanese samurai epics. This is particularly true for Leone’s first Western, Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). The Spaghetti Western, therefore, has

44  Giovanna Trento to be placed within an important, wider Western vogue that took place in Europe and elsewhere between the end of the 1950s and the middle of the 1970s, a period when more than six hundred Westerns were filmed outside the United States. Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars had national and international success, was extensively imitated and cited, and ultimately set the vocabulary of a new, non-canonic Western, the Western all’italiana, the basic elements of which came to be ghost towns, desolate and arid landscapes, frequent and often grotesque killings, the absence of clear moral parameters, the fetishism of dead bodies, a propensity for anti-heroes and non-heroes (who are frequently dirty and smelly), a general lack of Indians, no founding of history through the building of the city and the railway, abundant use and abuse of coffins, crosses, and cemeteries, and a non-poetic and often cynical gaze that contradicted the American Western mythology. Sergio Corbucci also directed several Westerns during the same period, primarily for the Italian domestic market: Massacro al Grande Canyon (Grand Canyon Massacre, 1964), Minnesota Clay (1965), and most of all, Django (1965), whose character became the Spaghetti Western’s ultimate model, featuring a working-class, violent (non) hero, basically a loser. Django’s influence persists and is evident in films ranging from Parry ­Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1973) to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Django Unchained (2012). However, the postmodern admiration and appropriation of Italian Westerns, operated by Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Sam Raimi, turned these films into cool, violent, pop items (Fisher 2014, 6), thus stripping them of their political, supposedly radical narrative that was imbedded in Italian leftist popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Although classified as Italian, many Spaghetti Westerns were filmed in Spain (mostly in Almeria) or in the former Yugoslavia. The arid Spanish locations and the southern-looking faces of the extras pushed Spaghetti Western filmmakers to set their adventures in the American South-West, rather than the West. The Mexican revolution and barricades mythology were given a predominant position, not only because Latin America was an ­important market for European Westerns but also because such revolutionary ­mythology was on the same wavelength as the diffused r­evolutionary sensibility that circulated in Europe – in Italy in particular – during the 1960s and 1970s, especially among young people and those who joined the 1968 student movement.6 Fascism and Cinema: Between Local and Global Italian cinema appropriated and reused American Western cinematic tradition during Fascism too, in particular in films that fantasized the Italian “colonial adventure” in Africa.7 Fascism was an “imperfect dictatorship,”

The Italian (Southern) Western  45 and among all the areas where Fascism made its influence evident, cinema was an area particularly open to contamination and to diverse influences, ranging from the Soviet Union to North America (Brunetta 2009, 68). Italian cinema, after a sizeable period of success, faced commercial disasters in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Around 1930, Fascism invested in the reshaping and modernization of Italy’s film industry, allowing Italian cinema to regain some strength in the 1930s. American cinema had dominated Italian screens from the mid-1910s on. This was true even under Fascism. Although Mussolini’s regime managed information and propaganda mainly through the Istituto LUCE founded in 1925, Fascism considered narrative cinema mostly as popular entertainment and (at least until the protectionist legislation inaugurated by the 1938 Alfieri Law) did not oppose the influence of Hollywood’s imaginary universe on Italian audiences. North America was able to provide models of youth, vitality, and adventure that were compatible with Fascist ideas. Moreover, American films were still considered incapable of fomenting social conflict (Brunetta 2009, 68–70). In February 1937 – the year that saw the introduction of Fascist racist legislation and one year before the introduction of protectionist legislation for Italian cinema – journalist Ruggero Orlando (1907–1994), who in postFascist Italy would become one of the most prominent journalists of stateowned television, praised American cinema on the first page of the Fascist colonialist review L’Azione colonial.8 Orlando hailed the American Western specifically, exalting its infinite lands, pioneering spirit, brave cowboys, and struggles against the “Indians.” The American Western was described as the ultimate “American colonial cinema,” one that could provide inspiration and strength to Italian colonial cinema,9 especially to those movies filmed in the Horn of Africa (Orlando 1937, 1). Italy’s historical ties to America are numerous, as evidenced by the prominent role America has had in Italian cinema and vice versa. Two elements in particular account for this linkage: the massive emigration of subaltern Italians to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the economic and social reconfiguration of Italy after World War II under the M ­ arshall Plan.10 Factual and epistemological shifts between Italy and ­America are evident in two films of the 1930s, both directed by Guido ­Brignone, that deal with mass migration from Italy towards South ­America and colonial Africa respectively: Passaporto rosso / Red Passport (1935) and Sotto la croce del sud / Under the Southern Cross (1938). Both films bear a clear resemblance to the American ­Western genre and try to articulate an Italian version of the myth of the frontier by portraying pioneers, settlers, the search for wealth, and a civilizing mission.11 These civilizing and centralizing narratives had particular resonance among an Italian population itself newly formed. Right after the unification of the country in 1860, less than ten percent of the total population spoke Italian, the majority of Italians speaking local dialects. Regional differences persisted well into the 20th century, and even today there remain social and cultural discrepancies between a more industrialized north and a more agricultural

46  Giovanna Trento south (Ricci 2008, 36–38). In the 1930s, the Italian film industry made sizable efforts to reach different groups, generations, and regions, and both rural and urban audiences (Landy 2004, 11). The use of different dialects sometimes displaced by Italian cinema during Fascism had, therefore, a demagogic and reassuring value in order to support an image of Italy as a patchwork in which every region brought a colorful touch to the ensemble (D’Agostino and Ruffin 1997, 170). Such a patchwork was supposed to find its harmonious completion in the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, as is implicitly made clear by the conciliatory use of Italian dialects in colonial films such as Il grande appello / The Last Roll-Call (1936), Sotto la croce del sud / Under the Southern Cross, Bengasi / Benghazi (1942), or Giarabub / Jaghbub (1942). One of the main preoccupations of Fascism was stressing its soul as a revolutionary movement was rooted in Italian farming life and rural hardship.12 But Fascism also presented itself as a new force, able to start a national process of modernization. What was at stake in the 1920s and 1930s was the building of an Italian, modern, popular culture. Strapaese and Stracittà – the hyper-rural and the hyper-urban – were the two pivotal elements for the building of a Fascist national tradition, two complementary notions and basic semantic areas that were both meant to articulate Italians’ national experience and strengthen their sense of italianità (Italianness). As James Hay pointed out, the debate that took place in Italy over Strapaese and Stracittà could be read as another manifestation of the epochalist/essentialist conflict that, according to Clifford Geertz, characterizes nationalisms. However, the semantic structures of these two terms are more complex than they may appear at a first glance, as both notions and both groups addressed, from different points of view, Italy’s need for a “popular culture” (Hay 1987, 133–34). Italy’s cinematic self-representations and film genres of the time were clearly influenced by such local need and by the complex interlacing of the rural and the urban. References to American cinema displayed by Italian colonial films were often instrumental in the urban and modernizing aspect of Fascism’s popular culture and to its idea of building Italian modernity through colonialism. However, they might occasionally help Italian filmmakers to articulate Fascism’s rural vocation too, as happens with the irregular use of Western genre codes in Sotto la croce del sud. At the beginning of the 1930s, a new emphasis on peasantry became instrumental in the effort to motivate subaltern Italians to fight a war in Africa to occupy Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa thus became the extreme southern Italy of and for a “greater Italy” (la grande Italia),13 where landless peasants were supposedly going to find their piece of land and become less subaltern. Sotto la croce del sud was filmed in the colonial Horn of Africa and shown at the 1938 Venice Film Festival (Spaghetti Westerns would never join this prestigious festival). The film displays the Horn of Africa’s symbolic and regenerating role and, at a first glance, it may appear a rural film that sketches a benevolent portrayal of the efforts carried out by Italian pioneers to start farms and settle on the Ethiopian plateau. However, Sotto la croce

The Italian (Southern) Western  47 del sud cannot be merely confined to a local rural perspective, as it is a pastiche of international genres in vogue at the time, among which the Western genre played a predominant role through the appropriation of the narrative of the myth of the frontier. Sotto la croce del sud also referred to specific aspects of Italian colonialism in the 1930s: the question of intermarriage and miscegenation, the attempts of creating agricultural settlements in Ethiopia, the Fascist racist legislation, etc.14 The film was supposed to be a Fascist, colonialist cultural product. However, throughout the film, esthetic and political canons were repeatedly subverted, thus constructing highly ambiguous images of “Italians,” “foreigners,” “settlers,” “Africans,” and “meticci” (“half-castes”) the Fascist press often found unacceptable (Pomilio 1938). Italian colonial cinema had both a local and a transnational soul. If Italian colonial films in the 1930s were locally instrumental in pursuing nationalist Fascist propaganda, strengthening the sense of Italianness, and healing ambivalence overseas, they were also meant to set a dialogue with international ­cinema – with colonial, Western, and war films – thus allowing the circulation of international cinematic tastes and film genres. The colonial genre in particular offered an opportunity to expand the international reach of the Italian film industry and reverse a period of decline. Italian colonial films were thus able to assert their autonomy, move within a larger international current, and even circumvent Fascist racist legislation. These films mixed, in original and ambivalent ways, the evocation of an African erotic imaginary universe and the need to adapt to the official legislation that banned or discouraged interracial relationships. In so doing, these films highlight the extent to which life in the colonies and its representations were subordinated to constant adjustments. As Marcia Landy has noted, action genres – Westerns, thrillers, and crime films – focus on the social order (1994, 99). These genres exercised their influence on those Italian films that portrayed Italian colonialism/colonies in Africa. But while war films such as The Lost Patrol, directed by John Ford in 1934, influenced especially those films set in military colonial contexts – such as Sentinelle di bronzo / Sentinels of Bronze (1937), Giarabub / Jaghbub, or even Luciano Serra pilota / Luciano Serra, Pilot (1938), which is only partly a war film – the echoes of American ­Westerns are particularly evident in Italian colonial films set in African natural backgrounds, such as Lo squadrone bianco / The White Squadron (1936), Sotto la croce del sud / Under the Southern Cross, Abuna Messias / Cardinal Messias (1939), and Il grande appello / The Last Roll-Call, but also the already mentioned Sentinelle di bronzo / Sentinels of Bronze and Luciano Serra pilota / Luciano Serra, Pilot, because these colonial films dealt with the ideal conquest of an immense land and the construction of a “new man”. Lo squadrone bianco / The White Squadron, directed by Augusto Genina and based on the French novel L’escadron blanc by Joseph Peyré, tells the story of an Italian military outpost in the Sahara desert. The film intended to welcome the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 by focusing on the previous Italian colonization of Libya in 1911–1912. Nonetheless, before making the

48  Giovanna Trento film in Italian, Genina had unsuccessfully proposed the project to French and British film productions (with some obvious modifications), thus ­proving the colonial aims of the film were quite interchangeable (Costa 2006, 248). The Sahara desert also allows the mise en scène of a challenging and heroic relationship between man and land, carried out by an I­ talian lieutenant and a captain. The dichotomy and confrontation between land and man, nature and culture, on which Lo squadrone bianco is built implicitly suggest the ideal process of founding – through challenge and death – the new modernist city (references to Futurism and Italian modernism are quite explicit in the film). The film was praised by Ruggero Orlando for its transnational linkage of Western and colonial cinema. According to Orlando, the amplitude (be it real or symbolic) of the “overseas lands” allowed Italian cinema to gain a broader audience, appealing to the “flavour of the exotic charm, combined with the depth and the rarity of the best human qualities: pioneering spirit, heroism, selflessness, loyalty, justice, sacrifice, and adventure” (Orlando 1937a, 3). Il grande appello was filmed in 1936 in the Horn of Africa and directed by Mario Camerini. According to Adriano Aprà, it is one of the most explicit – though ignored – precursors of Neorealism (Aprà 2006, 227), and only the highly nationalist end of the film may appear dated and disturbing to a contemporary audience. In 1937, L’Azione coloniale judged Il grande appello not rigorous enough in terms of the building of a Fascist colonialist epic (Spaini 1937, 3), because Giovanni, the protagonist, the owner of an inn and tavern in Djibouti, is the weak one rather than the hero. However, at the end of the film, Giovanni redeems himself and sacrifices his life in the Ethiopian Campaign.15 By alternating the amplitude and beauty of large African landscapes with interior tavern settings, Il grande appello reproduces the nature/ culture and the outside/inside dichotomies proper to the frontier narrative. The film functions, as James Hay incisively notes, “as a geographical and cultural frontier … emblematic of ‘contested space,’ a realm where the rules seemed to be renegotiated at every turn” (Hay 1987, 198). Giovanni’s hotel is definitely a “contested space” where many different languages are spoken (Bertellini 2003, 267–68) and where Giovanni, himself a traitor, is betrayed by his foreign partner and lover, a Spanish woman who owes much to the saloon-type aggressive women of the American Western genre. Moreover, exceptionally on the Italian screens, Il grande appello shows, sitting at the table of Giovanni’s tavern, the notoriously attractive and sexually available northeast African young women (faccette nere) who were essential elements of Italian colonialist imagery. In 1943, Giorgio Ferroni directed a comic Western, Il fanciullo del West / The Boy of the West, named after Puccini’s opera. Here parody is already evident and it remains a key feature of the Spaghetti Western (Günsberg 2005, 176). Ferroni would join this sub-genre in the 1960s, directing three additional successful W ­ esterns: Un dollaro bucato / Blood for a Silver Dollar, 1965, Per pochi dollari ancora / For a Few Extra Dollars, 1966, and Wanted, 1966.

The Italian (Southern) Western  49 Southward: Liminal Spaces and Cultural Ambiguities After the great success of Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, the Italian film industry started producing many Westerns. There was a mass shift by Italian directors from the mythological films of the 1950s to the 1960s Spaghetti Western. Only towards the end of the 1960s, though, did a clear distinction between rich, “high-standard” Spaghetti Westerns (produced by P.E.A. or De Laurentiis) and B-movies or low-budget Italian Westerns become evident (Beatrice 2002, 141). American cinema had been a source of fascination for Italian audiences since the 1920s, but right after World War II such fascination was considerably intensified by Hollywood itself. “Of all the Western European nations Italy, as a liminal economy with a strong left-wing subculture, was both a potential bridgehead and a key focus for US anxiety over encroaching communist influence” (Fisher 2014, 15). Spaghetti Westerns, especially around 1968, did connect to the strong left-wing sub-culture that was widespread in Italy. However, the Spaghetti Western’s potentially radical re-use of Americanism was often ambivalent, as this Italian sub-genre both celebrated and rejected Americanism and the American Western. A foundational duality between two different geographical and symbolic topoi (the “developed” North and the “backward” South) has been very important for Italy’s self-representation and the theorization of the Southern Question, ever since the unification of the country (Moe 2002; Schneider 1998). This produced, among other things, the construction of the “other inside the country” (the landless southern peasant), which became a pivotal element of Italy’s self-representation throughout the 20th century. Thus, the icon of the landless southern peasant came to be at the same time an insider and an outsider, both a carrying element of the national identity and the “other inside the country”. Such dualistic baggage has produced among Italians persistent confusion between self and other than one’s self, as much as between colonizer and colonized, as is made clear by the ambiguities that characterized the ways colonial concubinage in the Horn of Africa was managed and perceived by Italians during and right after colonialism.16 Italian colonial cinema as well was affected by this uncertainty and widely “capitalized on the marginality, or cultural ambiguity, of colonial Africa to present tales of ideological conflict” (Hay 1987, 198). Such fragile equilibrium is fully expressed by African concubines and ascari (colonial solders) who appear in Italian films. In S­ entinelle di bronzo / Sentinels of Bronze, filmed by Romolo Marcellini in Somalia at the dawn of the Fascist racist legislation, the charming African young woman is, as ever, present, even if she appears under the clothes of Italian actress Doris Duranti in black face. The Eritrean colonial soldier, interpreted by an ­African actor, faithful attendant of the Italian officer, falls in love with her. The impasse constituted by the equivocal love story between the leading lady, who is “black” and “white” at the same time, and

50  Giovanna Trento the faithful ascaro, who is black but has a special tie with the white man, is finally resolved with the escamotage of the soldier’s premature death. In the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-heroes of the Western all’italiana came to embody, under renewed shapes, the cultural ambiguities and the sense of marginality that has constantly characterized Italian self-representations. Spaghetti Westerns repeatedly displayed ambiguous relationships between two male characters who, in most cases, were marginal, outsiders, irregular, or at least controversial, such as Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) and Sean ­Mallory (James Coburn) in Leone’s Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker! 1970–71) or Bill Tate (Lou Castel) and El Chuncho (Gian Maria ­Volontè) in Quien Sabe? / A Bullet for the General (1966–67, directed by Damiano Damiani). In Faccia a Faccia / Face to Face (1967), directed by Sergio Sollima, the contradictory relationship between an urban and bourgeois history professor from New England, Brad Fletcher (played by Gian Maria ­Volonté), and a bandit coming from subaltern classes, Solomon Beauregard Bennet (played by Tomas Milian), plays a central role. Former professor Brad Fletcher goes West, initially to recover from his illness, but, through an ambiguous exchange of roles between him and the bandit (Solomon), Brad increasingly goes native and finally becomes wilder than the “savage.”17 Despite this tendency towards oppositional relationships, Spaghetti Westerns did not portray the problematic and misrepresented “Indian,” who so importantly characterized the American Western and its landscapes. Whereas a physical, symbolic, and, ultimately, mythical conflict between the Euro-American and the “Indian” had defined the American Western genre as such, the Spaghetti Western – by relying on Italian cultural ambiguities and southern discourses on Italian marginality – pushed the absolute Other (the “Indian”) away from the screen and preferred instead to include more nuanced and ambiguous notions of Other. Thus Spaghetti Westerns portrayed relations between various anti-heroes, non-heroes, or outsiders and avoided sharp confrontations with clear antagonists. Exceptionally, “Indians” and black Africans appear in Se sei vivo spara (1967), directed by Giulio Questi, but this film is in many ways exceptional (Cox 2009, 140). The lack of Native Americans in Spaghetti Westerns is connected to both local and global factors. The production around 1950 in the United States of new “pro-Indian” Westerns – such as Devil’s Doorway and Broken Arrow – created new representations of “Indians” that were related to the aftermath of wartime propaganda, when the United States wanted to stress the difference between American democratic tolerance and Nazi anti-Semitism and racism. Hence, after World War II, Hollywood operated a certain revision of standard American racial/racist stereotypes. However, in Broken Arrow, the “Indian” (Cochise, a reincarnation of the Noble Savage played by the white actor Jeff Chandler) appears reliable to spectators simply because he becomes, literally and figuratively, white. The cult of the Indian then developed in various ways, but it was particularly dynamic during periods of civil-rights activism, such as 1950–1955 and 1960–1964, and aligned itself with the Black Power and the anti-Vietnam War movements (Slotkin 1992, 366–78).

The Italian (Southern) Western  51 According to film critic Guido Aristarco, Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow “breaks an arrow in favor of the Indians, who enter, in this way, the cinema as adults” (Everson and Fenin 1973, 42). If we assume the “Indian” in the American Western represents the “child” – thus evoking Rousseau’s bon sauvage – we understand that the Western all’italiana did not need to display “children” (meaning “Indians”) simply because ­Spaghetti ­Western directors, scriptwriters, and spectators, after having appropriated and digested the Western genre canon, were now aware of the fact they were, in a postmodern way, re-performing the cinematic game they were playing when they were kids, thus implicitly ­deconstructing it (Giusti 2007, IX-X). Spaghetti Westerns – even if not always intentionally – often engaged in portrayals of Italian society and subaltern classes. However, as suggested by Landy, “Italian westerns are not polemic or doctrinaire; rather, they are interrogative about political issues involving notions of power, economics, nation, and cultural identity.” In so doing they tend not to assume a “monolithic audience” (Landy 2000, 184). After World War II in Italy (especially towards the end of the 1960s), local, southern, folkloric, Gramscian, and post-Gramscian discourses became evident in Italian cultural production at various levels and in different fields such as fictional literature, cultural anthropology, cinema, etc. This tendency went along with an interest in transnational, leftist, pro-Third-World18 discourses, widespread among writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and Italians in general. This is evident in the work of writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1968, posthumous 1981) and his complex construction of a transnational Pan-South (Trento 2010, 2012). In post-World War II Italy, over half the population voted for left-wing parties. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the whole country – among Marxists as much as the Catholic Left – there was a significant interest in anti-colonialist struggles, developing nations, the influence of Islam, and related geopolitical topics (Holub 2001, 135–39). Between the lines, Spaghetti Westerns, often in a populist and simplistic way, tell us about the terzomondismo (sympathy towards the Third World), the revolutionary Marxist culture, and the transnational southern drive that were widespread among Italians. The revolutionary Third World metaphor, proper to many Spaghetti Westerns, was an expression of a­ nti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiments. Damiani, who later directed the Spaghetti Western Un genio, due compari, un pollo / A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975), argued his Quien Sabe? / A Bullet for the General actually is not a Western but rather a film on the Mexican revolution that focuses, as other Italian films of the time did, on subaltern and populist heroes as symbols of the Third World. According to Damiani, the Spaghetti Westerns’ foregrounding of and ­sympathy with sub-proletarian rebellions had nothing to do with the AngloSaxon, puritan roots of the American Western (Beatrice 1996, 130). Moreover, the Spaghetti Western’s roots are firmly set in the Mediterranean area, arguing the cultural references of this sub-genre can be found in Greek and Latin epics,

52  Giovanna Trento the Iliad and Odyssey, the Holy Texts (Gospels and the Bible), Greek tragedies, mannerist literature, and the commedia dell’arte (Beatrice 2002, 142–45). Such convergences are also evident in the role played by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Spaghetti Western Requiescant (1967), directed by cultivated and leftist director Carlo Lizzani. Pasolini interprets Don Juan, a Mexican Catholic priest who, despite believing in love and fraternity, eventually embraces the idea that the human being who takes the gun and shoots the oppressor to defend poor and exploited people is not a criminal; he/she is a righteous person. Requiescant can be considered an example of the Latino (Catholic) Western, having among its main references the South American Teologia de la liberacion (Liberation Theology). Similarly, in Damiani’s Quien Sabe?, Klaus Kinski’s character, El Santo, rages against a morally weak Catholic priest who supports the Establishment: “Jesus Christ died between two bandits! God is on the side of poor and oppressed people!” By highlighting Marxist, populist, proletarian, revolutionary, Southern, and Third World sympathies of many Spaghetti Westerns around 1968, it seems clear the Spaghetti Western’s references to the American Western were often merely formal ones while, paradoxically, Italian colonial movies filmed in Africa during Fascism – with their transnational baggage of pioneers, settlers, immense lands, and civilizing missions – were closer to the American Western narrative and values than Spaghetti Westerns were. This apparently irreconcilable contradiction between the Anglo-Saxon American Western ideal canon and the Latino-Mediterranean, revolutionary Western all’italiana, located somewhere in Pasolini’s Pan-South, can be partly reconciled by pointing out the Spaghetti Western’s semantic tools were constructed also through the representation of the Mezzogiorno (Italian South). Indeed, as Landy pointed out: “The emphasis on landscape, on demographic mobility (westward); the focus on brutality, brigandage, revenge, and criminality; the decomposition of villages, the ambiguous role of the Catholic Church, and the stark competition for economic power – all are conditions that inhere in Italian folklore but can be grafted to prevailing representations of Americanism” (Landy 2000, 184). Memories and Genres Antonio Gramsci – intellectual reference and co-founder of the Italian Communist Party – was arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926 and died in 1937. Italy’s post-World War II political and intellectual life was strongly influenced by the rediscovery of Gramsci. The letters he wrote in captivity appeared in a collected volume in 1947 and many posthumous publications followed.19 “No other figure’s ideas have played such a large role in the development of post-World War II Italian cinema” (Landy 2000, 149). The memory and the representation of both Fascism and the partisan resistance to Fascism widely characterized Italian cultural life after World War II, when a considerable part of Italian cinema – openly or symbolically, dramatically

The Italian (Southern) Western  53 or comically – turned around these two topoi. After the presentation of Il generale Della Rovere / General della Rovere (directed by Roberto Rossellini) and La grande guerra / The Great War (directed by Mario Monicelli) at the 1959 Venice Film Festival and the commercial success of both, between 1959 and 1963 approximately forty Italian films focused on World War II and the exit of Italy from Fascism (Iaccio 2001, 192). Even the physical and psychological violence displaced by Pasolini’s last film, Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma / Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), can be read as the desperate and final articulation of political and esthetic tensions existing in post-Fascist Italy, between Fascism and the resistance to it, whereas in the 1970s, according to Pasolini, Italians were irremediably condemned to sink into an alienated and unreal condition. Throughout the 20th century, film genres – action films in particular – have played a significant role in the construction of national memories. In Italy, the post-Fascist difficulty of digesting Fascism somehow led Italian culture towards a hyper-representation of the partisan resistance to Fascism and to an under-representation of colonialism, which tended to be pushed away from national history. The Spaghetti Western sub-genre could thus be described, a bit simplistically, as a partisan resistance epic, with the Italian Colonial Cinema functioning as a colonialist Fascist epic. However, I would prefer to use the more complex expression “remembering the present” (as Johannes Fabian put it) to depict the omnivorous attitude that characterized Spaghetti Westerns. Indeed, many of these films not only ingurgitated a considerable part of the history of European and American cinema and visual arts but also – in a sometimes parodic attack on the establishment – ­impertinently reperformed Italy’s 20th century past and present. For instance, Quien Sabe? opens on a group execution. This fine scene displays multiple references. It has a neorealist flavor that recalls the anti-Fascist partisans’ struggles, it refers to Pasolini’s portrayals of sub-proletarians (influenced by both Gramsci’s political philosophy and Italian visual arts), and it quotes Eisenstein’s project “Que viva Mexico!” Also Tepepa / Tepepa (1968) and Leone’s Duck, You Sucker!, among others, contain scenes that, for Italian spectators of the time, were clear references to Fascism’s violence and the 1944 Fosse ardeatine mass execution. Film director Giulio Questi had joined a partisan brigade at the age of eighteen. Later on, he evoked the partisan resistance as one of the main sources of his 1967 Spaghetti Western Se sei vivo spara / Django Kill, and in particular “the cruelty, the comradeship with friends, the death, all the experiences I had of war, in combat, in the mountains” (Cox 2009, 143). The frontier narrative of the classical Western made class conflicts irrelevant and allowed America to expand “by projecting the ‘fury’ of class resentment outward against the Indian” (Slotkin 1992, 11–13). Spaghetti Westerns by contrast did portray the fury of class resentment, especially through the narrative of the Mexican revolution, as two films written by leftist scriptwriters demonstrate: Quien Sabe, written by Franco Solinas and directed by Damiani, and Tepepa, directed and written by Giulio Petroni in collaboration with Solinas. Leone also occasionally referred to class conflicts

54  Giovanna Trento and proletarian revolution – for instance, Duck, You Sucker! opens with a quotation from Mao Tse-tung.20 A number of other Italian directors who often had some political engagement in the Italian Left (such as Corbucci, Lizzani, Damiani, Sollima) through a peculiar, sometimes vernacular and irreverent use of the American Western, repeatedly put on Italian screens (more than Leone did and specifically for the Italian audience) the multiple, sometimes revolutionary Marxist discourses that circulated in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.21 However, if on one hand their dissident and irreverent use of Americanism aimed to undermine the Western genre’s ideological inflections, on the other hand these Spaghetti Westerns, by Corbucci and others, paradoxically ended up affirming the dominance of Hollywood in the semiotic marketplace (Fisher 2014, 203). In 1970 Compañeros, directed by Sergio Corbucci, summarized, in a quite picaresque way, Italy’s 1968 diffused revolutionary culture and aimed to portray subaltern classes and reach working-class spectators. However, many Spaghetti Westerns’ stances, even if nominally leftist, were ambiguous or contradictory, as their message was revolutionary and cynical at the same time. For instance, Requiescant is a political film because “it deals with malefemale relationships, racism and the vices of unrestrained power” but it does so through elements of goth and horror, and “is a deeply weird, unconventional Western” (Cox 2009, 150). But part of the revolutionary tendencies of the Western all’italiana can be found in the way in which they often appropriated characteristics of other film genres such as horror and thriller, especially in smaller productions. Even horror genre maestri – Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento – were active in the Spaghetti Western sub-genre. Among others, Fulci directed Le colt cantarono la morte e fu … tempo di massacro / Massacre Time (1966) and Sella d’argento / Silver Saddle (1978), considered by many the last Spaghetti Western, while Argento co-wrote Leone’s C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). After the end of World War II, the discovery of American Western films in color had helped Italians to dispel the fear of the recent war, a fear that was still present in everyday life (Giusti 2007, VIII). In the 1960s, Spaghetti Westerns, with their big guns and grotesque killings, symbolically killed and finally exorcised that fear. First the gun (a masculinity fetish), then the machine gun (symbol of rebellion) became integral parts of Spaghetti ­Westerns post war, post Fascism, and even ante litteram postcolonial aesthetics. However, such films are still characterized by the rape of women, even if the ferocity of masculinity displayed in these films is slightly attenuated by a generally surreal and ironic approach to sadomasochistic violence. The Western all’italiana in the 1960s posed questions concerning the problematic interlacing and contamination of high and low, folkloric and cultivated in the construction of notions of culture and popular culture. Such questions became crucial in the following years. In the 1970s, S­ paghetti Westerns would increasingly evolve in two main directions: elegy and parody (Codelli 1999, 931). On one hand, a sort of farewell to the ­Western took place, with films such

The Italian (Southern) Western  55 as the baroque, bloody, late Western Keoma / Keoma (1975–1976), directed by Castellari, or, most of all, Il mio nome è Nessuno / My name is Nobody (1973), directed by Valerii but produced and largely influenced by Leone. The latter aimed to be a synthesis of the Western, reconciling at least four types of Western: the classic American Western; the modern, revisionist American one (such as Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch); Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns (with Morricone’s soundtrack); and the comic, parodist late Spaghetti Western of the 1970s (Cox 2009, 301–02). The Spaghetti Western parody, indeed, was inaugurated in Italy in 1970 with the box-office triumph of Lo chiamavano Trinità / They Call me Trinity, “a broad, popular ‘buddy’ comedy” (Cox 2009, 279), directed by Enzo Barboni and starring (so-called) Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, which opened the road to many sequels and imitations. The Spaghetti Western was definitely not a monolithic phenomenon. In some cases, the Italian Western even became a sort of foreign legion, enlisting all sorts of mercenaries: “directors who had been disinherited by ­Neorealism, displaced citizens, and artisanal directors who were capable of doing nearly everything” (Brunetta 2009, 208). Due to the stratification of Italian society and the numerous political and aesthetic codes to which the Western all’italiana referred, the Spaghetti Westerns’ relationship with Italian audiences was quite complex. Thus today, this sub-genre can be read as embedded in the political and social tensions that marked Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as well as mainly a mass phenomenon of entertainment.22 But the Spaghetti Western’s contradictory or complementary aspects are not necessarily irreconcilable, in particular within Italian society, which tends to be contradictory. As Marcia Landy points out, “popular cinema” has “multiple and, at times, divergent meanings, relying on an ability to acknowledge and reconcile differences among social classes, generations, nations and regions without eradicating obvious distinctions” (Landy 2004, 11). Italian genre cinema of the 1960s and 1970s – Spaghetti Western in primis, but also Italian horror, the political film genre, and the erotic comedy – positioned itself at the intersection of various political horizons and esthetic goals. The Spaghetti Western is, at many levels, not an isolated event in the 20th century. It shares with cinema during Fascism not only the Italian legacies with America and the influence exercised by Hollywood but also the articulation (by recurring to film genres) of specific, Italian, vernacular political memories. Both Italian colonial cinema and the Spaghetti Western had a transnational vocation, both responded to local Italian necessities, even if from opposite political points of view, and finally, in so doing, both displayed important cultural ambiguities.

Notes 1. The slightly disparaging expression “Spaghetti Western” started appearing in American newspapers in 1968. Later on, this expression became increasingly

56  Giovanna Trento common to define the Western all’italiana and it progressively lost its degrading overtone. Austin Fisher notes Italian Westerns have been referred to as S­ paghetti Westerns, Euro Westerns, Westerns all’italiana, and even Macaroni Westerns; Fisher opts for the neutral and descriptive Italian Western. Throughout this chapter, I will refer to this Italian sub-genre as Spaghetti Western, Western all’italiana, or occasionally Italian Western. 2. Marco Giusti (2007) compiled in Italian a rich “dictionary” of Spaghetti ­Westerns in a broad sense, providing information on more than 800 films. 3. On the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) and left-wing collective actions in Italy in 1968 and beyond, see Ginsborg 1990: 254–347. 4. On revolutionary movements and lotta armata in Italy in the 1970s, see ­Catanzaro 1991. 5. On related issues, see Trento 2012a. 6. “The Italian student movement, though initially a reaction against the nation’s ill-equipped education system, arose from an increasing disdain for individualism, the nuclear family, and consumerism. Equally, however, this anger was aimed at the traditional forces of the ‘Old Left’, who had singularly failed to fulfill their remit of achieving a proletarian hegemony” (Fisher 2014, 69). 7. Italian colonialism in Africa started in the 1880s in Eritrea. Italy occupied Somalia in 1889 and Libya in 1911–1912. The Fascist occupation of Ethiopia in 1935–1936 represented a revenge for the defeat suffered by the Italian army in Adwa in 1896. 8. L’Azione coloniale first appeared in 1931. It published articles (weekly or every other week) on different topics related to colonial politics and culture. 9. Both notions of “colonial cinema” and “colonial literature” were quite controversial during Fascism. On cinema and conquest during Fascism see Ben-Ghiat 2015. 10. On Americanization and U.S. influence on Italian post-World War II culture, see Fisher 2014, 11–19. 11. On Passaporto rosso, see Landy 2000, 183. 12. On the influence of Soviet (rural and revolutionary) cinema during Fascism, see Garofalo 2002. 13. On the notion of grande Italia see Gentile 2009. 14. In 1937, the Italian government classified concubinage between Italian men and African women as a crime. Such prohibition opened the road to additional forms of segregation in the African colonies and to the wider racist legislation enacted in Italy beginning in 1938 against Jews, Africans, homosexuals, and other minorities. On the issue of miscegenation in Sotto la croce del sud, see Pickering-Iazzi 2002. 15. Jean Antoine Gili highlighted the multiple political readings of Il grande appello. Gili 1990, 50–58. 16. Colonial concubinage, the so-called madamato, was a widespread and nuanced phenomenon in the Horn of Africa. See Barrera 1996; Trento 2011. 17. Austin Fisher provides a different reading of Faccia a Faccia by stressing the film’s legacy with the representations of Fascism, World War II, and the Partisan Resistance to Fascism. See Fisher 2014, 77–78. 18. The expression “Third World” (terzo mondo) was commonly used in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s to define developing countries and the global South.

The Italian (Southern) Western  57 19. The six volumes of Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (The Prison Notebooks) came out between 1948 and 1951, in 1975 reaching their most accredited ­edition, edited by Valentino Gerratana. 20. Bill Krohn discussed the political disagreements that developed in the 1960s and 1970s on the caractère “critique” (or, on the contrary, “non-critical” caractère) of Leones’s films. Krohn 1989, 12. 21. When these Spaghetti Westerns were released in the U.S., the populist radicalism inscribed into their narratives was not evident to American spectators. See Fisher 2014, 168–81. 22. See my conversations with Sandro Mantovani and Roberto Silvestri (journalist for il manifesto and director of Alias).

References Aprà, Adriano. 2006. “Mario Camerini: dalla realtà alla metafora.” Storia del c­ inema italiano. Vol. V: 1934–1939, Orio Caldiron, ed. 225–35. Venice and Rome: ­Marsilio and Bianco & Nero. Barrera, Giulia. 1996. Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea (1890–1941). Program of African Studies. Working Paper Series, 1. Evanston: Northwestern University. Accessed Jan. 24, 2014. http://www.northwestern.edu/ african-studies/working%20papers/wp 1 barrera.pdf. Beatrice, Luca. 1996. Al cuore, Ramon, al cuore. La leggenda del Western all’italiana. Florence: Tarab. ———. 2002. “Il western all’italiana.” Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. XI: 1965–1969, Gianni Canova, ed, 140–56. Venice and Rome: Marsilio and Bianco & Nero. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2015. Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (forthcoming). Bertellini, Giorgio. 2003. “Colonial Autism: Whitened Heroes, Auditory Rhetoric, and National Identity in Interwar Italian Cinema.” A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, Patrizia Palumbo, ed., 255–78. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brunetta, Gian P. 1990. “L’ora d’Africa del cinema italiano.” L’ora d’Africa del ­cinema italiano: 1911–1989, Gian P. Brunetta and Jean A. Gili, eds., 9–37. ­Rovereto and Trento: Materiali di lavoro. Brunetta, Gian P. 2009. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. Jeremy Parzen, trans. Princeton: ­Princeton University Press. Catanzaro, Raimondo, ed. 1991. The Red Brigades and Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy. London: Pinter. Codelli, Lorenzo. 1999. “Il West in Europa, l’Europa nel West.” Storia del cinema mondiale: Vol. I, l’Europa, Gian P. Brunetta, ed., 921–33. Turin: Einaudi. Costa, Antonio. 2006. “Augusto Genina, un regista europeo.” Storia del cinema ­italiano. Vol. V: 1934–1939, Orio Caldiron, ed., 245–52. Venice and Rome: ­Marsilio and Bianco & Nero. Cox, Alex. 2009. 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western. Herts: Kamera Books. D’Agostino, Patrizia and Valentina Ruffin. 1997. Dialoghi di regime. La lingua nel cinema degli anni trenta. Preface by Gian P. Brunetta. Rome: Bulzoni.

58  Giovanna Trento Everson, William K. and George N. Fenin. 1973. The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (Revised Edition). Middlesex and New York: Penguin Book. Fabian, Johannes. 1996. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fisher, Austin. 2014. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Frayling, Christopher. 2005. Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Garofalo, Piero. 2002. “Seeing Red: The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties.” Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943 Piero Garofalo and Jacqueline Reich, eds., 223–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gentile, Emilio. 2009. La Grande Italia: The Rise and Fall of the Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney, trans. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gili, Jean A. 1990. “I film dell’Impero fascista.” L’ora d’Africa del cinema italiano: 1911–1989, Gian P. Brunetta and Jean A. Gili, eds., 39–112. Rovereto and Trento: Materiali di lavoro. Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin. Giusti, Marco. 2007. Dizionario del Western all’italiana. Milano: Mondadori. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith, eds and trans. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci. Antonio. 1994. Letters from Prison. Two vols. Frank Rosengarten, ed. Raymond Rosenthal, trans. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 2001. Quaderni del carcere IV vol. Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci. Valentino Gerratana, ed. Turin: Einaudi. Günsberg, Maggie. 2005. Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hay, James. 1987. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Holub, Renate. 2001. “Post-War Italian Intellectual Culture: From Marxism to Cultural Studies.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: TwentiethCentury Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives: Vol.9, Christa ­ ambridge Knellwolf and Christopher Norris, eds., 133–42. Cambridge: C ­University Press. Hughes, Howard. 2010. Spaghetti Westerns. Herts: Kamera Books. Iaccio, Pasquale. 2001. “Il cinema rilegge cent’anni di storia italiana.” Storia del cinema italiano. Volume X: 1960–1964, Giorgio De Vincenti, ed., 191–206. Venice and Rome: Marsilio and Bianco & Nero. Krohn, Bill. 1989. “La planète Leone.” Cahiers du cinéma 422: 10–13. Landy, Marcia. 1994. Film, Politics, and Gramsci. Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. “Gli Uomini che Mascalzoni/Men, What Rascals!” The Cinema of Italy, Giorgio Bertellini, ed., 11–20. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Moe, Nelson. 2002. The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

The Italian (Southern) Western  59 Orlando, Ruggero. 1937. “Impero coloniale e cinema italiano. Il film delle cabile somale.” L’Azione coloniale VIII, 5, Feb. 4. Orlando, Ruggero. 1937a. “‘Squadrone Bianco’ trionfa da 5 mesi in un cinema di Parigi.” L’Azione coloniale, VIII, 21, May 27. Pasolini, Pier P. 1981. “Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo.” Corpi e luoghi, Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella, eds., 35–44. Rome: Theorema. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. 2002. “Ways of Looking in Black and White: Female ­Spectatorship and the Miscegenational Body in Sotto la Croce del Sud.” Re-­ Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, Piero Garofalo and Jacqueline Reich, eds., 194–219. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pomilio, Marco. 1938. “Colpe ed errori del cinema coloniale.” L’Azione coloniale IX, 40, Oct. 20. Ricci, Steven. 2008. Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Riley, Michael J. 1998. “Trapped in the History of Film: The Vanishing American.” Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, John E. O’Connor and Peter C. Rollins, eds., 58–72. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Schneider, Jane, ed. 1998. Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country. Oxford-New York: Berg. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Atheneum. Spaini, Alberto. 1937. “Cinema coloniale.” L’Azione coloniale VIII, 41, Oct. Trento, Giovanna. 2010. Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini. Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale. Milan and Udine: Mimesis. ———. 2011. “Madamato and Colonial Concubinage in Ethiopia: A Comparative Perspective.” Aethiopica. International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 14: 184–205. ———. 2012. “Pier Paolo Pasolini in Eritrea: Subalternity, Grace, Nostalgia and the ‘Rediscovery’ of Italian Colonialism in the Horn of Africa.” Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds., 139–155. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan. ———. 2012a. “From Marinetti to Pasolini: Massawa, the Red Sea and the Construction of ‘Mediterranean Africa’ in Italian Literature and Cinema.” Northeast African Studies 12 (1): 273–308. Special issue edited by Jonathan Miran: Space, Mobility, and Translocal Connections across the Red Sea Area since 1500.

4 From Django to Django Unchained Love narratives in the global south Clifford T. Manlove

“Well, guess your government will be glad to see that gold back.” —Joe (a.k.a. “The Man with No Name”) to Silvanito: Fistful of Dollars “And you? You don’t want to be here when they get it, eh?” —Silvanito “You mean the Mexican government on one side, maybe the Americans on the other side, and me right smack in the middle? Uh, uh, too dangerous!” —Joe

It might have been “too dangerous” an endeavor for Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone in their first installment of the Dollars trilogy, Fistful of ­Dollars (1964), to be “right smack in the middle” between the national interests of the U.S. and Mexico, the shopkeeper’s suggestion to Joe at the end of that genre-breaking Spaghetti Western, but that is precisely the premise of ­Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Django.1 Corbucci works to push the genre boundaries defining the Western and its rebellious, radically ambivalent, sub-genre, the post-Western, to their breaking points, especially with respect to the tropes of love, colonialism, and death. In addition to considering Django’s impact on how the Western is defined generically, its location and lineage with respect to the classic Hollywood Western in particular, in this chapter I will pursue the question of what continues to make Django – the title character, the aesthetic, and the franchise – appeal to such a large popular audience from so many different cultures and nations worldwide. What is it about Django’s story, style, form, historical context, and genre that have made it a commercial success in so many nations around the world – though not in the U.K. or the U.S. until recently – particularly in the Global South? If viewed as American, despite its broad international origins, how does Django represent America in the international imagination? Do the film and its reception say more about Hollywood and its America2 or the international imagination? What of Django’s place in film history, and its widespread and deep influence on other feature films worldwide, most notably Perry Henzell and Trevor D. Rhone’s The Harder They Come (1972) and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)?

From Django to Django Unchained  61 The Post-Western par excellence: Corbucci’s Romantic (Western) Love Story Measured against its more conventional ancestors in what is narrative film’s most venerable genre most associated with and representative of America, Sergio Corbucci’s Django is nearly everything classic H ­ ollywood Westerns are not while also remaining identifiably a Western, or at least a post-Western. Arguably, more than even its Spaghetti counterparts, the aesthetics Corbucci chooses for Django run completely counter to Andre Bazin’s characterization of the Western cinematic aesthetic: “the Western has virtually no use for the closeup, even for the medium shot, preferring to contrast the travelling shot and the pan which refuse to be limited by the frameline and which restore to space its fullness” (1971, 147). This mythic “fullness” – a nostalgic utopian setting that is whole and pristine in the present – characterizes not only the mise-en-scène of the classic Western but also its thematic repertoire. Django opens with a close-up rather than the wide panoramic shot chosen to open and close classic Westerns. Corbucci spectacularly violates these genre conventions in the opening scene, an homage to Leone’s own homage to Akira Kurosawa’s opening scene for Yojimbo (1961) in Fistful (Frayling 1998, 147). Contrary to the aesthetics found in nearly every other Western, the entire opening scene of Django is shot with a near-static camera as the title character (played by Franco Nero) walks directly away from it. The credits for the film run throughout this opening scene in a blood-red, Western-style font, featuring a song written by Luis Enriquez Bacalov and performed by Rocky Roberts as a pop-style operatic ballad rather than the usual brassy orchestral work commonly associated with classic ­Westerns. Entitled “Django,” the song tells the title character’s story of tragic love lost rather than the classic Western tale of errantry and adventure, paraphrasing and introducing the film’s narrative in the manner of “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’” for High Noon. Sung in secondperson address, the singer questions and counsels in the manner of the ­chorus in a mythic Greek tragedy: Django! (chorus)/Django, have you always been alone? Django! (chorus)/Django, have you never loved again? Love will live on, oh, oh, oh … /Life must go on, oh, oh, oh … For you cannot spend you life regretting Django! (chorus)/You must face another day Django! (chorus)/Django, now your love has gone away Once you loved her, whoa oh … Now you’ve lost her, whoa oh, oh … But, you’ve lost her forever, Django. When there are clouds in the skies, and they are grey You may be sad but remember that love will pass away. Oh, Django! After the showers the sun will be shining …

62  Clifford T. Manlove Like the choice of “Django” and its placement to open and close the film, the use of “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’” to open High Noon asserts the principal theme of the film is not so much weakness of community in the face of lawless wilderness or how good a man the hero is; rather, it is how strong the bond of romantic love can be. So it is with Django and Django Unchained, both films infamous for frequent, spectacular scenes of bloody violence and satisfying revenge. Tarantino chooses the same version of “Django” sung by Roberts to open Django Unchained, linking the two films aesthetically, thematically, and formally. The lyrics of Bacalov’s song tell both stories: Corbucci’s tale of love lost during the Civil War, as Django drags a coffin up a ravine, and Tarantino’s tale of love lost during an antebellum plantation slave auction, as the title character drags a set of slave chains to the next auction. Django is shot in the style of Yojimbo at the start of the opening scene. The lens is moved from an out-of-focus extreme close-up of a dark hat bobbing slightly in the frame to settle on an in-focus medium-close shot of the back of Django’s black hat, black jacket, and well-worn saddle as he walks away from the camera. All the aesthetic characteristics chosen for this opening scene portray a character forsaken by love and burdened by death. Once Django’s back has walked into the focus of the lens, the angle of the shot opens up quickly, showing the title character trudging through thick mud, a saddle slung over his back and a line attached to something heavy he is dragging but not quite visible in the frame yet. There is very little movement by Django in the mise-enscène in this opening sequence, and certainly no horizontal movement of any kind, in stark contrast to the usual Western cinematography that foregrounds distance and movement. Just as he moves far enough away from the camera for us to see what he is dragging, there is a simple cut to a high-angle close-up of Django’s boots trudging through thick, wet mud, which helps to foreground the gold stripe of a Union soldier’s uniform on his pants tucked neatly, military-style into muddy boots. As if to emphasize the muddiness, found in no classic Western, of Corbucci’s aesthetic choice, the sound of Django’s boots slopping through the mud is inserted while a credit, in a red, Western-style font – “A FILM/PRODUCED BY/SERGIO CORBUCCI” – is superimposed over the shot. In the first significant movement of the frame in the shot, the camera moves slowly from the close-up, without a cut, back to the very slow tracking of Django that opened the scene to show next what he has been dragging just outside of camera view, a muddy wooden coffin over which the title of the film reads: “DJANGO.” The camera continues to very slowly track Django as he moves directly away from it in an increasingly long shot, trudging up the canyon, muddy coffin in tow, with little or no vertical or horizontal movement in the mise-en-scène throughout as the film credits role. Reinforcing this Sisyphean image and theme, Alex Cox observes: “Django is noteworthy as one of the very few Spaghetti Westerns shot

From Django to Django Unchained  63 in the ‘standard’ European widescreen format (1:1.66), as opposed to the super-wide Techniscope frame (1:2.35). Obviously, the tighter, lesshorizontal frame is more appropriate for such a claustrophobic, enclosed film” (2009, 92). Static, closed framing dominates the narrative and miseen-scène of Django. While the scene is shot largely with a static frame, it closes with a rapid zoom to a wide angle, moving quickly from the medium-long shot of Django moving slowly, getting ready to round a bend in the gulch, to a wide-angle, panoramic shot of a small gulch in a larger desert landscape as he disappears from view around the bend. As if to underscore the contrast of the post- ­versus classic Western mise-en-scène, when Django rounds the bend, he appears at the opening of the following scene: a classic, panoramic, extreme long shot in which Django appears to rise from the ground as he rounds a bend from the gulch below, coffin in tow. C ­ orbucci presents us with Django seeing an unjust spectacle in the same manner that opens Yojimbo and Fistful, but Corbucci changes the subject of that spectacle from the violation of the sacred family by a profane criminal “family” to that of a woman having all four limbs tied to a bridge (perhaps spanning the U.S./Mexican border) and being whipped, bruised, and nearly crucified and burned by both of the profane, criminal families/armies and not just one of them, as is the case in Leone and Kurosawa. Using Rocky Roberts’s “Django” to underscore the affinity, Tarantino pays homage to Django’s opening sequence in his Unchained by portraying Django in Maria’s position, being moved with a chain gang of slaves through the mountains and hills of the American Southwest, looking a great deal like Almeria, Spain, used in so many S­ paghettis. Rather than portray Django saving the day in the opening scene, Tarantino’s version extends the story of the rescue of his love, Broomhilda, through to the final scene of Unchained. A useful choice on which Tarantino patterns his genre-busting, pastiche style, Corbucci’s Django is among the first Spaghettis to so consciously cultivate the aesthetics of the post-Western, down to the finest detail (Hughes 2001, 43–45; Cox 2009, 87–95), including the role of women (Wright 1977, 84–85). Just as dust and dryness are a Western convention – water scarcity is a major motivator for conflict – Django is covered with mud that is thick, dark, and very moist from heavy rains that arrived just prior to Corbucci’s shooting schedule (Grant 2011, 246). While heroes and cowboys – and ­Indians, villains, and even women on occasion – of the West always ride large, beautiful horses (McMahon 329), Django has been unhorsed at some point prior to the film, reinforcing the static, deathly theme; even Fistful’s Joe rides a mule. This suggests Django’s horse must have been killed – in the war? Did that slow his return to save his wife, making it too far away? – and, given he continues to carry the saddle, Django must have some hope of replacing it. As he walks into what he calls “town,” it is obvious its only citizens are a saloon/inn-keeper/pimp and his five prostitutes. In Django, it is the town that has no name; every

64  Clifford T. Manlove classic Western town has a name and citizens, even if doomed ones. In Corbucci’s town, there are also no sheriffs or marshals of any kind, no grocers, barbers, or ranchers, miners, blacksmiths, card sharks, or town “fools” or drunks, or their daughters, or anyone, except in the cemetery that Nathaniel advises is full. With respect to the conventional school teachers, saloon girls, daughters of cattle barons, and prostitutes who populate the Western, Corbucci ­follows the lead of Leone in Fistful in creating Maria, the equally ambivalent counterpart to Django, to play the Marisol role that is the rare mother/wife figure in a Western. Unlike Joe and Marisol of Fistful, who experience a chaste and courtly relationship that can only be consummated visually via point of view shots, Corbucci’s Django establishes a psychic kinship, a bond formed in the flesh between Django and Maria. Like her S­ paghetti and post-Western counterparts, Maria actively challenges the classic ­Western p ­ atriarchy that divides women into two groups, prostitutes and the innocent daughters of the cattle barons who become school teachers. She attempts to escape Nathaniel’s dead town and its pervasive prostitution economy. Maria’s latest attempted escape motivates the scene that immediately follows Django’s ascent out of the muddy gulch and spectacularly dramatizes the central thematic conflict in the film over power inflected by gender and racial/ethnic bi-polarities represented as inextricably linked. Just as the practices of racism and sexism are linked in Django – both Jackson and Hugo and their men live and die by both – Django and Maria, too, are increasingly bound to one another on their arrival. When Django arrives in town, he is no longer alone, and he even seems to abandon his status as a loner, of which patriarchy takes note. In their first encounter at Nathaniel’s saloon, Major Jackson declares: “That man had a woman with him also; white trash; a traitor to our Cause sir!” As with any taboo3 – what touches a taboo object itself becomes taboo (Freud 1975) – Maria’s sin against the cause of Southern slaveocracy becomes Django’s when he frustrates J­ ackson’s desire for racial and gender purity, which Jackson seeks in having her burned on a cross. Evidence of a material bond between Django and Maria can be seen soon after their arrival, establishing a theme of entwinement between them. The most telling of the two occurs graphically in the same frame when Maria thanks Django for saving her, telling him he has made her feel like a woman again. As Django replies he is glad for this, the camera lens zooms quickly into a close-up of their embrace from behind Maria, focusing on their overlapping heads. The frame is filled with the highly styled hair on the back of her head and Django looking into Maria’s face (occluded by her hair) and into the camera with a single blue eye visible. When the zoom is completed, with Django’s head cocked slightly to his right and Maria’s a bit to her own right, the effect on the mise-en-scène presents a gestalt of a single human head, the right-hand side of Django’s face and his piercing blue eye matched with the back of Maria’s head and styled hair as she returns his gaze, creating a Venn diagram using the outlines of both heads.

From Django to Django Unchained  65

Figure 4.1  Django and Maria embrace, merging in the mise-en-scène.

Unlike most Western romances, theirs is not a chaste, courtly love. Though the dubbed English dialogue is clumsy, the meaning is clear: a physical and psychic kinship is forming, signified by the graphic sharing of space in the mise-en-scène. The second graphic match between Django and Maria is suggestive of a psychic identification between the two in addition to the physical link established in the first graphic linkage. Corbucci presents what will be the first term in this second graphic match when Maria goes up to the room Django has rented for her from one of Nathaniel’s prostitutes (Amelia). The room is full of artistic renderings of women in various genres – paintings, drawings, sculptures, vases, a tapestry, manikins, etc. – and in various styles and states of recline or posing, featuring three large mirrors, two of which are hung at the top of two walls over a queen-sized bed. Maria first enters her room, for which Django pays in gold, despite his weakness for it, to the strains of Bacalov’s “Blue Dark Waltz,” echoing the song Nathaniel and his women drunkenly play during their muddy arrival. While Django eats below, Maria moves around looking at the art. As with the first graphic linkage, the heads of the two are graphically matched using a long, rounded landscape-oriented mirror and a painting just behind the head of each to represent shared identification. In the first shot of this match, we see – from the outside, framed by an open window in homage to Yojimbo and Fistful – a medium shot of Marie speaking to Amelia, with a mirror showing the rumpled, ivory white linens and pillows of the bed just behind and around Maria’s head. This is matched with the second shot during Django’s first encounter with Major Jackson in Nathaniel’s garish, decayed saloon. After Django has finished eating and is playing solitaire, Jackson and five of his red-clad rebels confront him, looking for “that damn Yankee, killed five of my men up near the river.” Jackson declares this knowing their killer must be Django because

66  Clifford T. Manlove

Figure 4.2 Maria’s psychic state in the mirror is a graphic match for Django’s (see Figure 4.3).

“that man had a woman with him also. White trash, sold herself to the Mexicans. She’s a traitor to our Cause, sir!” In this second low-angle shot that creates the graphic match, we see Django throwing cards with Jackson on one side and Ringo – an homage to one of the first Spaghetti heroes4 – on the other, harassing one of Nathaniel’s women.

Figure 4.3 Django’s psychic state in the painting is a graphic match for Maria’s (see Figure 4.2).

From Django to Django Unchained  67 Again, behind and surrounding his head in this shot is a portrait painting of a woman in recline, with Django’s hat covering much of her body. The two graphic matches represent a merger between Django’s and Maria’s identifications that intensifies throughout the film. Django’s Postcolonial Critique and The Global North/South Frontier “Jackson has no right to consider anyone inferior.” —Django to Nathaniel “Well you better not try to tell him a thing like that. They’re fanatics can’t you understand that? Have you seen those strange hoods they wear? It’s a religion with them. They’re crazy!” —Nathaniel “That’s exactly the reason I’ve got to do just what I’m doing, Nathaniel.” —Django Although thoroughly Italian and made with a domestic audience in mind, Corbucci’s Django is also the quintessential international Western, both with respect to its production and its iconic currency and popular appeal.5 Corbucci made a post-Western inspired by Leone’s commercially successful Fistful of Dollars, an aesthetic and thematic remaking of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was inspired by Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952),6 one of the first commercially successful Hollywood challenges to the classic, pre1960s Western. If film can be said to work like a universal language, then Django may be one of the finest examples from the Western genre, especially given that the film functions as what Neil Campbell describes as a “rhizome,” an example of how “the overcoded west [should be seen] not as a single region but as a mutating multiplicity” (2008, 9, 34–36). Made by an Italian director in Spain and Italy, an Argentine-Italian music director in Luis Bacalov, with American, Italian, and Spanish actors and crew, this B-movie Spaghetti Western was a huge box office hit in countries on every continent, especially in the Global South. The film was such a hit in so many countries – except in the U.S., where it was censored/edited for violence, and the UK (banned) – that numerous sequels and remakes have been made around the world since, most recently Sukiyaki Western Django (2007; Japan) and Django Unchained (2012; U.S.).7 However, according to Campbell, the copied copy is a reminder of the west’s existence as a complex, travelling concept, a rhizomatic formation crossing continents, constantly being reconfigured and used in all manner of ways. Any sense

68  Clifford T. Manlove of an original, authentic west has been displaced and disrupted by the effect of the hyperreal … where the real and the imaginary collapse into one another, creating a third space from which interesting, critical questions emerge about the production and consumption of meaning, and the role of myth and icon, and about the persistence and fascination with all aspects of westness (2008, 114–115). The influence of the Western has moved across oceans and continents, to and from the U.S. many times since Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train ­Robbery (1903), making the Western arguably the most reflexive and critical of all film genres. As a result, Leone argues: “The West belongs to everyone. To the Italians, like myself. To the Germans, who have made those Sauerkraut Westerns, to the French who are making those Camembert Westerns filmed at Fontainebleau. Even to the Japanese.”8 All three films inspired by High Noon not only adopt many of the aesthetics and post-Western sensibility of that film, each is also sequel, speculating on what will become of the frontier town after Will Kane retires to run a dry goods store with his new wife, when an apocalypse arrives. … Corbucci, Leone, and some of their young colleagues wanted to create a “critical” Western, Frayling argues, using a reflexive sense of genre awareness to invite their Italian working-class audiences, especially in the South, to reflect on the social conditions surrounding them. Austin Fisher reinforces this point in the context of his book-length analysis of politics and violence in the Spaghetti Western. “Westerns which retained the recognizable iconography and many of the central oppositions at the heart of the Hollywood genre, but jettisoned this focus on the necessity of progress, were by the 1960s more suitable to act as surrogate fantasy narratives for southern Italians” (2014, 58). It is precisely its engagement with an iconic fantasy of the dispossessed, especially in the Global South, that makes Django both a transnationally popular and a critical Western. Frayling emphasizes in Spaghetti Westerns: “It will be one of the contentions of this book that the two main strategies which ‘critical cinema’ has adopted – to shock the spectator into a questioning of what he or she is seeing, and a recognition of ideas which he or she can think about after the film is over – are discernable in the better Italian Westerns” (1998, xxiii). The “better” Spaghetti Westerns, in part because they are formula films, are self-aware. These critical films present their aesthetic reflexivity within the diegesis and for the spectator to see, making the means and conditions necessary for the production of spectacle visible to the spectator regardless of the cultural location. ­Frayling counts the Dollars trilogy among these films, and even Django (1998, 79–82). The better Spaghetti Westerns function as critical cinema because of their engagement with the fantasy of utopia by way of a dystopian narrative, a point Frayling makes when referring to John Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance: “formulas embody moral fantasies of a world more ­exciting, more fulfilling, or more benevolent than

From Django to Django Unchained  69 the one we inhabit” (qtd. in Frayling 1998, xii). I would argue further that this also makes these films utopian or dystopian in their orientation and critiques. These points bring us to a perennial critical debate that has dogged Spaghettis, and all films in the Western genre, regarding whether they reify the dominant ideologies of Hollywood, America, or (Western) Civilization or not. On this point, Fisher assesses Corbucci’s Italian Westerns, which he deems traditional with respect to ideology through the early 1960s: “As the 1960s progressed, however, his work steadily became more eccentric, iconoclastic, and eventually militant. Django (1966) presents a nightmarish Pop Art West, pitting its hero against Klansmen” (2014, 89). What makes this militant moral fantasy so salient to the dispossessed of the Global South, Fisher suggests, is its violent rejection of the myth of progress, the avowed mission of colonialism. While Django is highly formulaic, it is also selfconscious in a highly reflexive way, mimicking9 and then manipulating these characteristics, both with respect to Western narrative and aesthetics. It is this manipulation that I argue makes this film a critical Western in the sense defined by Frayling, a critique of the Western and the Global North/South bipolarity. Django is even featured prominently in Jamaica’s first feature film, The Harder They Come (1972) by Perry Henzell and Trevor Rhone. Ivanhoe Martin, Harder’s protagonist, sees Django during his first night in Kingston, which colors the way he identifies against his antagonists throughout the film. Henzell’s decision to use Django in this manner is indicative of its reflexivity. Django is emblematic of a cinematic moment (1885–1895), the historical moment that launches cinema into being worldwide, and the cinematic nature of identification in modern colonialism. The connection between reflexivity and historicity in Westerns is an important part of Bazin’s argument: “For the relations between the facts of history and the Western are not immediate and direct, but dialectic” (1971, 143). Westerns can inspire their audiences to critically engage with history, especially the unbearable, invisible histories of modern colonialism, and Django is exemplary in this regard. What makes Django a universal epic is precisely this engagement with so many of the important historical events defining the American West and beyond, from slavery and Civil War, to Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan, to the Mexican-American War and the formation of the U.S./Mexico border, the Mexican Revolution, even to the invention of the fully automatic machine gun by Sir Hiram Maxim in 1884 and the effects on the battlefields of Africa and Europe it would have. Corbucci’s Django dramatizes the significance of several conflicts reflective of the larger, Global North/South frontier. Henzell’s decision to use Django for his parable of Babylon as Jamaica’s first feature film raises several questions about Corbucci’s film, especially considering Henzell’s deep interest in Rastafari and reggae.10 It is especially telling that Henzell selects a post-Western rather than a classic, given the hegemonic role American culture plays in postcolonial Jamaica and the

70  Clifford T. Manlove film. Harder mirrors and reverses many aspects of Django’s narrative and themes, down to the roles of the hero and the two gangs of antagonists competing for economic dominance over a nameless Western border town (Kingston in Harder). It not only makes extended reference to Django to introduce the Western theme regarding the conflict between morality and law/order but it also functions as a rhizome to suggest Harder’s themes are to be found in Django and other post-Westerns. I argue that seeing Django through the lens of Harder demonstrates that the Babylonian conspiracy between church, commerce, and government is also at work in Corbucci’s film.11 According to Rastafari, these three powers work to rule civilization (a.k.a. the West, modernity), conspiring to form Babylon,12 where its citizens are a product of an economy built on death, much like Corbucci’s town with no name. With respect to the Babylonian Church in Django, Brother Jonathan is the quintessential example of anti-clericalism so prevalent in Spaghetti Westerns, paralleling how Preacher and his church are represented in Harder. His ministry entails serving as Major Jackson’s protection and money collector and keeping his ear on the town. Like the dead town, any congregation or church he had died long ago; there is no sign of either to be ministered to by Brother Jonathan any longer, reinforcing the themes of death and sacrilege. The only people left for him to minister to are ­Nathaniel and his women, from whom he takes a collection for his unholy patron. Once Jackson’s unholy red-hooded Klansmen, bearing their burning cross, have largely been gunned down—during the scene we see Ivanhoe ­Martin watch in Harder—Brother Jonathan blames this misfortune – the loss of­ customers for Nathaniel’s women – on Maria, declaring, “It’s because of her, I’ll tell ya. She’s the one that brought this on us. She’s the incarnation of sin and evil!”13 Django’s decision to machine-gun forty-three of Jackson’s men links him to the taboo Maria once again. Amelia, who gives her room key to Django for Maria in exchange for gold, a moral act in the face of personal risk, points out Brother Jonathan’s hypocrisy: “And you’re a fine one to talk. You ought to be ashamed of yourself dressed up like that and goin’ around with a Bible in your hand.” As if to punish Jonathan’s patriarchal taboo for women and his profiteering hypocrisy, Corbucci decides to have the Mexicans ride into town at precisely this moment. They promptly capture Jonathan, cut his ear off, force him to eat it, and shoot him dead in the street, a victim of his own support for a racist patriarchy. The only remaining male resident, Nathaniel, is the commercial center of Corbucci’s dead town, Babylon’s sole proprietor, saloon owner, and pimp. Nathaniel makes a point of servicing both Major Jackson’s Southerners and General Hugo’s Mexicans without preference or prejudice in the grand cosmopolitan tradition – “You know how it is. We try to please ‘em both, if we can” – while also feeling obliged to pay Jackson for protection. Django asks, aptly, given the theme of injustice: “How do ya do that?” The fact he need not also pay the Mexicans points to their representation as slightly

From Django to Django Unchained  71 less evil and perhaps slightly less racist than their Southern counterparts. What makes Nathaniel’s commercial ethics so Babylonian is this utilitarian sentiment, which he shares with his prostitutes just as Django is about to face his first showdown: “I hate to say it, but it’d be the best thing for us all if he [Jackson] kills that young feller immediately. He’d feel no pain and I’d lose less customers.” Maria watches Nathaniel from the second floor of his saloon as he calculates the value of Django’s life. Nathaniel is little more than a tool, the quintessential commercial middleman who sees the world in strictly material, financial terms. Because he is a dealer in death, willing to touch, distribute, and continue to live on it, he eventually becomes what he is selling in dying at the hand of Jackson. Using church and commerce, the government portion of the Babylonian Conspiracy that Corbucci portrays is divided by the border, a national frontier: America to the north, where the nameless town seems located and the Mexican national army cannot go to hunt General Hugo’s rebels, and Mexico to the south; while Major Jackson operates freely on both sides of the border, his red-clad private army restricts their operations to north of the border. Both the American and Mexican governments appear to be represented by the thoroughly unreconstructed Confederate Major Jackson, who both commands a band of fifty-seven Klansmen and enjoys a position as a (American or Texan?) military attaché/adviser stationed south at Fort Charriba, where he trades in gold with the Mexican government. Despite his obvious ideological leanings – which Amelia makes clear when she says, “Major Jackson hates anyone who isn’t pale-skinned and Southern” – Jackson also somehow continues to enjoy (or finance) his military rank on both sides of the border, though why does the Mexican army obey his orders and billet him at their fort? It is ironic that a former rebel against the constituted government of the United States should also support the Mexican government against its own rebellion, symbolized by General Hugo. Henzell presents us with Ivan and the Jamaican audience’s viewing of Django’s gun battle with Major Jackson and forty-three of his forty-eight remaining Klansmen. What makes this choice especially salient to the black and dispossessed of the Global South? Django ruthlessly hands out justice en masse to the red-hooded Klansmen, a powerful graphic image in the African diaspora on par with the Confederate flag. Once he has rapidly mowed down the forty-three faceless men Jackson brings to town with the hidden Maxim gun14 – the ease of which is amplified by a series of quick shots showing many red-hooded men sprawling headlong to the muddy ground – he puts it back in its coffin and draws his .45 revolver to shoot Jackson’s horse as he tries to ride away. Django causes Jackson to plunge face first into the muddy ground, casting him in an ironic parody of black face and dirtying his ironic white hat. I argue this scene explains why black Jamaicans and the dispossessed of the Global South would find Django more salient than any classic Western. Rastafarians in particular would be drawn to Corbucci’s garish representation of Babylon.

72  Clifford T. Manlove Death and the Apocalypse in the Post-Western When asked what characteristics distinguish a post-Western from a classic Western, in an interview Sergio Leone said the difference could be found in the films of John Ford, “whose work I admired enormously, more than any other director of Westerns. … If he sometimes demythologizes the West, as I have tried to do in the Dollars films, it is always with a certain romanticism which is his greatness but which also takes him a long way away from historical truth (although less so than most of his contemporary directors of Westerns). Ford was full of optimism, whereas I on the contrary am full of pessimism” (qtd. in Frayling 2012, 258). Although the “fullness” of on-screen optimism can be beautiful, it also short-circuits criticism while overcoded cinematic pessimism opens critical space. McGee attributes the pessimism in Leone’s films to their unconventional relationship with the apocalypse, arguing: “The world of the Man With No Name is a world that comes to pass after an apocalyptic event,” an event, a setting not found in classic Westerns (2006, 167–168). The pessimism of Leone finds its expression in the pervasiveness of death in the narratives and aesthetics of his Spaghettis. Leone’s anti-heroes have no choice but to embrace death and to make it their only companion, as it were. As Joe points out to Silvanito in Fistful, “Even the dead can be useful.” Following Leone’s Fistful, Corbucci takes the trope of death to a hyperbolic, even epic dimension from the opening scene through to the closing gun battle, except for the mise-en-scène that closes out Django. Corbucci closes his film as the lone anti-hero literally turns away from death and being alone. Django leaves his blood-stained pistol on his wife’s grave, which he has used to steady his pistol with his broken hands, and turns away from her grave, and from the death of love in his life, to trudge up a dry hill, accompanied by an instrumental of version of “Django” to reinforce the theme of love lost and love (re)found. This graphically matches the opening sequence of the film, with Django trudging through the mud away from the camera, dragging his coffin. In the last seconds of the film, Django moves unsteadily past the bodies of his enemies whom he has just shot down despite all odds, without his coffin and on the way to a new and uncertain life with his new partner, Maria, who will perhaps serve as a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve bringing the dead town back to life. Cox makes this very assessment: “Though Django may seem pessimistic, it is by Spaghetti Western standards quite an upbeat film. The bad guys are all killed, the hero and the heroine survive, and, as Maria predicts, they’ll meet again. This is rare in an Italian Western, and it tells us something of Corbucci’s fondness for women, and for bonds” (2009, 93). It is this embrace of death, and the sudden reversal away from it, that typifies the post-Western and supports its reflexive critique of hyper-masculinity and racism. It is in the roles of its women characters that each Western reveals its investment in the necessity of progress. Bazin lays out the Western formula’s role for its two types of women characters, the A-girl and the B-girl, who

From Django to Django Unchained  73 are presented for critique in Django: “In the first third of the film, the good cowboy meets the pure young woman – the good and strong virgin, let us call her – with whom he falls in love. Despite its chasteness we are able to guess this love is shared. However, virtually insurmountable obstacles stand in the way” (1971, 143). In the case of Django, Corbucci cuts the A-girl before his film even begins, and starts his version of the anti-Western at the entrance of the B-girl. Django’s love for his unnamed A-girl is the ultimate “insurmountable obstacle,” as he tells Nathaniel he was “too far away” to prevent her from being killed by Jackson and he tells Maria, his B-girl, that he can never love again. Bazin’s description of the Western formula for women on this point is uncanny, though understated in its accuracy about Django, which sounds almost like an afterthought: “But the story is often complicated by a paradoxical character – the saloon B-girl – who as a rule is also in love with the cowboy. So there would be one woman too many if the god of the screenwriter were not keeping watch” (1971, 144). Corbucci does exactly that, killing off the A-girl before the on-screen portion of the narrative opens. His reversal of the usual narrative structure with regard to the place of its women characters provides an opportunity to put the B-girl at the center of the narrative and not kill her off. Leone solves this conundrum of the B-girl in the Dollars trilogy by eliminating her presence altogether. Rather than being a “shining city on a hill,” Corbucci represents the town and civilization as a ghost town where everything and everyone are dead or, at best, already bought and sold, especially the relationships between men and women. On this point, Corbucci takes up Leone’s point of distinction between his own and classic Westerns with respect to pessimism. Using Django and Maria, Corbucci also challenges colonialism’s relentless embrace of dead things and the practice of death. Unlike many other ­Westerns, whether classic or post-Westerns, women play an indispensible role in Django in the lone hero’s encounter with and ambivalent triumph over death. It is in this dual relationship with death, making good use of it while also choosing to abandon it, which Corbucci gives to Django that makes near-universal identification with him remain so pervasive. The scene of Django’s arrival in town mirrors scenes in Yojimbo and Fistful, presenting a spectacular array of taboos and profane encounters to introduce the town and its citizens, except that Django brings the woman who ends up at the center of the three-way moral/legal conflict: Leone’s “trielle” formula. In a somewhat delayed response to the image of a blackcloaked stranger dragging a coffin into his garish ruin of a saloon, delayed by a negotiation over whether there is room for Maria in the hotel above the saloon or not, Nathaniel observes, while delivering the meal the newcomer in town has called for: “Hmm, if you’re a coffin-maker, sure did pick a good town to settle, sure did.” With his muddy coffin and empty, inverted saddle in the foreground – a saddle that should be on a horse tied up outside the saloon, but is not – Django responds to Nathaniel’s reference to the taboo mixture of death and eating: “I haven’t had many clients so far.”

74  Clifford T. Manlove Being receptive to clients, Django acknowledges he is interested in joining the economies that run the town without in any way betraying the fact this is taking up a conversation he had briefly with Major Jackson’s men in the second scene of the film as they prepared to burn Maria on a cross. Django keeps the number of customers he has had for his services secret; General Hugo introduces Django to his men as a “a thief, a murderer, and an outlaw.” Nathaniel continues, with his garish and too heavily made-up harem of prostitutes in the background: “Well, don’t worry, you will. What with Hugo’s Mexican renegades and the rebels under Major Jackson fightin’ their own private war, this whole town’s been ruined. It’s a dead city, regular ghost town.” As it turns out, there are two things that both gangs have in common: firstly, they are made up of rebels, American and Mexican, and, secondly, they are both willing to pay Nathaniel for the use of his women, making for a very uneasy truce of sorts, at least in town. It is on this second point that Django queries Nathaniel about what keeps him in a town like this: “So, your girls are pleasuring phantoms?” Django’s quick analytical question brings the deathly references by Nathaniel to an end with a stark political statement about the purpose, the business of his women in an otherwise “dead city,” which Nathaniel reluctantly acknowledges. Django’s question leads us back to Nathaniel’s means of commerce: his five women who, as might be expected, take an interest in Django and his familiar travelling companion. After he declines to give her the drink she asks for while he is eating, Amelia announces to Django: “You know, you sure are a brave man to tote that girl around. Or maybe you’re not afraid of the Mexicans or of Jackson.” Signifying his embrace of death to this point, Django declares: “I’m not afraid of anyone.” Linking the two taboos he is “toting,” she presses her profane question: “Oh, aren’t you? You’ve got guts, honey. My, ah … my girlfriends are afraid of what’s in that box. But it really doesn’t frighten me. After all, a coffin’s a coffin. Is there someone inside?” Revealing far more to her than to Nathaniel, he replies as if to terminate her questions: “Yeah, and his name’s Django!” It is hard to imagine either a Western hero or an anti-hero referring to themselves in third person, let alone expressing such an angst-ridden, existential remark. Similarly, what makes High Noon a post-Western, despite its taking place before the apocalypse, is precisely this transgressive encounter, in which the A-girl abandons her purity and Quaker religion to take up a gun in defense of “her man,” as Helen Ramirez (the B-girl) suggests. At the end of High Noon, after Will Kane takes off the “tin star” given to him by the town and grinds it into the ground with his boot, he rides off with his A-girl to open a store, abandon the frontier town to “the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” of the Spaghettis after the apocalypse. Leone alters the place of women in his approach to the post-Western by eliminating the B-girl entirely and sending the A-girl back to her sacred marriage in the end as a good man should, and going without a woman as only the good can. Corbucci concludes Django with a powerful image of the embrace of death and its transgressive reversal entwined with

From Django to Django Unchained  75 redemption. Django literally uses the loss of his A-girl – her frail wooden grave marker and its wrought iron adornments – as the means to avenge her murder, since he has lost the use of his hands after being beaten by the Mexicans for betraying them. Corbucci concludes by showing Django leave his bloody pistol at the grave of his A-girl and slowly trudge out of the cemetery, turning away from a past of Civil War, gun violence, and gold lust. Thus Django is about the redemptive, transgressive power of love that refuses to die and that, in turn, conquers death. Tarantino uses the images and aesthetics Corbucci selects to open and close Django, and its stark racial conflict to inspire his Southern post-­ Western. Like Corbucci, Tarantino uses a romantic love story to serve as the catalyst for Unchained: a recently freed black man’s search for his enslaved wife. As in Django and other post-Westerns, the apocalypse has already happened: the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While clearly a Western – featuring the landscapes, the horses, the character types, and themes of Westerns, like the conflict between law/order and lawlessness or between the town and the ­wilderness – Unchained also challenges many conventions of the classic ­Western by featuring a black hero, partnering him with a ­German dentist named Dr. King Schultz rather than a real, American bounty-hunter, portraying a woman in a role other than school teacher or saloon girl – Django’s wife, Broomhilda, cast by Tarantino via Dr. Schultz into the role of Brunhilde of the mythic German epic love stories, making Django Siegfried – and replacing the hardy frontier town with a plantation that produces ­nothing. In fact, compared to Corbucci’s town with no name, it produces something much worse. Tarantino reverses his representation of the plantation from its conventional associations with tropes of the garden and cultivated civilization to a gothic Pop Art setting of the hyper-real and ultra-violent. “Candy Land” is shaped to be an altar to the spectacular enjoyment of the worship and practice of death in the service of slavery and a racist patriarchy. Playing the role of an antebellum Major Jackson, it is Master Candie who owns Django’s wife, the A-girl who will be miraculously brought back to life through Django’s spectacular rescue. The mise-en-scène is Master Candie’s own avowed creation from top to bottom, thanks to Tarantino. Candy Land has long since been reversed as plantation focused on productive agricultural purposes nostalgically associated with the garden (of Eden or utopia) to “Mandingo fighting” financed by large-scale gambling and commerce in slaves, making it a dystopia or a Babylon in the Rasta sense. Tarantino represents his Southern version of the Rasta Babylonian Conspiracy of church, commerce, and government in the form of Southern honor (church), the slave trade (commerce), and slavocracy (the slave state). Each of these Babylonian institutions plays a major role in Unchained. It is clear Tarantino seems intent on forcing American viewers in particular to confront the ugly historical realities of plantation slavery; a tremendous nostalgia remains for Southern plantation culture in America, and not just in the South. While expressly

76  Clifford T. Manlove downplaying the connection of his version of the Spaghetti formula to the original Django in any but the most basic aesthetic terms, it also seems clear that, given the number and importance of the homages to the original, especially the decision to use Bacalov’s title song to open his film, Tarantino wants his film to be seen as a commentary on Corbucci’s Django and his version of the American post-Western. Tarantino’s Unchained is a singular critical portrayal of the slave economy and plantation world view told in the Spaghetti style. Tarantino’s Django narrowly makes the turn away from the embrace of death that his namesake via Corbucci does by way of his impossible yet successful quest to free his long-lost wife from the living death of slavery in Candy Land that results in the absolute destruction of the plantation and its white citizens. This is something the original Django fails to do: save his wife, the A-girl, from patriarchal forces like Major ­Jackson, undoubtedly a former plantation owner. As he told ­Nathaniel, he was “too far away.” Tarantino’s version, using a series of transgressive reversals, portrays Unchained Django as brutally and spectacularly covering this ­impossible distance and redeeming them both. Notes 1. Leone takes on Joe’s impossible proposal two years later in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Corbucci portrays that proposal in Django the same year. 2. See Higgins (2012) for a collection of arguments about Hollywood’s role in representing Africa in the contemporary popular imagination. 3. Because women are taboo in patriarchy’s ideology they tend to occupy only two roles in classic Westerns. And given the prevalence of alienated loner characters, the idea women are taboo in these films makes sense. According to Freud’s “Totem and Taboo,” a taboo object/subject contains within it both a sacred and a profane dimension. It is simultaneously representative of the holy yet also a threat to holiness and the “fullness” of which Bazin speaks regarding the universal appeal of Westerns. 4. Ringo (played by Giuliano Gemma) was launched by A Pistol for Ringo (1965), directed by Duccio Tessari, who had worked with Sergio Leone as a screenwriter. As would be the case with Django, many films featuring Ringo were made by various directors and actors and in several countries. 5. See both Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns (1998) and his biography, Sergio Leone (2012), for extended discussions of both issues. Also, Cox reinforces the point that Django was made for a domestic audience, noting it was the first Spaghetti in which the actors did not use English pseudonyms and for which the leading man was himself Italian (2009, 91). 6. See Frayling (2012, 118–164) for an extended discussion. See also Frayling (1998), 39, 147. 7. See Grant (2011) and Frayling (1998) for extended discussions of the major works in the Django franchise and the scope of influence of Django. 8. Leone quoted in an interview by Frayling (2012, 243). It is important to note the ­Japanese influence on the Spaghetti Western by way of Yojimbo, especially since Kurosawa and his studio own some of the international performance rights to Fistful.

From Django to Django Unchained  77 9. I use “mimicry” in the sense that Zora Neale Hurston describes it (2001). 10. Henzell, in an introductory essay to Yes Rasta, n.p. 11. For a discussion of the “Babylonian conspiracy” in Harder, see my unpublished book manuscript on the film and cultural histories surrounding it, “The Harder They Came.” See Fumagalli (2008) for the only article-length analysis of both films. 12. See the OED for a definition of “Babylon” that includes the Rastafarian definition. See also Smith, Augier, and Nettleford (1960) on the Rasta understanding of Babylon. 13. It is because Django is so iconic internationally – especially in the dubbed ­English version Ivanhoe Martin would have seen – that I have chosen to use it to supply dialogue for this chapter. 14. “The weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest,” according to Gilbert (1997, 11).

References Bazin, André. 1971. “The Western, or the American Film par excellence.” What is Cinema?: Vol. 2. Hugh Gray, trans. 140–148. Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, Neil. 2008. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Postwestern Horizons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cawelti, John G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corbucci, Sergio, dir. (1966) 2010. Django. Performances by Franco Nero, Loredana Nusciak, Jose Bodalo, Angel Alvarez, and Eduardo Fajardo. (BRC) Blue Underground, DVD. Cox, Alex. 2009. 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western. Harpenden, U.K.: Kamera. Fisher, Austin. (2011) 2014. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, ­Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London: Taurus. Frayling, Christopher. 1998. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Taurus. ———. 2012. Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1912) 1975. “Totem and Taboo.” Standard Edition of the ­Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. James Strachey, trans., ed. ­London: Hogarth. 13: 18–74. Fridlund, Bert. 2006. The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Fumagalli, Maria Christina. 2008. “‘You ti’ink the hero can dead—til de las’ reel?’: Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come and Sergio Corbucci’s Django.” The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imagination. Kathleen Gyssels and Benedicte Ledent, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gilbert, Martin. 1997. A History of the Twentieth Century: Vol. On:; 1900–1933. New York: Morrow. Grant, Kevin. 2011. Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns. Godalming, U.K.: FAB.

78  Clifford T. Manlove Henzell, Perry, dir. (1972) 2000. The Harder They Come. Perry Henzell and Trevor D. Rhone, screenwriters. Jimmy Cliff, performer. (New World Pictures) Criterion, DVD. ———. Yes Rasta: Photographs by Patrick Cariou. Untitled essay introduction. New York: Powerhouse, n.d. n.p. Higgins, MaryEllen, ed. 2012. Hollywood’s Africa after 1994. Athens: Ohio ­University Press. Hughes, Howard. 2001. Spaghetti Westerns. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials. Hurston, Zora Neale. (1934) 2001. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The ­Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. New York: Norton. 1148–1156. Kurosawa, Akira, dir. (1961) 2006. Yojimbo. Toshiro Mifume, performer. (Toho) Criterion, DVD. Leone, Sergio, dir. (1964) 1999. A Fistful of Dollars. Clint Eastwood, performer. (United Artists) MGM, DVD. ———. (1965) 2006. For a Few Dollars More. Clint Eastwood, performer. (United Artists) MGM, DVD. ———. (1966) 1998. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Performance by Clint Eastwood, performer. (United Artists) MGM, DVD. ———. (1983) 2005. “To John Ford from One of His Pupils, with Love.” Christopher Frayling, trans. Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone by Christopher Frayling. New York: Abrams. Manlove, Clifford T. “The Harder They Came: Cultural and Political Histories of Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaica’s First Feature Film.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified October 24, 2014. Microsoft Word file. McGee, Patrick. 2006. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the American Western. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. McMahan, Jennifer L. 2010. “Beating a Live Horse: The Elevation and Degradation of Horses in Westerns.” The Philosophy of the Western. Jennifer L. McMahan and Steve Caski, eds. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 329–350. Porter, Edwin S. (1903) 1994. “The Great Train Robbery.” Landmarks of Early Film. (Edison) Image, DVD. Smith, M. G., Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford. 1960. “Report on Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica.” Mona: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. Stevens, George, dir. (1952) 2000. Shane. Alan Ladd, performer. Paramount, DVD. Tessari, Duccio. (1965) 2013. A Pistol for Ringo. Giuliano Gemma, performer. (Embassy Pictures) Timeless, DVD. Tarantino, Quentin, dir. and screenwriter. 2012. Django Unchained. Jamie Foxx, Christopher Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kerry Washington, performers. Anchor Bay, DVD. Wright, Will. 1977. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zinnemann, Fred, dir. High Noon. (1952) 2008. Carl Foreman, screenwriter. (Republic) Lionsgate, DVD.

Part II

The Western in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean

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5 In the Crossfire Africa, Cinema, and Violence in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) Dayna Oscherwitz

Introduction: Reframing the Image OF the Postcolonial In his seminal essay “Concerning Violence,” Frantz Fanon described decolonization as a form of violence of “total, complete, and absolute substitution” (Fanon 1963, 36), the complete abolition of the colonial violence “which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs and dress of external life” (Fanon 1963, 40). Decolonization for Fanon was less the physical violence associated with revolution and uprising than a disruption, an overturning of the system of structural, economic, and political inequality that colonialism produced. The post-colonial era that Fanon imagined would result is precisely what Stuart Hall would later call the “time after colonialism … [where] colonialism is defined in terms of the division between the coloniser and the colonised” (1996, 244), a time “where all the old relations disappear for ever and entirely new ones come to replace them” (247).” If, however, we look at Africa in 2013, fifty years after the publication of Fanon’s essay, it seems what we find is less the post-colonial Africa Fanon imagined than what Achille Mbembe has termed the “postcolony,” a space where the violences of colonialism persist, if in altered form. The former colonizers, for example, still intervene directly in Africa, as was the case in Mali in 2013, which saw a French military campaign against separatist forces, a campaign encouraged by the United States.1 2014 was marked by a massive Ebola outbreak that spread across West Africa and out of Africa literally into the West. The divergent responses to American and European versus African victims of Ebola illustrated with astounding clarity the persistence of structural violence in governing relations between Africa and the Global North. The Mali intervention, the Ebola lack of intervention, and other similar military, economic, and political ­convergences in African nations since decolonization suggest that while it is certainly true the official end of colonialism ushered in a grand substitution, that substitution has, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, been more rhetorical than actual, a swapping of terminology in what Spivak has termed “imperialist axiomatics” (Spivak 1985, 140). In what we broadly term the postcolonial, we have

82  Dayna Oscherwitz witnessed, as Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, and others have noted, not the substitution of decolonization for colonization but rather of neo-colonialism for colonialism, not the overturning of what Immanuel Wallerstein terms the “World System” but its reformation and recalibration (Wallerstein 2004). In all of these formulations of the postcolonial, the endurance of colonialism’s cultural, political, economic, and military violence is due, at least in part, to the persistence of the forms through which we think of the world. Decolonization de jure is one thing; decolonization de facto is quite another, and it could and has been argued that the central failure of decolonization has been what Ngugi wa Thiong’o famously termed a failure to “decolonize the mind” (Ngugi 1986). The chief currency of colonial-think, according to Ngugi, is language, spoken and written European languages specifically. I would suggest, however, it is as much the image as the word, and perhaps more so, that circulates and perpetuates colonial-think in both the Global North and the Global South. In analyzing the violence that created and sustained colonial structures, Achille Mbembe identifies three specific forms of violence. These forms, in Mbembe’s reading, approximate or are equivalent to discursive fields, justifying, organizing, and legitimating the violence of colonialism and its respective power structures and inequalities.2 The first of these is the legal form or field, which Mbembe calls “a founding violence … [that] underpinned not only the right of conquest but all the prerogatives flowing from that right … [which] regarded itself as the sole power to judge its laws” (2001, 25). The second field is linguistic, and it underpins the first, functioning “to justify its necessity and universalizing mission – in short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority” (Mbembe 2001, 25). However, there is, as noted, a third field that functions “to ensure this authority’s maintenance, spread, and permanence … constituting the central cultural imaginary” (Mbembe 2001, 25). Although Mbembe does not state this directly, this form of violence seems to be a cultural field constituted by the image or in which the image plays a central role. Visual, Symbolic, and Revolutionary Violence in Bamako It is precisely this relationship among image, form, violence, law, and social order (both national and global) and the role of all of these in perpetuating the legal and structural violence carried over from the colonial that is the subject of Aberrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako. The film is a complex overlay of film genre and image, and it explores the experience and consequences of neo-colonialism in the African nation and by extension the Global South as a whole. The Western figures prominently in this exploration, foregrounding the various forms of lived violence that characterize contemporary Mali, ranging from the deaths of adults and children

In the Crossfire  83 from preventable illnesses, to the deaths of immigrants released to die in the Sahara, to the economic and cultural violence wrought by global trade and monetary policy. However, the central form of violence the film addresses is the violence of the filmic image, a violence Bamako depicts as implicit and complicit in all other forms. It is the image, Bamako argues, and the formal structures made of images in film and other visual media that promote and sustain the systemic and persistent violence of the post/neo/colonial order. Whether we are speaking of the modern nation state, of the institutions of global capitalism, the modern novel, or the over-determined “image-Africa,” it is the image, from colonial-era films and postcards to Hollywood “human rights” films to CNN broadcasts to NGO advertisements, the “imperial ­imaginary” that perpetuates and naturalizes the system of structural inequalities that was colonialism and the neo-colonial discourses and practices that developed from it (Landau and Kaspin 2002, 1–35; Shohat and Stam 1994, 100–14). Moreover, it is the constant consumption and circulation of such images in both the Global North and South that produce and protect the violence of (neo)colonial hierarchies and disparities, making them seem both natural and inevitable. Fanon himself was keenly aware of this, and he meditated in various places on the role the image and the cinematic image in particular have played in constructing both race and the colonial structures that produced it. In Black Skin, White Masks, for example, Fanon argues that cinema functions to construct race and produce self-alienation in the black spectator and cinema is the double or reflection of the colonialist othering gaze, reflecting back to both the black and white spectator the imaginary of the colonizing culture and suturing both into a colonialist perspective (Fanon 1967, 153).3 The image in general and the cinematic image in particular participate in what Jacques Rancière has termed “the distribution of the sensible.” In Rancière’s model, all social orders function as “police orders” in which “the police … is a symbolic constitution of the social … [whose function] lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible” (2010, 36), a partitioning that ­Rancière defines as the manner in which “a relation between a shared ­common … and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined in sensory experience” (2010, 36). Nowhere has this distribution of the sensible occurred with more force than in the colonial and post-colonial relationship between Africa and the Global North, in which distribution and exclusion have been the central structuring mechanisms and in which cinema has played a vital role. As James E. Genova and Aminata Barry have both noted, visual relations between Africa and the West have been governed by a “cinemaindustrial complex” that functioned and functions to reflect, legitimize, and perpetuate the hierarchies on which colonialism was built (Genova 2013; Barry 2004). This complex produced the colonial cinema, whose function was to manage perceptions and expectations of the colonial project among European spectators, to persuade Africans of the necessity and utility of the colonial mission,4 and to promote and sustain the hierarchies and divisions of ­colonialism – visual, economic, political – beyond the colonial era.5

84  Dayna Oscherwitz There is broad critical agreement that Bamako’s subject, or at least one of them, is the persistence of an unequal relationship between the Global North and South (Diawara 2010, Harrow 2010, Levine 2012, Maingard 2010, Olaniyan 2008). The film foregrounds this issue through one of its principal narratives, a cinéma vérité-style trial in which the citizens of Mali, among them anti-globalization activist Aminata Traoré, charge the IMF and the World Bank with crimes against humanity. Tejumola Olaniyan has suggested this trial and the arguments put forth in it that African poverty and hunger are not African at all but rather global in nature are the source of the film’s conceptual boldness (Olaniyan 2008, 132–33). Jacqueline ­Maingard agrees, arguing the film constitutes a “visualization of the destruction wreaked by globalization” (Maingard 2010, 403). I would like to suggest the film’s “boldness,” however, is a revolutionary boldness that consists less of this direct and quite obvious exploration of the neo-colonial economic violence than the sustained and delicate exploration of the relationship between neo-colonial violence and the ideological violence of filmic form, a double violence the film attempts to dismantle through a destabilizing disruption that Manthia Diawara has termed “anti-cinema” (Diawara 2010, 177). It is, I would argue, not the stories told through the film that operate this disruption but rather the forms they take. For the film is composed not of one story but of many, and each story has its own particular form, its own visual style and genre. Allison J. Murray Levine has read this overlapping as symptomatic of the orality of African storytelling, a characteristic often associated with African film (Levine 2012, 161). However, in all cases these stories also remain partial, incomplete, and above all self-reflexive, which suggests this intertwining and reflexivity also constitute a type of filmic violence that disrupts both the dominant conventions of filming Africa and the real-world discursive structures such filmic practices reflect, a refiguring of genre and the structures in which it is anchored, a gesture of rupture that seeks to rattle the image’s discursive field and the broader hierarchies it undergirds. Bamako, in other words, seeks to operate that revolutionary violence ­Rancière has termed “dissensus.” Cinematic realism, as Robert Stam has suggested, is an “essentially retrograde … aesthetic corresponding to that of the nineteenth century novel” (Stam 1992, xii). In fact, conventional realist-film narrative, as I have elsewhere argued, is, like conventional historiography, permeated with the colonial logic of the civilizing mission and the structural inequalities it implies (Oscherwitz 2010). The fact that realism has been the dominant mode in which Africa is represented in images, from the colonial era to the present day, whether in European, Hollywood, or African images and films, suggests the visual imaginary of Africa has yet to be decolonized. One principal means of disrupting the hegemony of realism, as Stam has suggested, is reflexivity, which may take the form of film within a film, blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the real, destabilizing the conventions of genre, playing with cinematic time, intertextuality, a play with real versus cinematic time, or a combination of any and all of these. Bamako engages in all of these strategies, specifically through a disruption of genre, “the formal, material,

In the Crossfire  85 and institutional procedures through which art does its work” (­Adesokan 2011, 3) and “the specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to cinema” (Neale 2000, 31). It juxtaposes anti-cinema and classical cinema and through this juxtaposition disrupts the (neo)colonial cinematic imaginary, denaturalizing the visual, legal, and political orders that govern contemporary Mali and the rest of the continent, and that calls for what Cheryl McEwen has termed a decolonization of development.6 The trial narrative that forms one of Bamako’s central stories already evokes this connection among narrative structure or form, the law (or the police order), and the socio-economic and political hierarchies of development. First and foremost, the trial is conducted in accordance with French models of jurisprudence, a fact made manifest in the language spoken during the trial. Thus even if the trial appears to be questioning and critiquing the former colonial power, it replicates in structure and in language the models of the former colonizer, whose presence is still felt in Mali and elsewhere. It is, therefore, in some respects, an example of the mimicry that, according to Achille Mbembe, undermines rather than produces sovereignty (2004, 375). Secondly, however, the imposition of Western-style law has been central to the project of advancing neo-liberalism in the Global South and it has been advocated directly by the World Bank as a means of guaranteeing private property and “as an integrated and comprehensive paradigm … towards a broader transformative agenda” (qtd. in Van Rooij and Nicholson 2013, 3–4). However empowering or transformative the participation in and testimony at the trial in the film may seem, they are, in and of themselves, gestures within the bounds of the sensible, sanctioned actions designed to sustain, rather than subvert, the existing order, a fact the film makes evident through the presence of the policeman who allows or denies access to the space of the court. However, the trial, as noted, is not the film’s sole form or narrative. Woven in and around the trial is the story of Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), an educated, middle-class husband and father who is unsuccessfully searching for a job; that of his wife, Mélé (Aïssa Maiga), an aspiring singer who ultimately leaves Chaka to try to find success and happiness elsewhere; the story of policeman (Sahl Samaké) whose gun goes missing; and the various stories of the witnesses who testify at the trial, including that of Madou Keïta, a young man who was left, with other would-be immigrants, in the Sahara desert. In generic or formal terms, these diverse stories or narratives constitute, respectively, a courtroom drama, a film noir, a melodrama, a detective film, and a documentary. In the middle of all of these, and seemingly detached from them, there is also a Western titled Death in Timbuktu, a shot-for-shot Western in which cowboys who speak in English and French gun down innocent Malians on the street in the name of efficiency. The overlapping, destabilizing, and blurring of each of these filmic forms or modes constitutes, in and of itself, a type of reflexivity. However, the insertion of Death in Timbuktu and its relationship to the other story-forms in Bamako constitute the film’s boldest disruptive gesture.

86  Dayna Oscherwitz Disrupting Western Law: The Cowboy, the Lawyer, the Schoolteacher, the Gun Sissako is not the only African director to have engaged the Western in his films. The Western, or at least elements of the Western, have appeared with surprising regularity in African films since the 1960s. Mustapha Alassane’s 1966 film Le retour d’un aventurier, one of the earliest African films, is a parody of the classical Hollywood Western.7 A character dressed as a cowboy features prominently in Sembène Ousmane’s 1975 film Xala. Elements of the Western can also be found in Idrissa Ouedraogo’s 1990 film Tilai and Souleymane Cissé’s 1987 film Yeelen, which ends with a classic example of a standoff. Djibril Diop Mambety’s 1992 film Hyenas also contains various elements of the Western, ranging from the gun to the wanted poster, and Boubakar Diallo’s L’or des Younga (2006) is a full African Western.8 What sets Death in Timbuktu from other appropriations of the Western in ­African cinema is that it is inscribed as a Western or, more specifically as a film. Bamako foregrounds the filmic nature of the intervention and its embedded status within the broader global networks of production, distribution, and power not only by restaging, within the context of the Western, questions of economics and agency but also by emphasizing the mode of distribution of the film and its effects on the people watching. Death in Timbuktu is situated in a parallel montage sequence that alternates shots of Chaka studying Hebrew in his room with a gathering of his neighbors setting up and then sitting around a TV set outside of their building. The television screen at first shows the end of a news broadcast, prominently featuring a map of the world with Mali marked in red, and then cuts to Death in Timbuktu, already in progress. The newscast and its map suggest the television is intimately connected to Mali’s broader position in the world. This linkage is reinforced by the alternating scenes of Chaka’s language-learning – he repeats phrases about losing his wallet – and both become encoded as forms of self-alienation in which Africans internalize the legal and economic structures that govern the contemporary world. This linkage is reinforced through the double presence of the gun, wielded both by the cowboys in Death in Timbuktu and later by Chaka, who turns it on himself. This setup establishes parallels between Death in Timbuktu and the trial that is at the center of Bamako. Both, for example, are presented as spectacles watched by the residents of the city. Moreover, the two are connected through a series of visual and narrative elements. Both Maître ­Rappaport (William Bourdon), the chief counsel for the IMF and the World Bank, and the cowboys in Death in Timbuktu, for example, wear sunglasses. Both are heard speaking in English and French. Finally, the cowboys in Death in ­Timbuktu seem to act out in allegorical fashion the directives of the IMF and the World Bank, substituting the symbolic and economic violence of these institutions for literal violence.9 One of the cowboys, for example

In the Crossfire  87 (Ferdinand Batsimba), executes a teacher because another (Jean-Henri Roger) deems there are one too many teachers in the city. This scene is crosscut with another in which two cowboys, played by Elia Suleiman and Zéka Laplaine, make references to efficiency. Taken together the two scenes suggest the process of structural adjustment, wherein the assassination of the schoolteacher is understood as a measure to increase efficiency. Moreover, permeating Death in Timbuktu are signs of the political, economic, and military power of the Global North, including Nike clothing and a shiny red Rambo Rocket bicycle. These images not only evoke the global economic, military, and political order on trial in the external film, they evoke – the Rambo Rocket bicycle in particular – cinema’s role in perpetuating it. Rachel Gabara has argued Death in Timbuktu constitutes the filming of a “First World genre in a markedly non-Hollywood way” (Gabara 2010, 331). Such borrowings are found elsewhere in African cinema, as Sada Niang has suggested, and they reflect the “overwhelming popularity of B movies among urban African populations” (2014, 47), but also the “[subversion] not only [of] the existing norms of filmmaking on the continent, [but] the main strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (2014, 47). When asked about the inclusion of Death in Timbuktu, Sissako has stated he put the sequence in Bamako to force the spectator to reflect on the meaning of the film, and he decided to use the Western because Westerns were some of the first films he ever saw. His comments similarly point to the wide circulation of Westerns in Africa, to cinema’s role in perpetuating the structural violence of the global economic and political system, and to attempts by filmmakers like himself to appropriate and subvert these processes.

Figure 5.1  Cowboy 1 (Jean-Henri Roger) directs Cowboy 2 (Ferdinand Batsimba) to shoot a teacher in the name of “efficiency.”

88  Dayna Oscherwitz What the Western means, in general, is a complex and complicated question. It has sometimes been read, most notably by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, as an inherently colonialist narrative that legitimizes the oppression of people of color and reinforces the principle of manifest destiny that underlies the neo-liberal economic policies criticized in Bamako’s trial (Shohat and Stam 1994, 114–15). Neil Campbell, however, has challenged the monolithic nature of such readings, arguing the Western, and the representation of the American West in general, is in fact “an unstable signifier,” one that functions “as part of a larger system of discourse … pointing in many directions at once” (2008, 41). Spaghetti Westerns, Campbell notes, particularly those of Sergio Leone, participate in the Western from the position of the outsider, “deliberately manipulating the generic memory of [the] audience … to raise ideological questions about how [the Western] has been represented and circulated” (2008, 131). Austin Fisher similarly reads transnational appropriations of the Western as ambiguous and sometimes paradoxical, noting these films’ strategy of “using an established model as a conduit for revolutionary practice,” a strategy that seeks to “undermine the Western’s ideological inflections but paradoxically affirm[s] the dominance of Hollywood in the semiotic marketplace” (2014, 203). Death in Timbuktu both embodies and stages this paradoxical nature of the Western, its appropriations and interpretations. First and foremost, it is less a classical Western than what Neil Campbell has termed a “travelling” or “accented” Western, much like the Spaghetti Western, because the form is taken and transplanted into the African context.10 However, unlike the Spaghetti Western, the displaced setting – the shift from the American West to Mali – is visible in the film, at least after the first few frames. Secondly, the brief Western is organized around a shootout between a lone cowboy (played by Danny Glover) and the group of cowboys who are wreaking havoc on the city. This might seem initially like a conflict between good and evil, but both the group of international cowboys and the lone cowboy intentionally or inadvertently shoot the Malian bystanders in the street. What is more, all of the cowboys, both the international cowboys and the lone cowboy, are foreign to Timbuktu. All of them ride in from the outside and at least three of them – Jean Henri Roger, Elia Suleiman, and of course Danny Glover – are recognized and recognizable as foreign. Therefore what transpires in the shootout between the two groups is less perhaps a battle between good and evil than a battle between two foreign forces vying for control over a city that belongs to none of them, a battle in which the real inhabitants of the city become casualties. Such a battle might represent the substitution of European neo-colonial rule (such as the OHADA laws signed by Mali in 1993) for the American style neoliberalism embodied by the World Bank11 or it may embody simply the grand substitution of the post-colonial moment itself.

In the Crossfire  89 Witnesses and Spectators: Identification and Contestation As important as the substance and structure in Death in Timbuktu is the effect the film has on those who watch it. James Burns notes in his essay in this collection that American Westerns during the colonial era were often subverted by the African spectators, who disrupted the conventional readings of the films with their own participatory narratives. These insertions and disruptions were unauthorized interventions that reconfigured the original meanings of the films in question and altered their reception. The spectators who watch Death in Timbuktu, however, do not disrupt or engage with the film they are watching, and they do not disrupt its original meaning. Rather, they identify with the actions and point of view of the cowboys in the Western, and specifically the group of international cowboys, rather than with their Malian victims. Bamako makes this point explicitly by alternating a scene in which Zéka Laplaine laughs as he shoots and kills innocent Malians on the street with a scene with the spectators who watch the film laughing along with him. What is particularly disturbing about the twinned laughter is that this cowboy, like the spectators watching the film, was at first shocked and horrified when the other cowboys begin shooting, but progressively, through exposure to the violence, he becomes desensitized, sutured into accepting and participating in that violence. Death in Timbuktu, therefore, specifically encodes the cinema as the/a means by which Western institutions, such as the World Bank, have been able to encourage or seduce Africans into adopting economic behaviors and practices that are ultimately self-destructive, a self-destruction Chaka will enact in the external film. To borrow Kaja Silverman’s explanation, what Bamako enacts and foregrounds through the interaction among Death in Timbuktu, the spectators who watch it, and the characters in Bamako is the process by which the “sleight-of-hand [of cinema] involves attributing to a character … qualities which in fact belong to the machinery of enunciation … the omnipotence and coercive gaze, the castrating authority of the law” (Silverman 1989, 232). Death in Timbuktu, however, is not really a Western film – that is to say, it is not a Hollywood Western. It is a film made by an African, set in Africa, and featuring, for the most part, Africans. It is therefore as much a commentary on the production of film by Africans as a comment on its consumption. This is clear not only because it is an African film made in imitation of a Western film but because its cast members – Danny Glover, Elia Suleiman, Jean-Henri Roger, Ferdinand Batsimba, Zeka Laplaine, and Sissako (as ­Dramane Bassaro, his alter ego from La Vie sur Terre) – are all involved at some level in the production of films. Therefore, when Jean-Henri Roger, a French film director and professor at the FEMIS, dictates to Congolese actor and director Zeka Laplaine to commit violence against other ­Africans, it is possible to understand this as a commentary not only on the way in which

90  Dayna Oscherwitz Western financial institutions have exercised control over Africa’s economic policy but also as a commentary on the degree to which the Global North, through the production of films and the development of film form, has exercised control over the nature and types of images that circulate about and within Africa. Bamako, in fact, points us to such a reading by presenting Death in Timbuktu as a film with only partial credits. The classically Western “presented by” and “directed by” credits, which appear at beginning and end of the film-within-a-film, are both left blank, leaving us to wonder who it is that has actually created this film and whose point of view it articulates. If Bamako does not repeat the processes of self-alienation it foregrounds, it is because it constitutes a type of inversion of Death in Timbuktu. The trial around which Bamako centers is, like the genre of the Western, a borrowed form. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the way the two forms – the legal trial and the film Western – have been appropriated within the context of the film. The Western has been appropriated directly, without modification. Its form has simply been transposed to an African context. The shot structure and editing style remain faithful to the original form, and the principal actors in the film, those who call the shots, Danny Glover among them, are foreigners. The trial, on the other hand, is both appropriated and subverted by film and by the Malians who participate in it. People speak out of turn, people testify who are not authorized to do so, evidence is presented that violates the rules of evidence and to all of these things, the counsel for the defence vigorously and unsuccessfully objects. The end result is the trial becomes a space in which Malians are able to speak, to protest, to contest, and to do so outside the bounds of what is authorized. Their speech, precisely because it is unauthorized, challenges the authority of the order in which it participates. This is particularly true of Zegué Bamba, whose testimony in his own, unauthorized language ruptures the three fields of violence – legal, linguistic, and visual – that govern the trial and the law it embodies. More importantly perhaps, the form in which the trial appears in the film has been modified and disrupted. Rather than appearing as a straight courtroom drama – the conventional and dominant mode of presenting dramatic trials in film – the trial appears as a courtyard drama, a fact made evident by Bamako’s alternate title, La Cour, which can mean both “court” and “courtyard.” Moreover, the trial is literally disrupted in the space of the film, both by the wedding procession that winds through it and by the various other genres and forms, also disrupted, that intersect with it. All of this is captured in long, non-linear, unedited, overlapping takes where the camera captures insignificant characters, actions, and motions, which constitutes a disruption of both classical narration and continuity editing. Death in Timbuktu, in contrast, is a classically narrative space, a space ordered around narrative efficiency, to borrow a word from the cowboys, a space in which Malians are, like the singing Malian mother gunned down in the street, ultimately completely silenced. No one, apart from the cowboys, speaks a word in Death in Timbuktu.

In the Crossfire  91

Figure 5.2  The lone avenger (Danny Glover) takes on the Group of Five.

It is ultimately the distance between Bamako and Death in Timbuktu – the film within a film and the external film, the space in which the spectator is positioned – that permits a reading of one against the other and a recognition of the relationship among the (borrowed) cinematic form, the borrowed form of the trial, and the deaths that punctuate and permeate both. The trial and the Western are travelling paradigms, both reflecting a law or order in which Malians are what Agamben terms “homo sacer,” the person whose defining and only characteristic in the eyes of the law is his or her capacity to be killed (Agamben 1998). Both are also borrowed or imitated forms the original provenance or authorship of which is ambiguous. We do not know who initiated the trial and who brought the charges against the ­ imbuktu World Bank, and the directing and production credits to Death in T remain strikingly absent. This marks a difference from the circulation of such forms in the colonial era, during which all such forms originated from the colonizer and were circulated from North to South as part of the colonial project. However, the Western is a closed borrowing that circulates within the confines of state television, and it transmits the violence in which it participates and seduces others into acceptance. The trial, on the other hand, is unenclosed and allows for and models the disruption of the systems that have produced it. Conclusion Cinema, Abderrahmane Sissako asserts in a discussion of Bamako on the DVD release of the film, has already been invented, and Africans cannot reinvent it. He goes on to argue, however, that cinema can be reinvigorated,

92  Dayna Oscherwitz and the place for this to occur is precisely in Africa. By inscribing Death in Timbuktu inside of Bamako, Sissako presents us with an example of what he means by reinvigoration. If African directors cannot break entirely with existing filmic forms, neither are they obliged to make films like Death in Timbuktu that blithely accept them. They can choose, and in fact Bamako calls upon them to do so, to subvert or reappropriate cinema in much the same ways as the “actors” in Bamako have subverted or reappropriated the trial in which they participate, producing that revolutionary violence of dissensus that seeks the liberation of both the filmed image and the global system in which it circulates. Perhaps this is why Bamako leaves the charges against the IMF and the World Bank leveled within its frames with no verdict, forcing the spectator to ponder the fact that in the contemporary period, regionalisms and regional realities – like the Western or the trial or the Rambo Rocket bicycle – circulate much more freely than we might imagine, and they are disrupted in places and spaces we do not always expect. On the one hand, this means an old Malian man can interrupt a trial held in French with a spontaneous outpouring in his own language. But on the other, it means deadly viruses such as Ebola deemed specifically African can find themselves circulating not only in Western Africa but also in the American (South) West. Thus, we find ourselves less and less in the post-colonial imagined by Fanon and more and more in the post-colonial of Stuart Hall, the time of the “double inscription” or the “breaking down [of] the clearly demarcated inside/outside of the colonial system” (1996, 247), where the order that binds us – along with its inequalities and injustices – is increasingly global and less and less localized, and the boundaries between those who exploit it and those subjected to it are increasingly difficult to control or predict, a postcolonial in which the bystander in the street, the cowboy brandishing the gun, the unemployed father, the policeman, the judge, the lawyer, and the filmmaker may all find themselves in the crossfire. Notes 1. The military intervention in Mali was critiqued by many African and ­Western academics and intellectuals, who saw it as a political ploy to boost French ­President François Hollande’s domestic standing and an example of French neocolonialism. For an example of such a critique, see the February 2013 interview with Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop in The Guardian at http://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/08/mali. Interestingly, in that interview Diop states international politics remind him of “a Hollywood movie in which the whole plot depends on us being conditioned to be on the side of the good guys.” This is precisely the effect Bamako engages. 2. See Foucault’s original definition of the concept of discursive field in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1966) as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s elaboration of the concept in The Logic of Practice (1992), The Field of Cultural Production (1993), and Practical Reason (1998).

In the Crossfire  93 3. For a more extensive analysis of Fanon’s writings on the cinema see Kaplan (1999). 4. On this subject, see Slavin (2001) and Genova (2013). 5. For more on contemporary films depicting Africa, see Eltringham (2013) and Higgins (2012). 6. For a more full discussion of this notion of decolonized development, see ­McEwan (2009). 7. For a reading of this film see Saint (2013) and Jaji’s chapter in this volume. 8. For a further discussion of the African Western, see Oscherwitz (2008). 9. This has been widely commented on by critics. For example, Michael Joshua Rowin, writing for Reverse Shot, called it a “hamfisted satire of Western imperialism.” Dennis Lim, writing in The New York Times, called the mini-western “a pointed comment on the dominance of Western culture and ideology.” Ann Hornady, writing in The Washington Post, read the mini-western as ambiguous and characterized it as an element in “a story that refuses to hew to Hollywood notions of structure.” 10. Campbell is borrowing from Hamid Naficy’s definition of accented cinema. As noted in the Introduction to this volume, I do not believe the accenting is exactly equivalent to that described by Naficy, but the reformulation rightly raises questions about what happens to a form when it travels. 11. OHADA (Organisation pour l’Harmonisation en Afrique du Droit des Affaires/ Organization for the Harmonization of African Business Laws) is a treaty signed among seventeen African states creating a common, transnational, business zone with common laws. For more on OHADA, see Bourque (2002) and Pougoué and Elongo (2008).

References Adesokan, Akinwumi. 2011. Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barry, Aminata. 2004. “Pour la grandeur du cinéma africain, une refonte du FESPACO.” Présence Africaine 170.2: 93–97. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason: On The Theory of Action. Randal Johnson et. al., trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Randal Johnson, trans. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford: Stanford ­University Press. Bourque, Jean-François. 2002. “OHADA Four Years On: One Business Law for 16 African Countries.” International Trade Forum. 4:25. Campbell, Neil. 2008. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Diawara, Manthia. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Prestel. Eltringham, Nigel, ed. 2013. Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema. Oxford: Beghann Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. C. Farrington, trans. New York: Grove Press.

94  Dayna Oscherwitz ———. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Charles Lam Markmann, trans. New York: Grove Press. Fisher, Austin. 2014. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London and New York: IB Tauris. Foucault, Michel. 1992. The Archaeology of Knowledge. A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Gabara, Rachel. 2010. “Abderrahmane Sissako: Second and third cinema in the first person.” Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, Rosalind Galt and Art Schoonover, eds., 320–33. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Genova, James E. 2013. Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When Was the Postcolonial: Thinking at the Limit.” The PostColonial Question: Common skies, divided horizons, Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, 242–60. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Harrow, Ken. 2010. Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Higgins, MaryEllen, ed. 2013. Hollywood’s Africa After 1994. Athens: Ohio University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1999. “Fanon, Trauma, and Cinema.” Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed., 142–58. London and New York: Routledge. Landau, Paul S. and Deborah D. Kaspin. 2002. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levine, Allison and J. Murray. 2012. “Words on trial: Oral performance in Adberrahmane Sissako’s Bamako.” Studies in French Cinema 12.2: 151–67. Maingard, Jacqueline. 2010. “Screening Africa in colour: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako.” Screen, 51.4: 397–403. Mbembe, Achille. 2004. “The Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16.3: 373–405. ———. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock,Anne. 1992.“The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-Colonialism.” Social Text 31/32: 84–98. McEwan, Cheryl. 2009. Postcolonialism and Development. London and New York: Routledge. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. Niang, Sada. 2014. Nationalist African Cinema. Lanham MD: Lexington Book. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in ­African Literature. London: J. Currey. Olaniyan, Tejumola. 2008. “Of Rations and Rationalities: The World Bank, African Hunger, and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako.” The Global South 2.2: 130–38. Oscherwitz, Dayna. 2010. Past Forward: French Cinema and the Postcolonial Heritage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 2008. “Of Cowboys and Elephants: Africa, Globalization and the Nouveau Western in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas.” Research in African Literatures 39.1: 223–38. Pougoué, Paul Gérard and Yvette Rachel Kalieu Elongo. 2008. Introduction critique à l’OHADA. Porto Novo and Abidjan: Presses Universitaires d’Afrique.

In the Crossfire  95 Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Steven Corcoran, trans. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. G. Rockhill, trans. New York: Continuum. Saint, Lily. 2013. “‘You Kiss in Westerns’: Cultural Translation in Moustapha A ­ lessane’s Le Retour d’un aventurier.” Journal of African Cinemas 5.2: 203–17. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge. Sisskako, Abderrahmane. 2007. Interview in Bamako, New Yorker Films, DVD bonus material. Slavin, David Henry. 2001. Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U ­ niversity Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12.1: 235–61. Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to JeanLuc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Rooij, Benjamin and Penelope Nicholson. “Inflationary Trends in Law and Development.” (Dec. 13, 2013). Duke Journal of International Law and Development. 2014; Forthcoming: UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2014–15. Available at SSRN http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2367357. Accessed Sep. 16, 2014. Wallerstein, Immanual. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press.

6 Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt MaryEllen Higgins

In Manthia Diawara’s African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun comments on his 2006 film Daratt (Dry Season): “Daratt does not deal with civil war, but with its aftermath. I observe the landscape after the storm, the life that goes on after the debris, ruins and ashes. How to live with each other after so much violence and hatred? Give in or practice vigilante justice? And, if I chose this latter option, what does it mean to kill a human being?” (2010, 283). Debris, ruins, and ashes haunt Daratt’s landscape; it is, as Ken Harrow has observed, a terrain littered with trash. In his Trash: African Cinema from Below, Harrow writes: we cannot appreciate the central role of the trope of trash in African cinema without considering its relationship to the materialization of the trope in its various configurations as actual “rubbish,” “garbage,” “waste,” designated by a series of terms used to signify that which has lost its value, and that is susceptible to either total disappearance or to some version of recycling, of returning (2013, 60). Fields of literal trash appear in Daratt’s two locales, Abéché and N’djamena. Haroun’s film also narrates various layers of figurative waste: the wastelands created by patriarchs, who are themselves in a state of bodily decline, and the discarded rights and hopes of citizens whose heads of state betray them. And there is yet another form of trashing. In Haroun’s oeuvre, in order to break the cycles of civil war violence, constructions of male valor that lie at the heart of the call to vengeance – constructions central to the Western genre – must, to use Harrow’s parlance, be “trashed.” But first, a caveat. My argument is not that Daratt is an appropriation of the Western, or “a colonisation by images” in reverse.1 Daratt may extract one of the Western’s familiar icons: the lone stranger who arrives in town, gun ready by his side, to mete out punishment on criminals who have escaped the law and to smash bullies in a bar room. There are, however, no horses to elevate the position of the hero, no cowboy hats, no trains. These habits of the Western are, as Lee Clark Mitchell notes, “only so many unwoven raw materials” (1996, 3). More pointedly, Daratt engages critically with ideologies of manhood and retribution reinforced by the Western

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  97 genre and, by extension, the cinema’s historic fascination with vigilante justice. I use a Western paradigm to analyze a film from Chad, not to prioritize a ­Western critical apparatus but to recognize Haroun’s brilliant intervention into world cinema, his right to actively trash it. In Daratt’s initial scenes, a blind grandfather, his grandson Atim, and their neighbors listen to radio reports on the conclusions reached by Chad’s Commission of Truth and Justice in the aftermath of civil war. We listen as they hear the president of the Commission announce the decision, after interviewing six hundred victims and witnesses and two hundred war criminals, to grant a general amnesty. The president appeals to listeners to break Chad’s forty-year cycle of violence. There are protests against the legal decision, we understand from the radio report, but we do not see them in the film’s frame. Instead, Haroun devotes the frame to a very personal, more intimate narrative. His protagonist, the orphaned grandson Atim, is removed from the legal proceedings and protests but not from the scenes of suffering in the aftermath of violence. Following the orders of his grandfather, Oumar Abatcha, who gives him his late father’s gun, Atim sets out to take revenge on the man who took his father’s life. The Western genre’s quintessential protagonist, as Loren Quiring describes him, possesses “a flash of will and lead” that commands “that power to make the world rather than to be made by it” (2003, 41). Unable to impose his will in the courts, and with his dead father’s gun in his camouflage jacket, Atim travels from Abéché (where Haroun is from, incidentally) to N’djamena, where his scars and accent mark him as a stranger. As it narrates a son’s desire to avenge the death of his father in the desert, Daratt is punctuated by some of the Western’s raw materials: lingering close-ups of glaring, squinting adversaries; choreographed, circulatory posturing of rivals anticipating the other’s violence; and images of a lone man’s hand as it reaches for the gun. The evocation of the Western is not as much homage or intertext as it is a trashing. The most striking case is when Atim aims his gun at the ­camera, as his revenge mantra is recited in voice-over: “I’m Adoum ­Abatcha’s son. Remember him?” Harrow describes this pivotal scene beautifully: “The camera presents his angry face in mid-shot. As the words are repeated, Atim raises the gun and points it directly at the camera, in the direction of the soldier, menacingly. The words continue, mixing themselves up, as in a jump cut we now see Atim holding the gun in his other hand and facing the opposite direction of the bridge. The sounds and shot confuse the viewer. What has happened?” (2013, 226). One thing that has happened, I would suggest, is the summoning in cinematic memory of the iconic scene in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. In Porter’s film, which is generally considered the first or at the very least a seminal Western narrative film (David Lusted 2003, 72–73), a bandit aims his gun at the camera as if to fire upon the spectators watching the film. As Lusted writes, this “extra scenic shot” is constructed without a

98  MaryEllen Higgins

Figure 6.1  Atim’s (Ali Barkai) stance recalls Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.

“compositional reference to any other shot in the film, so existing outside the film’s fictional world or diegesis” (2003, 73). In Porter’s 1903 Western, the bandit seems to fire directly into the camera. In Haroun’s rendering, the spectator similarly looks right into the barrel of his gun, but then the direction changes abruptly. Suddenly the angle shifts, the gun appears in the opposite hand, and Atim now shoots to the side at an unknown target, perhaps in the opposite direction of the soldier on crutches whose leg has been amputed at the knee. Atim’s arm jerks backward, as if he has made the shot. He looks around, surprised, as if the shot originated elsewhere. Just as the sound in early silent films was produced by music or narrators exterior to the screen, Atim’s voice seems momentarily to split from its image, as if jumping and cutting back to mix with something exterior and yet related to itself – perhaps to the cinema’s originatory images of punishment and violence. Or, given the pervasive influence of the Western genre in the construction of dominant forms of narrative film language (see Lusted 2003, 68), the jumbling of the language in Haroun’s film might be read as a figurative plucking, ripping, stripping, and trashing of the Western genre itself. The Western, then, is not recycled or revivified; rather, it is acknowledged and summarily trashed. Daratt is the second piece in a trilogy that starts with Haroun’s Abouna (Our Father, 2002) and concludes with Un homme qui crie (A Screaming Man, 2010). In an interview with Stuart Jeffries, Haroun comments on Abouna: “We are like orphans in Chad, and in much of Africa too. It’s like a relay race – when you don’t have somebody to hand you the baton, you are lost and can’t progress. It’s parallel to lacking God” (2002). In Daratt, Atim’s grandfather hands him not a baton but his dead father’s gun.

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  99 In contrast to the man of will and lead, Atim is haunted by flashes of pervasive, controlling, generational memory. Midway through the film, Atim speaks in voice-over, as if to the audience: “You know the story of the guy who wants to be rid of his shadow at any price? This man runs everywhere. All the time. Like a madman. Each time he stops, he turns around and sees his shadow behind him. One day his shadow says, irritably: ‘Why tire yourself out? You’ll only get rid of me the day you accomplish your mission.’” Atim will wear his camouflage jacket when he embarks on his mission, but later wears a T-shirt with an outline of Africa’s map that reads “mad of Afrika.” Lusted remarks on the combination of the proverbial man on a mission with the madness created by a devasting loss in the past in the revenge hero strain in the ­Western genre. He cites the Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann in the 1950s and 60s as prototypes: “His quest for revenge is seen as destructive and it is necessary for him to exorcise his neuroses before … he can become whole again” (2003, 163). The revenge hero becomes not a cowboy seeking justice but a frightening figure of excess, and his targets are sympathetic outlaws who wish to cut their ties to the past. The ghostly past itself seems to deliver the traumatic blow, the neuorosis, the obsessive search for wholeness. It is easy to imagine why flashes from the Western genre would appear, disappear, and reappear in Daratt, with its lone hero bent on filling the void of unrequited justice. Yet Haroun breaks with the ghosts of cinema’s past. Atim is not an excessive revenge hero. His hand is not the steady, swift hand of the Western’s gunslinger – the hand his grandfather expects him to show in order to prove his manhood – but the shaking hand of a youth who hesitates to kill his father’s murderer, Nassara. Indeed, each time Atim points his gun in Nassara’s direction, the camera lingers on his trembling hand. Furthermore, the landscape he traverses is not the open space of the Western but a desert terrain littered with debris, with trash. The ghosts of the Western, that dominant genre in the genesis of cinema, appear in Daratt as bits and scraps, as flashbacks to images that arise from the detritus of cinema history, images to be later dissociated from the narrative as it turns its primary focus to the aftermath of Chad’s civil wars. The image of the man who points his gun directly at the camera is in fact summoned twice in Daratt. Before Atim arrives at the bridge with the injured soldier, at the very beginning of his journey from Abéché to N’djamena, he stares at a soldier in a taxi-brousse (collective taxi/ bus). This soldier will become the film’s figure of excess. After the soldier, whom we later learn speaks Italian, mounts the van, he and Atim gaze intensely at each other as if daring the other to react. The soldier taunts him: “Tu veux une photo? Idiot, parle! Je t’ai posé une question!” (You want a photo? Who are you looking at? Talk, idiot! I asked you a question!) Atim holds his angry stare. Close-ups of each face staring directly

100  MaryEllen Higgins into the camera (but, we understand, at each other) follow. The soldier points his gun at Atim’s head but we see it head on, pointed directly at the camera. A man in the taxi prays anxiously; a woman holds her baby close to her. This moment conjures up the long, anticipatory stares that precede the violence in Spaghetti Westerns and perhaps also the trash talk of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. (In Scorsese’s latter film, he reproduces the image of the man shooting into the camera in The Great Train Robbery.) Like Oumar Abatcha, the classic Western genre is inflicted with a sort of blindness, an inability to see options beyond violence, to break with its own discourse of masculine duty and conclusive shootouts. Nassara and Oumar Abathcha – who are the real adversaries in the film, for Atim is the vehicle of the grandfather’s revenge – are linked ideologically by their shared belief that “a man needs a gun.” This statement is articulated verbatim by Nassara as Atim gazes at Nassara’s elaborate gun collection, which he ostensibly used to commit his former war crimes. Similar to the paternal Nassara’s assertion that a man needs a gun, the patriarchal grandfather tells Atim his hand must not tremble when he executes Nassara. As he prepares for the execution, Atim dutifully rehearses his role as if he were a gunslinger in a Western, one that makes the perfect shot under pressure. Ultimately, Atim brings Nassara to his grandfather but not to kill him. Atim fires the gun into the air above, crafting an illusion of violence that satisfies the blind grandfather’s thirst for revenge. In the last lines of Daratt, the blind grandfather asks: “Did your hand tremble?” The response: “No.” The grandfather congratulates him: “Then you are a man.”

Figure 6.2  The patriarch’s (Khayar Oumar Defallah) assessment of masculinity in Daratt.

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  101 Viewers will recall Atim’s hand trembles continuously when he points the gun at Nassara earlier in the film. Atim’s hand is steady, however, when he shoots into the air to avert the maddening orders of the patriarch. Shooting into the air above constitutes a new kind of coup that breaks with old, wounding, cyclical coups. What brings Atim to this point, not of reconciliation but of amnesty, is projected in a series of stunning visual shots in which Atim experiences crises of identification. The crises are marked in several scenes that evoke images of the Western’s feuding adversaries. Within the scenes of elongated staredowns, Haroun makes several crucial insertions. For example, in one scene, Atim holds his gun as he approaches the door of Nassara’s bakery, wearing his camouflage jacket. Empty, discarded plastic bags roll by at his feet. As Atim passes through the frame, the camera’s lens stays focused on the rolling pieces of trash, as if they, too, are characters in the scene or plastic tumbleweeds in a ghost town. Nassara emerges, with prayer beads in hand, on his way to the mosque. He is followed by Atim, as both walk through a field littered with mounting heaps of trash. Atim stands ready but does not make his shot; between he and Nassara kneel the prayerful. When Atim comes within shooting distance of Nassara again, this time a group of hungry youths stand between the avenger and his target as they receive Nassara’s bread offerings. Atim cannot shoot Nassara without risking injury to the youths. This scene repeats later on: Atim waits with his gun held in his pocket, ready to shoot Nassara, but hungry youths stand up between them. Thus inserted into the space between Atim and Nassara is a younger generation in need, young figures who emphasize other community problems beyond Atim’s personal mission of vengeance, figures who compete for Atim’s attention and, arguably, communities the grandfather seems to discard, forget, or ignore in the wake of too much remembering. When Nassara sees Atim, he assumes he, too, is hungry. He offers him some bread, which Atim takes, chews, and spits on the ground before he drops the loaf to the ground, trashing the offer. Atim and Nassara gaze at each other up close rather than many paces away (as in the typical Western), closing the distance between them. They circle each other three times, locked in series of a suspicious stares. It is a dance that conjures the circulating cinematography so prevalent in the Western’s staging of impending violence and revenge. The circular movements of Atim and Nassara, a prelude to possibilties of violence – or perhaps a deliberate meditation on the expectation of that violence so ingrained in the ­Western’s spectators – are overtly choreographed, as in the mocking Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. Yet the scenes are not, as they are in Leone’s work, operatic. They are mostly silent until something ruptures the silence and the space between them. Nassara says, “Just what do you want?” Atim responds, “Not charity.” Their circular dance is interrupted by the repetitive, circular blaring of a recording issued through a van’s loudspeaker: “Approchez, ­Approchez!” (Approach, Approach!). The inscription on the van reads “New Bakery:

102  MaryEllen Higgins Nouvelle Boulangerie,” a new market force that lures Nassara’s clients with goods from abroad. The Nouvelle Boulangerie van encroaches on the town much like the train in the classic Western; this one brings in baguettes, butter, and chocolate croissants from France. When Nassara protests, the driver tells him to complain to the World Trade Organization. The viewer understands, as Nassara does, that the WTO will not hear his case against foreign competition, just as the Truth Commision will not address the grievances of Oumar Abatcha. Later, Nassara will be called to the police, not for his crimes against Chadians during the civil war but for his assault on driver of the New Bakery van. Because Atim was born after his father was murdered – hence the name Atim, “Orphan” – he was not a witness to Nassara’s crime. He is, however, a witness to soldiers who view others as expendable déchets humains (the dregs of society), a term Harrow recalls from Ousmane Sembène (2013, 57) and a term that reappears prominently in the ironic title of a novel by Sembène’s compatriot, Aminata Sow Fall, as La grève des bàttus, ou, Les dèchets humains (The Beggar’s Strike, or The Dregs of Society). Atim witnesses the encroachment of neoliberal market forces on local ecomomies and women dragged at gunpoint by men in the streets. Atim will also be moved by Nassara’s coy wife, Aïsha, whose parents’ domineering will forced her into an unwanted marriage with a much older man. The metonymic link between the aftermath of vigilante violence and fields of debris is stunningly drawn early on in the visuals that follow the Truth Commision’s radio anouncement. Following the radio report of protests against the amnesty decision, off-screen gunfire is heard, fire that seems to indicate a militant reaction to the amnesty decision. The sound is accompanied by the image of the grandfather who hears the gunfire but who, like the viewer, cannot see its origins. This shot is followed by the image of Atim picking up shoes without bodies that litter the landscape, shoes that seem to belong to the villagers who were present in the earlier scenes but who are now eerily absent. Atim moves his fingers over the shoes, in the place where bodies would have been. In the background, a soldier chases a young man through the field of empty shoes. It is a move that might compel a viewer of the DVD to rewind and investigate whether the empty shoes match the shoes of the previously featured neighbors, thereby compelling the viewer to remember the past. Or it may alternatively present a flash forward to a future in which reciprocal violence leaves Atim’s town with nothing but absent bodies, the debris of shoes. As he readies himself to enact revenge, Atim’s attention is increasingly drawn to figures who produce suffering and damage: the soldier in the van who points a gun at his head, and that same soldier, in a bar/saloon, drunkenly shooting into the air, whom Atim later beats and disarms. This soldier recalls what Mitchell calls the Western’s “professional derelict, a figure whose excess is pitted against the upright, restrained hero” (1996, 166). Soldiers emerge in the film as excessive agents of damage. They are

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  103 unrestrained, domineering male figures who attempt to contain and control through the use of force and violence. They strike Atim repeatedly for public urination and the ex-soldier, Nassara, whips his wife, Aïcha, because she finds Atim’s mockery of him pleasurably entertaining. After Nassara trashes Atim’s cell phone, he confesses, “Sometimes I can’t control myself. I can even be dangerous. You know, I’ve done a lot of harm in my life.” For Mitchell, the obsession with masculinity, or making the man, is the ultimate mark of the Western genre. He writes that above all, the Western is recognizable by a set of problems in endless combination: the problem of progress, envisioned as a passing of frontiers; the problem of honor, defined in a context of social expediency; the problem of law or justice, enacted in a conflict of vengeance and social control; the problem of violence, in acknowledging its value yet honoring occasions when it can be controlled; and subsuming all, the problem of what it means to be a man, as aging victim of progress, embodiment of honor, champion of justice in an unjust world (1996, 3). Nassara, the aging perpetrator, is also an aging victim. Someone tried to slit his throat in the civil war, his child died in a miscarriage, and in a weak moment, he says he feels abandoned by God. He is also the declining victim of forceful neoliberal economics, as Carmela Garritano has aptly observed, that Northern conception of progress in Africa that drives arrogantly through the town.2 Atim’s position, both within the space of the frame and also vis-à-vis the problems of law, justice, and violence, is constructed artfully in each scene. How should he respond to the Commission’s calls for restraint, calls that throw his grandfather’s desire for justice in the trash? Does he want to use the gun/baton handed to him by the patriarch? Does he want reparations from the war criminal? Does he want to steal from Nassara or accept his apprenticeship? Does he want to become like him? Where to position himself within a civil war, within a vicious cycle of successive coups and counter-coups? Of the physical position of characters in the Western, M ­ itchell writes: “The Western can be reduced to oppositions between those who stand and those who fall down – between upright men on horseback and those whose supposedly ‘natural’ position is prone” (1996, 168). Falling and rising becomes less about the violence itself. Violence in the Western “is less a matter of violating another than of constituting one’s physical self as male” (1996, 169). Indeed, in Daratt’s concluding dialogue, Oumar Abatcha asks not whether Nassara is dead but whether Atim’s hand shook during the execution – the sign, for the grandfather, that Atim is a man. There are many instances of stooping, knocking down, falling, rising, kneeling, and trashing in Daratt. Yet even when Atim and Nassara exchange high and low positions, they more frequently mirror each other. The scene in which Atim takes

104  MaryEllen Higgins Nassara’s bread, chews it, spits twice, then drops it to ground is echoed in a later scene after Atim confesses he forgot to add yeast to the bread. This time Nassara, in an echoing gesture that reverses the roles, chews and spits the spoiled bread before he throws it on the floor. Shortly after this role-reversing scene of mirroring gestures, Atim points the gun directly at the mirror. He is wearing the blue bakery shirt handed to him by Nassara. As Atim gazes at the mirror, the image mirrors the gun. For Mitchell, the cowboy hero struggles to display his own masculinity and “that self-construction requires him continually to observe himself, controlling behavior in a world where desire so easily leads to social disorder” (1996, 167). There is another stunning mirror scene where Atim’s mirrored image appears between Nassara’s back and Nassara’s image in the mirror, just after Nassara bids Atim to take one of the guns from his collection. Nassara gazes at himself in the mirror, his eyes lingering over the wound at his throat. The dresser mirror is actually composed of two mirrors joined together; as he helps Nassara with his support belt, Atim’s image is on the left, Nassara’s on the right. After Nassara leaves, Atim crosses into the right space of the mirror, taking Nassara’s place. He gazes at himself. The semblance between Atim and Nassara is sutured again in their camouflage costumes. Atim wears his camouflage jacket as he sets off to find Nassara, then packs it away when he makes bread. In the final scenes, Nassara wears a camouflage-colored turban that he strips off before Atim spares him. The camouflage evokes soldierhood but also a mask that can be discarded and worn again, a version of constructed manhood that conceals and camouflages bodily wounds. Mitchell notes of the cowboy’s costume: “his dress has become a kind of language, signaling in fiction the kind of moral, emotional being he is (the excess of two guns versus the restraint of one, for example, or the contrasting claims made by fringe, silk, leather, and silver)” (1996, 165). In Daratt, Nassara is ordered to disrobe from the waist up and to take off his camouflage. In the end, Atim decides for himself, after witnessing the suffering, the decline, the unappealing and ultimately pitiful aggression of the man he was sent to destroy, not to mirror his hostility. As he stands between Nassara and his grandfather in the concluding scenes, Atim uses the baton/gun to change the course of events by granting Nassara amnesty but not the coveted role of father. The grandfather does not comprehend that Atim’s hand finds its steadiness in a decision not to enact revenge. With whom, then, does Atim identify? We can venture back to the scene at the beginning in which the neighbors listen to the radio announcement of the amnesty. The blind grandfather hears gunshots, we do not see who the shooters are, but in the aftermath, regardless of who starts the shooting, the outcome is that Atim picks up the debris, the empty shoes of his neighbors who have disappeared. Atim allies himself with the so-called dregs of society, those bereft of their costumes, those whose presence is marked by debris.

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  105 Like Harrow, I see Daratt as a film about “the after-effects of trauma,” in which “the memory is not stored as having passed, say, into an archive, but rather remains as though present, or even as though in the future – as if an anticipation of a blow already received was for a blow about to be received, or received again” (2013, 223). In the Western, the prototypical, drawn-out stare-down before the gunfight, before the duel, is a staging that anticipates fateful blows. What Atim seems to anticipate in the mysterious scene of leftover shoes are the blows that cause another series of losses. When the landscape appears to be empty, then, it is not blank at all. The spaces are marked by the absence of neighbors, the absence of fathers, the losses generated by civil war. Several scholars have already demonstrated that the American Western genre reinforced the rhetoric of empty American territory open for colonial settlement. The rhetoric of blank, virgin land was present well before the invention of moving pictures, yet as Scott Simmon writes: “This old argument could finally be fleshed out through the invention of the movies, which brought the technology to visualize the ‘blankness’ of the land and to dramatize the human action needed to fill it” (2003, 53). Within the spaces of Chad’s desert landscapes in Haroun’s films, scenes of bloody violence are notably absent, although threats of violence, media reports of violence, and scenes of missing bodies in the aftermath of reciprocal violence pervade the canvas. His frames are often inhabited by damaged bodies suffering from absence: the chronically asthmatic Amin, abandoned by his father and fatally untreated in Abouna; the son’s body damaged beyond repair and then missing from the motorcycle in Un homme qui crie; and Nassara, with his severed throat and his reliance on an electrolarynx to speak, who literally speaks, with his electrolarynx, from the wound. In the vein of Sidonie Smith’s (2012) reading of human-rights narration as a project of rearchivization in the afterlife of loss, I read Haroun’s film trilogy as a rearchivization of absence that marks that loss: the absent father whose image is only available to his sons on film in Abouna; the shoes devoid of bodies in Daratt; the empty spaces that mark the loss of the sacrificed son in Un homme qui crie. Similarly, Harrow detects a new archive in Daratt, an “absence turned into presence” (2013, 223). What is compelling about Haroun’s summoning of the ghost of the Western, its scraps of presence in the film, is its question of vigilante justice, one of the Western genre’s most prominent obsessions. Haroun’s questions outlined earlier in this essay – How to live with each other after so much violence and hatred? Give in or practice vigilante justice? And, if I choose this latter option, what does it mean to kill a human being?” – complement Martha Minow’s concerns in her Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, where she writes: “Societies have to struggle over how much to acknowledge, whether to punish, and how to recover. How to treat the continuing presence of perpetrators, and victims, and bystanders, after the violence has ended. … A common formulation posits the two dangers of wallowing in the past and forgetting it. Too much memory or not enough …” (1998, 2). Haroun’s very projection of cinematic

106  MaryEllen Higgins images of the aftermath of the violence in Chad, images and sounds that can be reprojected over and over, is clearly not vested in forgetting. Yet too much memory haunts the present to such an extreme degree that it blocks an awareness of everything else. Oumar Abatcha wants Nassara, his son’s killer, not just to remember the son but to infuse the presence of the murdered son into Nassara’s last memory as Nassara is ordered to re-enact the son’s final scenes of suffering. The grandfather addresses Atim: “He hasn’t forgotten me. Has he? I am Oumar Abatcha. May he suffer the same fate as my son. May he feel the same humiliation. Have him undress!” Atim, earlier, had rehearsed the lines he planned to utter in order to force Nassara into a recollection: “I’m the son of Abatcha. Remember?” Yet Atim remembers his father only through the memory of the grandfather who is fixated on the blow, the trauma that ended his son’s life. Atim does not suffer a series of intrusive recollections of his father’s murder, for Atim was not a witness to the violence imposed on his father, who died before he was born. He is, however, a witness to the father’s absence. He is haunted, he tells us, by a shadow. The voice of vengeance Atim hears when he points his gun, the repetition of the name of his father, is not a flashback to the blow but a flash forward to a future settling of scores. For Atim, it is not the indelible memory of the past that encroaches upon the present but the intrusive anticipation of the future. Thus while Oumar Abatcha and Nassara experience “possession by the past,” a description by Cathy Caruth in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995, 151), Atim is possessed by an imagined future. It is not just the future act of vengeance he envisions but the aftermath, as in the scene following the unseen gunfire that mysteriously concludes with Atim picking up discarded shoes, as if he is witness to another coup that results in wounded and absent bodies. The voice of the grandfather that demands vigilantism is muted by a vision of the aftermath of devastating violence. Caruth recalls in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History that the Greek word “trauma” or “wound” refers to bodily injury. In medical terminology, the trauma is the blow, and also “is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (1996, 3). The story of trauma, then, is “the story of a wound that cries out” (1996, 4). The lingering signs of traumatic blows are clearly noticeable in the damaged bodies of Haroun’s characters: the grandfather’s blindness, Nassara’s severed throat and debilitating back pain, the lost limb of the soldier on the bridge who asks for a cigarette. These wounds are inflicted by patriarchal political systems in which elders themselves are victims of the tragedies they produce. Persistent within Haroun’s Abouna, Daratt, and Un homme qui crie trilogy are negligent, declining patriarchal heads of state, a generation willing to sacrifice the futures of their sons and daughters to to gain and regain power and recognition. Initially, Atim does not expect to see a wounded man. He listens to his grandfather’s warning that Nassara is dangerous, he hears a woman on the

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  107 radio assert the former war criminals live in “total impunity,” and we hear Atim’s interior monologue imagining the “total freedom” his father’s killer enjoys. When Atim finally witnesses the presence of Nassara, he is on his way to the mosque, he gives charity to young beggars, he is weakened, he speaks through an electrolarynx, he suffers from back pain, he alludes to his past crimes in mournful tones. Later, we learn Nassara yearns for a son, especially someone with whom he can break the fast of Ramadan. The feast of ­Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, the feast of purification, presents an unspoken (in the film) opportunity to ask for forgiveness and to be forgiven. Minow asserts: “To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting” (1998, 118). Memory and truth are elusive. Nassara will not recount his crimes and Atim will not reveal the identity of his father so Atim carves a pathway between vengeance and forgiveness through a masterful illusion. This illusion stands in for the path of vengeance, for the ritual reversing of the roles of perpetrator and victim. He also refuses to let Nassara assume the former place of his victimfather, who was once at the mercy of the war criminal. Additionally, Atim refuses to let Nassara adopt him, to stand in for his father. Through his illusion, Atim rejects the role formerly inhabited by Nassara, the role of murderer. Atim’s mission, in the end, is not just the undoing of the cycles of violence through his masterful illusion but the undoing of a conception of male valor shared both by the grandfather and Nassara. It is this ideology, which is so persistent in the Western, that has endured a long dry season and must be stripped and artfully trashed. Richard Slotkin notes that frontier vigilantism’s extralegal force in the American Western targets “undesirables” (1992, 173). In other words, the Western’s vigilante determines who belongs in the trash heap. This is so often the case in Hollywood genres.Villain others are summarily, without question, wasted by cowboy heroes. Haroun’s hero throws away the idea of such a trashing. The Western genre is certainly not the only medium that narrates stories of masculine honor, revenge, trauma, excessive violence, and its remnants. The director Cheick Oumar Sissoko found the inspiration for his film on internecine violence, La Genèse (1999), in the book of Genesis.3 In Harrow’s analyses of Daratt (2013, 223–226), he unearths the ghost of the father in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In his comments on Daratt, Diawara (2010, 283) notes Haroun took his inspiration from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. There is a moment in Daratt where Atim’s friend Moussa tells his aunt, jokingly, that Atim is from America. “America?” she responds. “And I’m from Mars.” The wider joke might be in Moussa’s next line: “It’s not every day that we get somebody from America.” As we know from Haroun’s early film, Bye Bye Africa (1999), American films, and particularly Westerns, dominated African movie theatres daily, along with other imported pictures.4 Ultimately, it is not necessarily the Western genre – so many strips of film sutured together or, more recently, digitally reassembled images – that needs to be discarded. Instead, it is the continuous linkage between violence and

108  MaryEllen Higgins valor. It is interesting that the critical language used to describe radical artistic challenges to earlier works imply a kind of violent retribution: the artist “explodes” the myth, “ruptures” the scene, the text “implodes.” Images of violent fighting are notably absent from Haroun’s films. The viewer does not witness the blows. In the place of the blow, we see empty shoes, voids, remnants, what Harrow calls “absence turned into presence” (2013, 223). The ghostly presence of cinema is there, too. Haroun, like several African cineastes, draws from his vast knowledge of cosmopolitan sources. Wounds and loss produced by cyclical civil wars are, as we know, not limited to Chad but are the raw materials of so many worldly tragedies. At the bus stop where Atim and his friend Moussa rest, there is an advertisement with a woman’s hand elegantly holding a globe. It reads: “Le monde. À portée de main.” (The world. In reach of your hands). Notes 1. In his 2002 interview with Stuart Jeffries, Haroun remarked that it is important that Chadians make films because too often Africans do not “have the opportunity to see our own images on the screen instead of American or European ones. Otherwise we have a colonisation by images.” 2. I’d like to thank Carmela Garritano for her insightful comments about neoliberalism during my presentations on Haroun’s films at the African Literature Association’s annual conferences in 2012 and 2013. 3. See Alioune Sow’s (2009) “Alternating Views: Malian Cinema, Television Serials, and Democratic Experience.” 4. See Dayna Oscherwitz’s (2012) “Bye Bye Hollywood: African Cinema and Its Double in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa.”

References Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Daratt. 2006. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, dir. Armattan Productions. Diawara, Manthia. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich: Prestel. Jeffries, Stuart. 14 Nov. 2002. “Out of Africa.” The Guardian. Web. Harrow, Kenneth W. 2013. Trash: African Cinema From Below. Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press. Lusted, David. 2003. The Western. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Minow, Martha. 1998. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon. Mitchell, Lee Clark. 1996. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Trashing the Western’s Revenge Narrative  109 Oscherwitz, Dayna. 2012. “Bye Bye Hollywood: African Cinema and Its Double in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa.” Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, MaryEllen Higgins, ed., 240–259. Athens: Ohio University Press. Quiring, Loren. 2003. “Dead Men Walking: Consumption and Agency in the W ­ estern.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 33 (1), 41–46. Simmon, Scott. 2003. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Harper Perennial. Smith, Sidonie. 2012. “Cultures of Rescue and the Global Transit in Human Rights Narratives.” Handbook of Human Rights. Thomas Cushman, ed. London: Routledge. Sow, Alioune. 2009. “Alternating Views: Malian Cinema, Television Serials, and Democratic Experience.” Africa Today 55 (4), 50–70. Sow Fall, Aminata. 1979. La Grève des Bàttu. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines.

7 Cowboys and West Indians Decolonizing the Western and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1973) Rita Keresztesi

This chapter examines how the Western, the quintessential visual vehicle of American imperialist myth-making and rugged individualism, has been reconfigured to subvert the imperialist message to accommodate the genre for local uses in the Global South, in the Anglophone Caribbean in particular.1 While the classic Western was the vehicle for the dissemination of U.S. political and economic ambition, its Third World and then Third Cinema2 versions used the clichés of American-ness to critique that very ideology. Often it was the Italian or Spaghetti Western that mediated and translated the American genre to reappropriations in the Global South.3 Third World films, and Third Cinema in particular, employed the visual clichés of the Western but also debunked both American imperialism and white supremacy through a radical political message within a postcolonial context. In the Anglophone Caribbean, American classic Westerns were the only shows in town between the 1930s through the 1970s and even now, American B-movies dominate theaters. In his travelogue The ­Middle ­ ­Passage: The Caribbean Revisited, V.S. Naipaul comments on the d ­ ominance of ­American cinema during his visit to Trinidad, the island of his birth, in September 1960: Newspapers and radio were, however, only the ancilliaries of the cinema, whose influence is incalculable. The Trinidad audience actively participates in the action on the screen. … It responds, in short, to every stock situation of the American cinema. Nearly all the films shown, apart from those in the first-run cinemas, are American and old. Favourites are shown again and again: Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart; Till the Clouds Roll By; the Errol Flynn, John Wayne, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Richard Widmark films; vintage Westerns like Dodge City and Jesse James; and every film Bogart made. Films are reputed for their fights. The ­Spoilers is advertised as having the longest fight ever (Randolph Scott and John Wayne, I believe). … After thirty years of active participation in this sort of cinema, the Trinidadian, whether he sits in the pit of the house or the balcony, can respond only to the Hollywood formula. Nothing beyond the formula is understood, even when it comes from America;

Cowboys and West Indians  111 and nothing from outside American is worth considering. British films, until they took on an American gloss, played to empty houses. (Naipaul 2002, 535–5) Naipaul points to the characteristics that make Hollywood films, Westerns in particular, so popular with audiences: In its stars the Trinidad audience looks for a special quality of style. John Garfield had this style; so did Bogart. … For the Trinidadian an actor has style when he is seen to fulfill certain aspirations of the audience: the virility of Bogart, the man-on-the-the-run romanticism of Garfield. The pimpishness and menace of Duryea, the ice-cold sadism of Widmark. (Naipaul 2002, 545–5) Hollywood’s influence was less in the message of imperialist conquest than in style. American films provided models of masculinity and an outlet for rebellion. Because audiences watched American films through their own cultural filters, elements of Hollywood films were partially understood on their own terms. Only certain elements were borrowed and then reincorporated into their own national cinematic reproductions. Just as humor is culturally situated, American films only disseminate messages that communicate with local audiences. The already reappropriated version of the classic Western, the ­Italian or Spaghetti Western, was the primary influence on Trevor Rhone and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1973), the first Jamaican feature film made a decade after the island gained its independence from the B ­ ritish crown.4 In visual self-reference, Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film Django is the show in town at the Rialto Theater in West Kingston in Henzell’s film. ­Watching Corbucci’s Django leaves a lasting impression on Ivan, the young aspiring singer-outlaw hero of Henzell’s movie. While Ivan mimics the fictional Django, he is also a composite of typical “rudeboy” or “rudie” characters from the infamous yards of West Kingston. The Harder They Come references the story of a real-life Jamaican rudeboy, Ivanhoe ­“Rhyging” Martin, the first gunman in Jamaica and a folk hero who died in his early twenties during a shoot-out with the police in Lime Cay in the late 1940s. ­Rhyging is often regarded as the prototype of the rudeboys and later ­“yardies”5 of Jamaican popular culture. The outlaw figure of the Western becomes a point of reference for the Jamaican film. In the context of the postcolonial C ­ aribbean, the Western’s hero channels the modern figure of rebellion as opposed to traditional rebels, such as the Maroons in Jamaica or the ­“badman” stick-fighters and Kalinda dancers in the villages of Trinidad. In this context, America is modern as opposed to the recent colonial past that is also British and very out-of-date in style. During the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in Jamaica, “badmanism” found its cultural resonances with a growing urban youth

112  Rita Keresztesi population increasingly concentrated in West Kingston. The film ends in a final shoot-out according to the formula of the classic Western, but with a twist. As the law is closing in on Ivan, just like on his screen hero Django, he calls out, “One bad man, who can draw” on the beach by Port Royal. The postcard-like Caribbean landscape replaces the classic Western’s locale of Monument Valley or the dusty, dead Spanish countryside of the Italian Western. Moreover, in a radical move, the Caribbean seascape becomes a place of conflict and action, in opposition to the mellow island paradise imagined by First World tourists. Instead of sparing the hero’s life, the West Indian version of the genre makes him a casualty to senseless violence, suggesting his vulnerability to powers in the “postcolony,” as Achille Mbembe coins the term, that are bigger than the genre could contain. Henzell’s film self-consciously references the Italian or Spaghetti ­Western not as playful pastiche but as an intervention. The film mimics the ­Italian subversion of the Western, but with a “differance,” as Jacques D ­ errida conceptualizes and Stuart Hall explains: “Derrida uses the anomalous ‘a’ in his way of writing ‘difference’ – difference – as a marker which set up a disturbance in our settled understanding or translation of the word/concept” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 230). Hall uses Derrida’s disembodied explanation for the hybrid existence and creolized cultural identity of the C ­ aribbean, supplementing Aimée Césaire’s and Léopold Senghor’s metaphor of P ­ resence Americaine, in relation to their notions of Presence Africaine and Presence Europeennne (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 230). The film The Harder They Come performs such creolization of the classic Western via the Italian or Spaghetti Western by disturbing the gaze of the eye and I. The film mimics the Western but also invests it with the sounds of roots reggae and the rebelliousness of ghetto youth, the inheritors of the legacy of Jamaica’s Maroons and Garvey-ite black nationalism. Kenneth Harris, in “Sex, Race Commodity and Film Fetishism in The Harder They Come,” reads Ivan’s identification as transparent and unmediated, as Ivan becoming Django of Corbucci’s film. In Harris’s reading, Ivan supplants his black Jamaican identity to become the hero of a Spaghetti Western: “Ivan’s identification with the white hero …,” proving “the commodification of reggae for white consumers” (Harris in Cham, ed. 1992, 213). Harris continues: “He [Ivan] is fetishized both as an object of homoerotic desire and as an image of a cinematic hero” (Harris in Cham, ed. 1992, 214). Admittedly, Harris watches Henzell’s film from the perspective of a white and foreign spectator, basing his argument on Henzell’s white Jamaican subjectivity. But there is a another layer of watching. In this ­ segment of the film and during the final shoot-out, we only see the black Jamaican audience’s reactions to the Spaghetti Western Django at the Rialto and then to Ivan facing down the encroaching police force, in both cases Jamaican youth audiences mediating the film and events. Ivan sees himself as Django through the eyes of the local audience—identification of the

Cowboys and West Indians  113 I through their eye. Moreover, The Harder They Come was the first time the Rastafarian community, criminalized by the Jamaican government, saw themselves visually and linguistically represented in a feature film. Harris reads Henzel’s film as a straightforward commentary on the commercialization of Jamaican music and the fetishization of black masculinity. His analysis is based on Marxist and Freudian conceptualizations of the fetish object as commodity but sidesteps the political message of both the film and, most importantly, the meaning of the title song. Harris only hears sexual innuendo in the title of the film and the title song: “Thematically, the most important song in the film is not the phallic ‘The Harder They Come’ but another song by Jimmy Cliff, the rather more anal ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’” (Harris in Cham, ed. 1992, 215). But Jimmy Cliff’s (or Ivan’s) song “The Harder They Come” focuses on the yearning for political/economic agency that references both past colonial and current neocolonial subjugation: But I’d rather be a free man in my grave  Than living as a puppet or a slave. (—Jimmy Cliff, Island Records, 1972) The film performs an alternative postcolonial interpretation and critique of the genre, what Louis Chude-Sokei calls the “first black post-colonial western” (Chude-Sokei in Wilson and Connery 2007, 135). While it does not overtly carry the politically self-aware message of most Third Cinema films driven by a Marxist radical critique, the postcolonial undertones are clearly present, mostly through the Rastafarian sub-plot and reggae soundtrack, as well as the proximity of Cuba as a possible but fizzled place of escape. While postcolonial audiences of the classic Western often identified with the outlaw characters of the genre, in Henzell’s film the watching audiences have further axes of identification: Jamaican youth watching the Italian Western in Kingston while being watched in The Harder They Come. ­Henzell commented on the reception of his film, mostly by the youth of West K ­ ingston and Rastafarians, though middle-class Jamaicans and Jamaicans living in England were less enthusiastic: “Black people seeing themselves on the screen for the first time created an unbelievable audience reaction” (Henzell in Mennel 2008, 170). Michel Thelwell, who turned the film into a book with the same title, also comments on the reactions by Jamaican youth and Rastafarians as enthusiastic, almost cathartic: “Breddah Mike, is only one trouble I have wid dat book,” an old man said. “An’ dat is keeping it in de house. Post mistress she borrow it. Teacher him borrow it. Everyone who came a yard an’ see it wan borrow. You doan know how much walking I have to do fe keep up wid dat book”. (Thelwell in Cham, ed. 1992, 202)

114  Rita Keresztesi In the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean context, the rudeboy or rudie anti-hero exposes and takes on, though in vain, the corrupt forces of political and business elites who have internalized the values of their former colonial rulers. The musical echoes of badmanism can be heard in the sounds of Jamaican reggae, dub, and contemporary dancehall music. The soundtrack and the marginalized Rastafarian presence in the film carry a more radical message than the actual visual narrative. While the roots reggae, ska, and rocksteady soundtrack performed by Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, The Maytails, Scotty, and The Slickers speaks truth to power of the youth of the post-independence generation, the main character rudeboy, Rhyging Martin, can only offer a limited notion of resistance that eventually dissolves into aimless violence. The film addresses most aspects of corruption and new forms of enslavement that Ivan faces once he leaves the countryside for the city, such as the church, the police, the music business, the drug trade, unemployment, and poverty. The song “Rivers of Babylon” codes Ivan’s struggles in Rastafarian terms, naming the corrupt system in Biblical terms and pitting Babylon against Zion, Western values against local cultural signification. In the Anglophone Caribbean imagination, mostly in Trinidad and Jamaica, Americans and American Westerns offered a welcome alterative to Britishness. Before independence (1962) in Trinidad and Jamaica, ­American movies flooded the theaters with their images of American individualism; moreover, America was the former colony of a shared colonial master. ­During World War II, however, the actual presence of real American marines stationed in the barracks of Chauguramas in Trinidad offered another peek at American culture: that of arrogance, drunkenness, and solicitations of prostitution–, as often recorded in contemporary calypsos (for example, “Jean and Dinah” by The Mighty Sparrow).6 After independence, in the early 1960s, the United States became simultaneously the model for civilrights movements and the arbiter of global consumer culture and exploitative economic and political practices. Historically, the twin ideologies of colonial expansion and Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony drive the classic American Westerns’ plot. Americans have regarded the figure of the cowboy as their national symbol and “Ideal I.” In André Bazin’s assessment, the Western is Hollywood’s version of the American national conscience and a “means to isolate what exactly ­‘America’ was” at a time of mass immigration and the “closing of the frontier” (Bazin quoted in Frayling 2006, 252–6). It is a genre born out of times of duress, therefore demanding an excess of attributes to compensate for a perceived lack. The Western aims to resolve societal conflicts within its generic confines of extreme individualism: insiders versus outsiders of society, the good versus the bad, the strong versus the weak, and the triumph of civilization over savages and wilderness. The cartoonish structure of the genre allows for easy resolutions of conflict within the temporal and spatial confines of a Hollywood film.7 In such extreme circumstances, violence is legitimated

Cowboys and West Indians  115 and deemed necessary, even glorified. The Spaghetti Western exaggerates the ­violence of the classic Western to draw attention to the senselessness of ­violence through its extremes. The anti-American tones of the Italian ­Western resonated with audiences and filmmakers in the C ­ aribbean who saw a revolutionary potential in the genre (Frayling 2006, 575–8). The ­Italian Western exaggerates the inherent violence of the genre and its anti-hero, the Man With No Name, who is out for himself only. Italian Westerns bankrupted America’s self-made myth, as Sergio Corbucci put it in an interview: “Soon Americans will understand how things are” (qtd. in McClain 2010, 61). Corbucci critiques the Western’s idealized vision of American national character as self-deluding and solipsistic. Historically, the Italian Westerns mediated and subverted the classic Western for Third World reappropriations. The Western genre in its oppositional form accommodated alternative views on a variety of historical events and political struggles, such as the struggle for decolonization. Third Cinema and Caribbean cinema in particular are productive vehicles for political debate and articulations of new revolutionary oppositional identities. Stuart Hall has argued in favor of the important work of cultural production when discussing black subjects in the diaspora (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 2202–36). He takes the position of hybridity and not of authenticity or single origins as the more appropriate approach to making sense of Caribbean identities, often produced by cultural texts: “… we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, ­‘cultural identity’, lays claim” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 222). Such a distinction is particularly important when trying to make sense of post-­ independence nationalist rhetoric in the Caribbean. The slogans of “one people” and “all of we is one” were put to political work both in Jamaica and Trinidad by post-independence governments. In response, “narrative communities,” as Teshome Gabriel uses the term (after Benedict Anderson) when defining the role of Third Cinema, questioned the opportunist move of unification under the umbrella of the nation state and in support of the new middle class in the Caribbean. Besides oppositional political movements, alternative cultural narrative communities led by artists and religious groups carried on the work of representing the “downpressed.” They were, and still are, grassroots musicians and religious groups: reggae and calypso music, Rastafarians, Pocomania, Shango, or the Spiritual Baptists, to name a few. But culture can be, of course, co-opted. Case in point, in a cunning move, the former prime minister of Jamaica, Edward Seaga of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), at the end of his political career, reinvented himself as a scholar and preserver of Jamaican folk culture. In his recent multi-volume memoir, My Life and Leadership: Clash of Ideologies (2009) and Shaping History: Hard Road to Travel (2010), he recasts himself as a Jamaican visionary. To soften his controversial image and sanitize his legacy of instigating the worst

116  Rita Keresztesi violence and garrison wars in Jamaica’s history, he returned to his musicalproducer past and wrote a guide to Jamaican music, Folk Music of Jamaica Recorded by Edward P.G. Seaga, LP.8 Seaga’s presentation of his version of Jamaican folk music aimed to pre-empt the revolutionary potential of conscious roots reggae.9 Stuart Hall’s definition of Caribbean cultural identity emphasizes its production through cultural expression, literary, musical, visual, and c­ inematic representations as constitutive of political debates. It entails “not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 224). The negotiation of hybrid Caribbean identity takes place through “the most complex of cultural strategies” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 234). For Hall, film is a privileged mode of expression that itself mimics the syncretic nature of Caribbean identity in its simultaneous borrowing and innovation. But the dominance of the visual, as well as musical, expression is not without its paradoxes when in dialogue “with the dominant cinemas and literatures of the West,” at best a “tense and tortured dialogue” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 234). Moreover, as the Frankfurt School has painfully understood, culture is always open for manipulation, thus the “culture industry” can carry the very message of the powers in place, not just their subversions. The American Western and its Italian transport became one of the tools of expression for Caribbean and Third World identity during the early 1970s. Many of the genre’s features appealed for borrowing, especially its notion of bravado and masculine rebellion, but without the message of American hegemony. Hall’s understanding of film is informed by a Lacanian notion of self-formation, film as a fixation on the imaginary as opposed to the symbolic order, a dimension of “desire, memory, myth, search, discovery—in short, the reservoir of our cinematic narratives” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 236). Film then becomes a formative tool for experimentations on new kinds of identities and new forms of social orders. The speculative strategies of visual and aural imagination make cinema an active and powerful tool for social change or, when co-opted, the reassertion of the status quo. Hall sees the productive and radical work of culture. Cinema has the capacity “to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak … allowing us to see and recognise the different parts and histories of ourselves” (Hall in Cham, ed. 1992, 237). He views cinema as a positive force, one that allows for seeing and imagining what you do not know how to say yet. Louis Chude-Sokei, in his discussion of the black colonial revision of the Western, focuses on the pertinence of violence in Jamaican music and film, thereby distinguishing actual “revolutionary politics” from the articulation of “revolutionary desires”(Chude-Sokei in Wilson and Connery, eds. 2007, 135). Moreover, in the post-/neo-colonial context, political activism and criminality are often conflated for the sake of pre-empting opposition. In Chude-Sokei’s definition of the black post-colonial Western:

Cowboys and West Indians  117 In addition to blaxploitation, The Harder They Come and [Bob ­ arley’s] “I Shot The Sheriff” arrived on the heels of the international M boom in western genre films spearheaded by Cinecittá studios in Italy. This is the aesthetic pedigree of what is the first black post-colonial western and the broad transnational conversation that came with it. … As critiques of America—in visual dialect of its own filmic language— they are linked by these questions of violence, morality, and the intimate relationship between resistance and crime. (Chude-Sokei in Wilson and Connery, eds. 2007, 137) The black post-colonial version of the Western takes the side of the “downpressed,” to echo Peter Tosh, and effectively decolonizes the Western’s message. Its landscape and narrative are relocated to and subverted in the Caribbean. The cowboy-turned rudeboys of Jamaica (the distant relatives of the Badjohns of Trinidad) carry on a message of resistance as well as of crime, simultaneously. Their representations in music, film, and literature, in Chude-Sokei’s words, become “dubbed by Caribbean bush-­knowledge as well as an increasingly gendered notion of neo-colonial resistance” ­(Chude-Sokei in Wilson and Connery, eds. 2007, 139). This is the mode of expression Dick Hebdige called the “cut-and-mix” technique of black music and the culture of the black diaspora in general. Chude-Sokei defines the neo-colonial radical resistance version of the Western as follows: Through a popular culture newly empowered by what Paul Gilroy called the “alternative public sphere” of reggae sound system culture – which was largely responsible for the shifting of cultural power from the elite to the grassroots – Jamaican culture imaginatively attached itself to America by way of the national creation myth that is the western. (Chude-Sokei in Wilson and Connery, eds. 2007, 139) To illustrate the dubbed versions of the Western in reggae music, the CD issued by Trojan Records, The Magnificent Fourteen: Fourteen Shots of Western Inspired Reggae (1997), pays tribute to the Western by translating its tropes into an unmistakably Jamaican context.10 On the CD’s jacket the script reads: It was beneath the fierce glare of a relentlessly mean and sultry heat that the stranger pulled into Spanish Town from wild West Kingston clutching a fist full of dubplates. Dusty and disheveled, he dismounted from his horse in front of the first saloon bar he came to and swung open the door. In one corner of the room a sound-system was echoing at full blast and a dozen or so dancers were going through their paces. The stranger walked up to the bar and asked the barman for a drink and a draw (Magnificent Fourteen 1997).

118  Rita Keresztesi In this Jamaican rendition of a Western scene, the dubplate replaces the gun, at least for now, and reggae music and Jamaican Patois wage war against an earlier taste that favored more European tunes and proper British diction. Badmanism in Jamaica is associated with West Kingston garrison communities and dancehall culture. Laurie Gunst’s ethnography of the ghettos of West Kingston, Born Fi’ Dead, questions the judgment between justified political resistance and crime. Her eye-opening account of the intimate relationship between official political parties and street gangs further complicates issues of simple moral judgments. The Jamaican Labour Party’s (JLP) close ties, and Edward Seaga’s own long-term affiliation, with Tivoli Gardens and the rivalries supported by the People’s National Party (PNP) blur the lines between legitimate political affiliations and the criminal activities of the gangs. Moreover, police corruption further blurs the line between activism and criminality.11 Gunst’s path-breaking text attempts to understand how Kingston became one of the most violent cities in the world between 1975 and 1980, even though her actual journey through the labyrinth did not start till 1984. By then, most of the violence changed from politically motivated killings to drug-trade-fuelled violence and moved from West Kingston to Brooklyn, NY, from the smoking of ganja to crack cocaine. In her description, the book is the “the untold story of the tribal gunmen who had fought for [Michael] Manley [of the PNP] and Edward Seaga [of the JLP], his archrival” (Gunst xiv). Gunst herself makes the comparison between garrison wars and the frontier wars of the Western: But long before the posses began migrating to America, they were learning bad-guy style from Hollywood. These island desperadoes are the bastard offspring of Jamaica’s violent political “shitstem” (as the Rastafarians long ago dubbed it) and the gun-slinger ethos of ­American movies. They are the Caribbean cultural hybrid: tropical bad guys acting out fantasies from the spaghetti westerns, kung fu kill flicks, Rambo sequels, and Godfather spin-offs that play nightly in Kingston’s funky movie palaces and flicker constantly behind young men’s eyes. The posse men see themselves as Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Al Pacino in Scarface, or – if they are old enough to remember the 1960s – the rampaging misfits from Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch. (Gunst 1995, xv) In typical Caribbean syncretism, the “Jamaican sufferers come from the same tradition as the griots of West Africa” (Gunst 1995, xvi). In Henzell’s film, the reggae soundtrack and the Rastafarian community function as alternatives to Ivan’s criminality, eventually supplanting it. The seemingly senseless violence that engulfed Kingston in the 1970s and continued to the 1980s resonated with the violence seen in The Harder They Come. At the time, no one dared to connect violence in and between the

Cowboys and West Indians  119 ghettos with the rivalry between the two parties. The goal of Gunst’s book is to document those unsavory connections. Before, The Harder They Come came closest to exposing corruption at high levels and the police’s involvement with criminals, as well as the false piety of the church in Jamaica. Gunst describes the cinematic resonances between Perry Henzell’s film and the cinema that infused Kingston and supplied the picturesque grandeur to the violence in the ghettoes: No one … can forget the scene where its country-boy hero Ivan O. Martin comes to Kingston hungry for fame as a singer and goes to his first movie in town. He and a new, city-slick friend are at the Palace watching a rotgut spaghetti western called Django, starring Franco Nero, and the audience of young people is mesmerized by the violence. … At the end of his own last reel, when Ivan is a hunted outlaw himself, he makes his final stand on a deserted beach near Kingston. (Gunst 1995, xxi-xxii) Gunst, the Ivy-League educated academic, connects with the ghetto through their mutual fascination with the Western: “We shared an affinity with the Wild West, and this carried us across many a cultural bridge” (Gunst 1995, xxii). To uncover the “political unconscious,” as Fredric Jameson coins the term, of Henzell’s film, the key to interpreting the repressed political message of The Harder They Come, besides the reggae soundtrack and the understated Rastafarian presence, is the in-your-face referencing of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1965). Corbucci’s film is mostly cited for its extreme and often cartoonish violence. Alex Cox, in his recent book 10,000 Ways to Die, focuses on the repressed content of Corbucci’s film (Cox 2009). In his analysis, Django is a tale of xenophobia, banditry, and violence in a town with no name where there is nothing worth fighting for. But there is more to Corbucci’s story. The film critiques religion and the clergy as corrupt but it is also critical of the Anglo version of history with Klansmen as the quintessential Americans represented as clean-cut cowboys with blue eyes and white Stetson hats. The film was banned in the U.K. because of the numerous lurid scenes of violence but ironically, Corbucci’s film, at least a clip from it, uncannily made it to London – via The Harder They Come. In Alex Cox’s reading, Django’s character is robotic, only driven by money. Cox diagnoses him with PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome, with the trauma on-going. Cox’s labelling of PTSD, which came into everyday use after the first U.S. Gulf War and then reappropriated for explaining the ongoing harmful effects of slavery and racism within the African American community, explains from a psychological-cultural perspective why the Spaghetti Western was such an attractive genre for appropriation for Third Cinema and early Blaxploitation movies. The genre allowed for a psychological trauma to be visually imagined while at the same time subverting

120  Rita Keresztesi the very form of American self-confidence and cultural/political arrogance. Cox’s provocative interpretation of the film Django draws a direct connection between contemporary political events, the culture of the Cold War, and the gloom-and-doom visuals of the film. The prevalence of machine guns is a reference to the contemporary anarchist group, a NATO-sponsored terrorist organization in Italy called the Gladio Network. The Gladio Network was to be activated in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Its ranks were filled with neo-fascists trained by the British Secret Intelligence service, also known as MI6, and by the CIA. Their pop-culture manifestations resurfaced in James Bond movies. One of them, Dr. No (1962, the year of Jamaica’s independence from British colonial rule), was even filmed partially in Jamaica. The Harder They Come makes a direct reference to James Bond in Desmond Dekker’s song “007 (Shanty Town),” a 1967 rocksteady song that has been called the most enduring and archetypal rudeboy song and appears on the film’s soundtrack.12 The Gladio Network engaged in terrorist attacks on their own countrymen, such as the case of the bombs set off in Milan in 1969 and later railway bombings. The purpose of the home-grown terrorist attacks was to create a climate of fear and tension by NATO to discourage communists from being allowed to join the Italian government, as finally admitted by Giulio Andreotti’s 2001 report. The terrorist group was active and supported by the Italian government; the group buried about one hundred and thirty-eight secret arms caches, most often in cemeteries. Sergio Corbucci heard rumors at the time of the fascist network and of the arms hidden in graves.13 His Westerns would increasingly feature corrupt networks of rich people, bankers in leagues with businessmen who would be bribing both the sheriff and the bandits, the eerily similar case of Jamaican politics of the 1970s to the present. Corbucci’s dire movie-scapes depicted the merger of corporate and state powers. According to Cox, Corbucci’s film codes Italy’s neofascists and cold warriors as American white supremacists and klansmen in Django. Jamaicans could find resonances between the Spaghetti Western’s plot and their own political events of the 1970s, especially the rivalry between Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. Manley sought alliance with Cuba’s Fidel Castro through socialism and solidarity with the Third World, while Seaga’s government aligned with the U.S. and the CIA. In reaction, deadly garrison wars ensued in Kingston. Laurie Gunst follows the thread of violence from Kingston to New York, from garrison wars to all-out gang wars in New York. The politically motivated violence turned entirely economic, a fight over drug turfs and markets. She asks one of her informants how he sees the connection between movies and violence within this new context, dominated by the most violent gang called the Shower Posse.14 He responds: “Is like these movies hype pure badness,” he answered. “I see since Scarface come out in the seventies how every one o’ we want to play

Cowboys and West Indians  121 Scarface! Certain movies seem to turn people wicked same time. Things like Scarface, Rambo, The Godfather mean something very different in the ghetto. Is like white people can watch them film and not turn killer same time, but in the ghetto we see so much killin’ that the films are like real life. … Just like Scarface. But a pity we nah know that all o’ we would get dead.” (Gunst 1995, 2102–11) The main characters of this real-life gangster movie fashioned themselves after the Western but died real deaths: The Shower [Posse] was still going strong [in the late 1980s] in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Jim Brown was in Kingston and Vivian Blake was traveling back and forth. But now that Michael Manley had become prime minister again (in 1989), federal agents were hoping that Jamaica’s PNP government would finally deliver Jim Brown [the Don of Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston, the stronghold of the JLP] to them. They had begun extradition proceedings against him. … In the meantime, he was still on the loose in Tivoli Gardens. In July 1990 the Kingston police tried to arrest him there with a force of eighty men. They were caught in a gun battle that killed four policemen. The word on the street in Kingston was that if the Americans roped in Jim Brown, the Tivolies would go over to Montego Bay and start killing tourists. The State Department didn’t like the sound of that, so American embassy officials in Kingston told the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to leave Jim Brown alone for the time being. (Gunst 1995, 2112–12) The story repeated in May 2010 with related players when Christopher “Dudus” Coke, Jim Brown’s son and the Shower Posse’s new leader, was extradited by the U.S. Again, deadly battles ensued between Jamaican police and the “Tivolites” (of Tivoli Gardens) in West Kingston that resulted in the declaration of a State of Emergency by the JLP Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who was too personally intertwined with Tivoli to aid the police with the extradition case of “Dudus” Coke.15 Similar to the double narrative technique and the visual Western plot augmented by the radical roots reggae soundtrack Henzell uses in The Harder They Come, Stephanie Black’s documentary Life & Debt (2001) also tells two stories, one through the plot and another through the soundtrack. Black’s film is a visual commentary on the effects of globalization and the impact of foreign loans on Jamaica. Besides the main plot of depicting Jamaica as a tourist paradise newly riddled with violence and an economy indebted to the IMF and the World Bank, it is through the continuous Rastafarian reasoning sessions and the roots reggae soundtrack that the film imagines an alternative

122  Rita Keresztesi future for the island. Black’s film, which is loosely based on Jamaica Kincaid’s travelogue A Small Place, expresses the director’s sympathies with Rastafarian spirituality and Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of economic and agricultural self-reliance. She also takes a stand in the political rivalries of the 1970s by portraying the PNP and its former prime minister Michael Manley in a heroic light. Manley comes through as the regretful rudeboy, the Biblical Joshua with a conscience who could not save his beloved nation against the juggernaut of international finance. The final sequence of the film pays homage to Manley, who died during the making of Black’s film. In The Harder They Come the reggae soundtrack and the Rastafarian community offer a positive alternative to police and political corruption and the life of crime. In Rubén A. Gaztambude-Frenández’s reading, Ras Pedro’s character, the only Rastafarian in a lead role, “is portrayed throughout the movie as the moral conscience of the community” (Gaztambude-Frenández 2002, 360). Jeff Chang identifies Ivan Martin as a descendant of rebellious escaped slaves: “Vincent ‘Ivanhoe’ Martin was a real-life fifties Kingston outlaw who renamed himself Rhygin and summoned Jamaica’s Maroon pride. The Harder They Come updated his story for a nation defining its postcolonial identity in and through its homegrown popular music” (Chang 2005, 262–7). “Rhygin” in Jamaican patois and Rastafarian usage means spirited, vigorous, lively, passionate with great vitality and force, also sexually provocative and aggressive. The other possibility for escape is the cargo ship that awaits Ivan Martin to take him to socialist Cuba, an alternative PNP Prime Minister Michel Manley also considered during the 1972 oil crisis. Ivan misses the boat and so did Manley. The ending of the movie violates the Spaghetti Western’s generic code that the hero cannot die before the movie ends. Martin is shot to death by the encroaching police force and the final shot is of a woman dancing. Michael Manly accepted the fateful loans from the International Monetary Fund when he took office in 1972. The IMF loan trapped the island in economic debt, a decision Manley regretted till the end of his life. In Black’s film Life & Debt Manley laments: “‘You ask, whose interest is the IMF serving?’ Manley says. ‘Ask who set it up?’” Foreshadowing the tragic impasse for both Ivan and Jamaica, the film opens with the precarious scene of the almost head-on crash between the bus that carries Ivan from the countryside to the city and an oncoming truck on a one-lane bridge. In a visual metaphor, Jamaica is heading towards a crash a decade into its independence. Will the island head towards an indigenous version of economic self-reliance with Cuba as a close ally and the Rastafarian community as its spiritual anchor, or will it look to the United States and global capital? In his article on turning the film The Harder They Come into a book, Michael Thelwell comments that the financial support from Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, cemented the film’s message. Choosing then Rastafarian Jimmy Cliff to play Rhygin, the reggae artist and the criminal were fused into one and made the film’s true hero “the film’s extraordinary reggae soundtrack”:

Cowboys and West Indians  123 The emerging roots-reggae was the natural musical idiom of the ghetto. It had evolved organically out of indigenous musical traditions – nyabingi drumming and chanting and popular secular elements – and expressed in its lyrics, the defiant, class-conscious, highly political sensibility and experience of the rude-bwai youth culture of the poor. (Thelwell in Cham, ed. 1992, 184) Thelwell concludes reggae music was the organic accompaniment to the Rhygin figure: “So that the central figure of the film conflated, in effect, two ghetto culture heroes: Rhygin, the outlaw bad man, with the figure of the reggae musician” (Thelwell in Cham, ed. 1992, 184–5). The final scene of the film cuts from the shoot-out on the beach between Ivan and the police to the body of the dancing woman who is clad in a dress with the combined colors of Jamaica and the Rastafarian community: the Black, the Green, the Gold, and the Red. As the closing credits roll, the soundtrack picks up Jimmy Cliff/Ivan Martin’s song “The Harder They Come” in the middle, the verse that articulates defiance to state oppression and corruption: Well, the oppressors are trying to keep me down Trying to drive me underground And they think that they have got the battle won I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they’ve done. The song becomes the anthem of resistance and a coded threat to the system that Peter Tosh renamed the Babylon shitstem.16 The Western decolonized.

Figure 7.1  “Didn’t I tell you I’ll be famous one day?”

124  Rita Keresztesi Notes 1. My fascination with what I thought was the American Western started while still living in Hungary in 1980, when Sergio Leone’s 1966 film, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, finally reached my smallish town, Pécs. Since it was dubbed into Hungarian and retitled as A jó, a rossz és a csúf, the Italian mediation of the classic American Western escaped our attention. 2. I use the term Third Cinema loosely as a category that fits into the locale of the Third World but is politically and aesthetically vested in a radical stance and message of liberation. See Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press, 2001; and Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Rethinking Third Cinema. New York, Routledge: 2003. 3. The Global South is a geographical, as well as political and economic, concept that includes nearly one hundred and fifty-seven of a total of one hundred and eighty-four recognized states in the world, located mostly in Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia. Political, social, and economic upheaval are prevalent in many of these nations. At the same time, the populations of the global South and their emerging markets offer immense hope for economic growth, investment, and cultural contribution. 4. One of the first critical analysis of the film was published just three years after the film’s Jamaican release (Burton1975). 5. Yardie (or Yawdie) is a term stemming from the slang name originally given to occupants of government yards or social housing projects. For example, Trenchtown in West Kingston was originally built as a housing project following the devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie in 1951. 6. One of the most popular calypso songs about American soldiers in Trinidad and the closing of the military base: “Jean and Dinah” by The Mighty Sparrow (1956). See lyrics: http://islandlyrics.com/lyrics-mighty_sparrow-jean_and_ dinah_1956.htm. Accessed Jan. 22, 2014. 7. Frayling cites Umberto Eco’s influential study on the “Superman plot” in his analysis of the Italian (or what later came to be known as the Spaghetti) Western. In Eco’s analysis the cartoonish plot reflects a “hunger for redundance” and a narrative scheme that both “sustains and expresses the world” (Eco quoted in Frayling 2006, 75–77). 8. See Edward Seaga: My Life and Leadership (Volume I: Clash of Ideologies) (London: Macmillan Education, 2010); the self-published Revelations: Beyond Political Bondage (CreateSpace, 2009); The Grenada Intervention: The Inside Story (CreateSpace, 2009); and finally, Folk Music of Jamaica Recorded by Edward P.G. Seaga, LP (Folkways Label). 9. Former prime minister Edward Seaga was to deliver a special presentation at the International Reggae Conference held February 17–20, 2010 at the U ­ niversity of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, but instead he played the CD v­ ersion of his tourists’ guide to Jamaican music. This was a repetition of his off-topic performance at the Walter Rodney Symposium a year before, O ­ ctober 2009, held at UWI Mona, where he delivered an old lecture on M ­ arcus ­Garvey instead of addressing his party’s, the JLP’s, role in the banning of Walter ­Rodney to return to Jamaica and to his teaching post at the History Department at UWI Mona. 10. I would like to thank Louis Chude-Sokei for bringing the Western-inspired ­reggae CD to my attention and sending the music to me.

Cowboys and West Indians  125 11. See Oguejiofo Annu, “The Tivoli Gardens Uprising 2010: Christopher Coke, Edward Seaga, CIA and the Trouble in Jamaica.” http://www.africaresource. com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/christopher-coke-edwardseaga-cia-and-the-trouble-in-jamaica-oguejiofo-annu/. Accessed Nov. 10, 2014. 12. Dekker wrote the song after watching news coverage of a violent student demonstration against government plans to build an industrial complex on land close to the beach. In Dekker’s words: the students had a demonstration and it went all the way around to Four Shore Road and down to Shanty Town. You got wildlife and thing like that because it down near the beach. And the higher ones wanted to bulldoze the whole thing down and do their own thing and the students said no way. And it just get out of control … Is just a typical riot ‘cause I say – Them a loot, them a shoot, them a wail.” See, Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen (1998), Reggae Routes. Philadephia: Temple University, 1998: 102–3. 13. Rumors surfaced in 1965 and Italian newspapers did hint at but dared not to discuss openly the state-sponsored criminal activities of the Gladio network that was burying guns and dynamite in churchyards and graves. See Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die. 14. Duane Blake’s memoir, Shower Posse, is somewhat similar to Gunst’s project but Blake is too close to his subject. He is the son of the founder of the Shower Posse, and thus his ethnography of the most deadly gang becomes a tribute to and glorification of his father, Vivian Blake. In his self-published book, he depoliticizes gang warfare and turns the conflict into a matter of private interests. In his biography of his father, criminality mimics the individualism of the Spaghetti Western but also of America. In the son’s unabashedly adoring narrative, ­Vivian Blake is drawn into a life of violence through his sociopath brother, Tony. Within the imperialist centers of New York and Miami, Jamaican Rudeboys are consumed by drugs and profits, with no aspirations for political resistance or to subvert the neocolonial system. They are absorbed by the ethic of the dollar and the immigrant mentality to make it at any price in America. The book is also tainted by the obvious desire by Duane to make excuses for his father’s criminality and for the lack of attention paid to his son. See Duane Blake, Shower Posse: The Most Notorious Jamaican Criminal Organization. New York: Diamond Publishing, 2002. 15. For an account of what happened in June 2010 and the close connection between global corporate interests, the CIA, and Caribbean politicians and criminals, see Horace Campbell, “Gangsters, Politicians, Cocaine and Bankers/Emancipation from Mental Slavery.” http://www.BlackCommentator.com. Accessed 23 Sep., 2010. Issue 394. Opinions vary on this issue and some would say the dons play an important role in the life of the ghetto, providing important social and protective services the government fails or is unable to provide. This comes from informal conversations with friends who reside in Tivoli Gardens and the neighboring communities of Hannah Town and Denham Town in West Kingston. Also view “Tivoli Under Siege (State of Emergency)” and “Tivoli Anthem” http://wn.com/DUDUS_anthem. Accessed Jan. 23, 2015. 16. Peter Tosh. “Speech at the One Love Peace Concert” (1978). Web. Accessed Jan. 23, 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7hWweyB-U; and Peter Tosh, “Get Up Stand Up” – live at the One Love Peace Concert (1978). Web. Accessed Jan. 23, 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGV9VmxTrAc&feature=related.

126  Rita Keresztesi References Burton, Julianne. 1975. “The Harder They Come: Cultural Colonialism and the A ­ merican Dream.” Jump Cut 6, 5–7. Accessed Nov. 17, 2014. http://www.ejumpcut. org/archive/onlinessays/JC06folder/HarderTheyCome.html. Cham, Mbye. 1992. Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chude-Sokei, Louis. 2007. “‘But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy’: Dubbing the ­Yankee Frontier.” The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of ­Globalization. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds., 1331–69. Cliff, Jimmy. 1972. “The Harder They Come.” Island Records. AZLyrics.com. http:// www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jimmycliff/thehardertheycome.html Cox, Alex. 2009. 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western. Harpenden, U.K.: Oldcastle Books. Frayling, Christopher. 2006. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Gabriel, Teshome. “Third Cinema Updated.” Web. Accessed Nov. 16, 2014. http:// teshomegabriel.net/third-cinema-updated Gaztambude-Frenández, Rubén A. 2002. “Reggae, Ganja, and Black Bodies: Power, Meanings, and the Markings of Postcolonial Jamaica in Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 24, 3533–76. Web. Accessed Jan. 23, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/1126139/ Reggae_Ganja_and_Black_Bodies_Power_Meaning_and_the_Markings_of_ Postcolonial_Jamaica_in_Perry_Henzells_The_Harder_they_Come. Gunst, Laurie. 1995. Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey through the Jamaican Posse ­Underworld. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Mbye Cham, ed: 2202–36. The Harder They Come. 1972/2000. Perry Henzell, director. Criterion. Harris, Kenneth. 1992. “Sex, Race Commodity and Film Fetishism in The Harder They Come.” Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Mbye Cham, ed.: 2112–19. Life and Debt. 2001. Stephanie Black, director. New Yorker Films. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McClain, William. 2010. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the Death of the Western in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62 (12–), 526–6. Mennel, Barbara. 2008. Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge. Naipaul, V. S. 2002. The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited. New York: Vintage Books. Thelwell, Michael. 1992. “The Harder They Come: From Film to Novel – How Questions of Technique, Form, Language, Craft, and the Marketplace Conceal Issues of Politics, Audience, Culture, and Purpose.” Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Mbye Cham, ed.:1762–10. Wilson, Rob and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds. 2007. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Berkeley, CA: North ­Atlantic Books.

Part III

The Western in Australia and Asia

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8 Aboriginal Cowboys? On the Possibilities of the Western in Australia’s Far West Andrew W. Hurley

Introduction This chapter contemplates some Australian iterations of the transnational Western genre, broadly understood, by exploring the implications of an Aboriginal Western vignette in the Australian filmmaker Michael Edols’s 1973–1975 film diptych Lalai and Floating. Edols’s films date from the ­Australian New Wave era and, while little known nowadays, have an importance in terms of the recognition of Australian cinema outside Australia. Screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, they were much admired by several German filmmakers, most notably Werner Herzog. Ultimately they would spawn Herzog’s collaboration with Edols over three films, including Herzog’s own, rather ill-starred Australian film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). My focus here is on the ways Edols foregrounded ­Western iconography and outlaw/law-bringer role-playing in his filmic interactions with the younger generation of Aboriginal people living in the remote Mowanjum community of Western Australia. I argue that, for several reasons, the subject matter of the Western and the outlaw/law-bringer roles available in it offered an important bridge between the white filmmaker and the younger Aboriginal men, and a productive space for Indigenous identification. I mean to unpack some of the meaning residing in this Aboriginal Western while recognizing the difficulties for a non-Indigenous person in fully understanding the layers of meaning that might be operating. I will close my discussion by jumping forward forty years and examining M ­ ystery Road (2013), a film by the Indigenous Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen, which plays with the elements of the Western genre in a way that is reminiscent of Edols’s earlier fragment. Sen’s oeuvre portrays the ways that young ­Indigenous men in the Australian postcolony might still identify with roles available from the Western genre. The Australian New Wave, Kangaroo Westerns, and New Films with Aboriginal Themes During the 1970s, a range of factors, from a critical turn in Leftist circles to the election of a progressive Labor government in 1972 and the creation

130  Andrew W. Hurley of a favorable film-financing regime, coalesced to promote the emergence of a reinvigorated Australian film culture, referred to as the Australian New Wave (see generally O’Regan 1996). While the film activities subsumed under this title were broad, several aspects are deserving of mention to contextualize Michael Edols’s filmmaking. First, although it was not a major genre, there was some interest in this context in an Australian variant of the Western. As Thomas Klein delineates in a forthcoming book on the international efflorescence of the Western genre, there is a tradition of Australian films having some kind of relationship to the former genre that has transposed its themes into Australian conditions or otherwise hybridized them. These films, dealing broadly with events on or behind the Australian frontier, stretch right up to the present day and they transform into Australian myth thematic elements from what Klein considers to be a global genre. This Australian tradition includes early Bushranger films, made between 1904 and a national embargo being placed on them in 1912, which revolved around 19th century outlaw figures like Ned Kelly, who bailed up travellers or terrorised rural settlements, but whom ­Australian mythology has tended to romanticize as underdogs fighting against an unjust, stratified society. The relationship between the Bushranger films and the American Western is controversial, especially for those writing from the perspective of national cinemas. Bill Routt, for example, considers the similarities between the U.S. Western and the Australian Bushranger film are not causally linked. Rather, two separate genres emerged from two societies with parallel historical experiences, and hence the two variants only coincidentally resemble each other (2002). Peter Limbrick (2007) and Thomas Klein (forthcoming) also discuss other, more recent instances of what were sometimes called K ­ angaroo Westerns.1 Several of these were made in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s by the British Ealing Studios when it attempted to use Australia as a production base from which to compete with Hollywood.2 In the context of the subsequent Australian New Wave era, a film like Russell Hagg’s Raw Deal (1977) closely borrowed from the established elements of the genre. But the Western genre also manifested itself in less obvious ways at the time. It is possible, for example, to view the shoot-out sequence in Phillip Noyce’s Backroads (1977) as being in the Western tradition, even if the film is more broadly grounded in the road-movie genre (Birch 2005, 187). Thomas Klein has suggested that if one takes a broad view of the Western genre, then it is also possible to interpret Fred Schepisi’s important 1978 film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, its screenplay based on a 1972 story by Thomas Keneally about an Aboriginal man who becomes an outlaw at the turn of the century, as a type of outlaw Western.3 This is not to say Australian variants of the Western, especially when they were recognized as such, were well accepted by some white Australian critics of the day. For example, in a 1985 review of the genres of Australian national cinema, the filmmaker Tim Burstall cited other critics when he argued the Australian Western was

Aboriginal Cowboys?  131 as “irrelevant” to Australian conditions as violent mafia-type films made in the U.S.: True, we had a frontier society in the nineteenth century, we had outlaws and goldrushes, but the whole myth is seen not as something on which to work an interesting Australian variation but as fundamentally unusable. “Beware the Kangaroo Western,” says Paddy ­McGuinness in a demolition job on Raw Deal, and every other critic agreed the ­Western as subject matter was just a non-starter for Australian filmmakers (qtd. in Klein, forthcoming).4 The film historian Peter Limbrick thinks these Australian Westerns are worthy of closer inspection, though. In his study of the Ealing Studios Kangaroo Westerns, Limbrick is less interested in assertions of cultural nationalism than in those films’ implication in colonialism, given how “white subjects dominat[e] space and others” in the films (2007, 70. See also Limbrick 2010 for his expanded argument). Significantly, these Ealing films either don’t feature Aboriginal people at all in their long shots of vast, empty landscapes and exclusive attention to the toils of white settlers, or they thematize Aborigines through what he calls “discourses of violent confrontation and disavowal of prior presence, as well as through fantasized modes of rapprochement and reconciliation” (2007, 88). In this context Limbrick urges us to view the (Australian) Western as a “settler colonial mode of cinema that turns to certain narrative and representational strategies as part of a larger cultural project of grounding white settler cultures within colonized landscapes” (2007, 69). In making his point, though, Limbrick resiles from the idea of a Western supergenre that is uniformly imbricated in shoring up settler colonialism, and gestures towards the more complicated ideological nature of European Westerns like Sergio Leone’s Italo Westerns, for example (2007, 70). As Christopher Frayling (1981) and a number of contributors to this volume show, many of the Italo Westerns subverted the ideology of the classical American Western and had a critical bent, as well as the goal of mass entertainment. They often sympathised with the oppressed of the Third World, and this is one key to why a film like Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) could beget Third Cinema films, notably Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972). We can take up this point by looking at the ways films like Edols’s Floating and Sen’s Mystery Road depict Aboriginal people engaging with the Western as subject matter and as a suite of available subject roles. In this context, variants of the Western could very much be a “starter” for ­Aboriginal people, to borrow Tim Burstall’s language. This is especially so for those with a proximate memory of the violence of the Australian frontier and a sense of its after-effects in the present day. Michael Edols’s filmic interactions with Indigenous Australia in the 1970s did not occur in a vacuum. As the example of Fred Schepisi’s film, The Chant

132  Andrew W. Hurley of Jimmie Blacksmith, indicates, some (white) Australian filmmakers became very interested in Aboriginal themes during the New Wave era. While many of the films in the “Australian Film Commission genre” – so called after the new film-finance body – left the “myth of innocent settlement” undisturbed (Wilson 2007, 191), some features, such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), foregrounded Aboriginal topics, albeit with little or no Aboriginal guidance and advice. In line with the progressive political climate of the day, these films were met with debates about the cultural and moral rights of Aboriginal people in their filmic representation (Moore and Muecke 1984; Davis 2007, 6; Wilson 2007, 192). This is not to say films like The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith were well received by Australian film-goers at the time. Janet Wilson suggests The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was before its time, out of key with a national audience that was not yet prepared for a collective memory of “white settler bigotry, intolerance and oppression” or Aboriginal outlawry (Wilson 2007, 193). Even less well exposed in Australia than these feature films was a vital stream of white documentary filmmaking about Aboriginal topics. Together with features like Weir’s The Last Wave and Noyce’s Backroads, these documentaries were used to showcase Australian film culture in Europe (Hurley 2010). It was in this new documentary context that Edols made his films. The 1970s saw the emergence of a new type of engaged filmmaker, a good example of whom is Edols’s associate Esben Storm, who would assist in making the Lalai-Floating diptych. Storm contributed, for example, to the 1970 omnibus film Or Forever Hold Your Peace, an impressionistic observational film about the Vietnam moratorium movement in Sydney, and he made his feature-length debut as director of the 1973–1974 social realist film 27A. 27A was opposed to Queensland’s Mental Health Act, which could be invoked, as the filmmaker thought, under unjust circumstances to hold a patient against his or her will. Besides its social engagement, 27A also confounded generic expectations. Ostensibly a fiction film, a lay person – an alcoholic who had himself had experience with institutionalization – played the lead role. Michael Edols is nowadays a lesser-known figure in the history of ­Australian film. Nevertheless, he has a long list of directing credits in film and television, has exhibited his award-winning films in Europe and North America, and has collaborated with filmmaker Werner Herzog.5 While employed by the Australian government’s Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU) during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Edols began to freelance as a cinematographer and worked closely with engaged filmmakers like Storm.6 Raised in British Borneo, as it then was, and having learned to speak Dusunic and Murutic languages, Edols has long had an interest in indigenous cultures, albeit one that is primarily experiential rather than learned. In this context, he collaborated in 1971 with the independent filmmakers Jef and Su Doring in making Tidikawa and Friends (1971–1974), an impressionistic documentary about the Bedamini people of the Papuan plateau forest.

Aboriginal Cowboys?  133 This experience primed Edols’s practice of making intercultural films in a style removed from the traditional documentary, with which he nevertheless remained associated through his ongoing employment with the CFU.7 The association with filmmakers like Storm also lent him an openness to generic experimentation. It was as a result of his involvement with the Dorings on Tidikawa and Friends that Edols gained entree to the Mowanjum community, where he would make the three key films in his oeuvre as intercultural filmmaker: Lalai, Floating, and When the Snake Bites the Sun (1985–1986).8 By chance, the Worrora elder Albert Barunga was present at a 1972 screening of Tidikawa and Friends organized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman. Struck by the film, Barunga invited Edols to visit Mowanjum, his community in Western Australia. Edols leaped at the opportunity, given his underlying interest in indigenous cultures and a striking previous exposure to Aboriginal culture. Edols had once been sent on a CFU assignment to the Northern Territory, where he had met an Aboriginal man and been touched by his opposition to the activities of mining prospectors who, as he expressed it, “cut” his body when they cut into the earth searching for minerals (Edols 2005). Edols had also visited Perth in 1972 and “[come into] contact with tribal Aboriginals living in a city environment and [been] shocked by the stories of genocide that they had to tell” (qtd. in Woolagoodjah 1975). Mowanjum Barunga and other Mowanjum elders had their own purposes for inviting the young, white filmmaker into their community. Edol reports of his brief: The “wunan circle of elders” [sic] … said as I sat under the stars with them that I had to show how the young ones were lost in drink. This was an unexpected brief, but for the elders this would be a way for those lost in drink to see themselves (Edols 2005, 13).9 In order to contextualise this remark, a short historical sketch of the ­Mowanjum community is needed. Mowanjum is located near the port town of Derby in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is home to the ­Worrorra, Ngarinyin, and Wunambul Aboriginal peoples. As the anthropologist Valda Blundell and Donny Woolagoodja relate in their book Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh, the settlement at Mowanjum has a relatively short history. It is successor to the Kunmunya mission, set up by the Presbyterian Board of Missions in 1912. The most important missionary there, J.R.B. Love, was an enlightened figure for his day who “developed a genuine respect for the Worrorra people. He thought that their beliefs about the Wanjinas [mythical creator beings] could be merged with the Christian religion.” Encouraging the Worrorra to spend time in their country and develop skills that would

134  Andrew W. Hurley allow them to participate as equals in Australian society, Love contributed to the development of a generation of Aboriginal people (including David Mowaljarlai and Albert Barunga, both of whom, with Sam Woolagoodja, were critical for the realization of Edols’s suite of films) who were articulate and strong and able to adapt their traditions “to the opportunities as well as constraints of colonisation” (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005, 16). By the early 1950s, concerns about the low birth rate caused the community to be moved from Kunmunya to another site. However, this site proved to be unsatisfactory and by the mid-1950s, the community had been moved again, this time to (Old) Mowanjum on the outskirts of Derby. These moves reflected a change in Aboriginal policy, whereby the segregation of the more remote missions and stations was replaced by the policy of integration into wider Australian society (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005, 96ff). The community’s relocation close to Derby was not an easy one. As Blundell and Woolagoodja observe: The move to Mowanjum, so far away from their homelands in the north, created a huge rupture in the people’s lives. Without regular access to vehicles and boats it was difficult for them to spend time in their countries or supplement their diet with bush foods. At ­Mowanjum, pressures to assimilate to Euro-Australian culture were intense (2005, 98). Children from Mowanjum were now educated in Derby and adult members of the community were encouraged to find work in town. Aboriginal people now had far better access to Western audio-visual popular culture, too, including in the form of films screened at the Derby cinema. This proved a big drawing card to younger people (see e.g. Heather Umbagai quoted in Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005, 101).10 By the time Edols came to make his first films in Mowanjum, the younger generation had had almost twenty years of exposure to the cinema. There were various concrete problems associated with the community’s new location, including, to name a few, racial prejudice among some of Derby’s white population; difficulties with white bureaucracy on and off the community; poor diet leading to an increase in type 2 diabetes; and conflict between the white concept of an individual’s accumulation of wealth and the traditional notion of sharing of resources, which led sometimes to violent clashes. However, there was also a positive spirit among some of the ­Aboriginal elders in the community: “Many of the adults who made the move to Mowanjum envisioned a life for their children that would combine the best of their own traditions with the best that white could offer” (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005: 99). These men and women ensured there was a continuation of some of the traditional life and customs, including the wurnan system of gifting and other protocols, and during the 1960s and 1970s, the Mowanjum community gained an Australia-wide reputation “as

Aboriginal Cowboys?  135 a community that reached out to the wider world to share its Aboriginal ­heritage” (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005: 100). Contributing to this visibility was a troupe of dancers that travelled to Perth to perform as well as individual elders, including David Mowaljarlai, who wrote books that gained a relatively wide distribution. Equally important was Sam Woolagoodja. If elders were keen to positively maintain traditional culture at ­Mowanjum, then their brief to Edols demonstrated they were also ready to use other, more admonitory means. Film was not a coincidental choice. Given the appeal of the Derby cinema, the elders must have intuited the young people might be more likely to pay attention to a film. In the event, Edols’s reaction to the elders’ “unexpected” brief was twofold. He suggested he make two films: one would answer the elders’ brief and be called Floating – like wind blow’em about, after an Aboriginal English expression used by David Mowaljarlai to refer to how some of the younger people on the community had become distanced from traditional culture. The other film would be Lalai – Dreamtime, a fifty-minute feature intended to create a glimpse of that traditional culture, “a re-enactment on film of a no-longer practised traditional lifestyle for the benefit of their young who had failed to learn their tribal laws since they had lost their language” (Edols qtd. in Woolagoodjah 1975). In general, it was intended these two films be exhibited in conjunction with each other, with Lalai screening first and then leading into Floating. The contrast between the two films could not be more marked. Lalai is a film of patient description, where Edols’s camera witnesses a visit by Sam Woolagoodja and members of his family to their ancestral tribal lands to the north of Mowanjum. Dressed in traditional garb, Woolagoodja and his family enact various activities including hunting, gathering, and ritual life. To the extent that language is used – on the whole, the wealth of the Worrora culture is allowed to express itself in visual terms – it is restricted to a poetic rendition/translation of part of Woolagoodja’s Worrora-language discourse. The filmmaker resists any temptation to explain what is shown, even if, for a white viewer, this leaves Worrora culture rather opaque, even surreal.11 Woolagoodja’s and Edols’s fabrication is swiftly undercut during the first minutes of the companion film, Floating. The first sequence is a beautiful pan shot of the Worrora lands, which is very much of a piece with Lalai, yet it quickly and unceremoniously swerves into a shot of one of the film crew, complete with clapperboard. The viewer is rudely awakened from her or his reverie. Thereafter follows a series of improvised sequences, shot in the main at Mowanjum community and in the style of direct cinema. A range of informants speak, from the dignified Sam Woolagoodja and David M ­ owaljarlai to red-neck white residents of Derby. Christian religious observance on the mission is shown, as are the musings of younger Aboriginal members of the community, who illustrate their distance from some traditions. For example, one scene depicts a group of young men sitting down drinking; one shows his cicatrices (ritual scars) to the camera, noting they were given to him in

136  Andrew W. Hurley his youth but he does not know what they signify. Another moving scene is of an elderly Aboriginal patient at the Derby hospital who is capable only of a screech. These are striking images, and ones that arrest the white viewer. No wonder Werner Herzog, in his quest for new and unheard-of images, was so taken by Edols’s films when they were screened at the Berlin Film festival in 1978. As he wrote at the time, Edols’s films were full of images of “intensity and insight” (Herzog 1978a).12 Not only was he struck by the unfamiliar yet expressive Aboriginal physiognomy (“I have the feeling that everything is visible there … just to see them makes me breathless” (Herzog 1978b). He was also affected by the grit of Floating: “It hurts to be an onlooker,” as he put it (1978a). For him, the insidious white civilization, as represented in the film, was “an obscenity as impossible [to] overlook as vomit in an empty train carriage” (Herzog 1978a). The Aboriginal Western as Frame-Breaker and Godsend Had Herzog been more attuned to the possibilities of a modern Aboriginal existence and less wedded to a clash of civilizations view, he might have been just as taken by the Aboriginal Western footage buried two-thirds of the way through the film. This sequence is comparatively short but incredibly powerful, not least because it jars with the largely observational mode used up until that point and with footage with which it is intercut. The Western footage emerges from scenes of the Derby cinema, such that we can imagine it is, or could be a, film being screened that night at the cinema. But there are also perplexing elements. As the Western progresses, it is interrupted with the scenes and sounds of a white religious gathering in Derby, at which two guitarists sing a song of religious inspiration, watched by the white congregation. Several times the monochrome footage of the earnest yet contemporary religious gathering yields to the far more compelling E ­ astman Color footage of the Western. The Western sequence itself was inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and it begins with a group of five young Aboriginal horsemen, dressed in Western garb, approaching on the horizon. The setting is an arid landscape at high noon, and mirage effects play on the image of the distant horsemen. Shots of the approaching horsemen are intercut with shots of the locale for which they are headed, a rubbish dump surrounded by baoab trees and furnished by junk of various sorts. The horsemen dismount and encircle another similarly attired young man (played by Barney Tataya), who is reclining on a rusty bed frame, an old acoustic guitar leaned up against it. We see various shots typical of the ItaloWestern genre: the close-ups of the horsemen’s squinting faces; low shots of dusty, spurred riding boots walking across the screen; hip-level shots from behind the dismounted pursuers while they approach the Tataya character;

Aboriginal Cowboys?  137 and the inevitable gunning-down scene. The Italo-Western genre is also keyed by the soundtrack, which features a plaintive air, played on harmonica, with a vibrating, rattle-snake sound interspersed with greater frequency in the lead up to the shoot-out. There is a guning-down and the Tataya character triumphs against the odds. We see a shot of him from a worm’s-eye view, together with another low shot of the prostrate body of one of his victims. After surveying the scene, he blows smoke from the barrel of his revolver – we see his face in extreme close-up – then he mounts a horse, gees it up, and escapes on horseback. The sequence then cuts to documentary footage back at Derby’s Spinifex Hotel (the saloon), with scenes of Aboriginal inebriation, accompanied by a diegetic soundtrack of rock ‘n’ roll. In other words, the observational mode of cinema resumes. After a blackout signifying the night (or passing out through inebriation), the film then presents a new morning, set on a remote outstation that is a cattle station run by Aboriginal people on ancestral lands, removed from the ills of town life. Because the Aboriginal Western is a fragment, entirely without dialogue and dissolved from any larger narrative, the footage is particularly open to interpretation. We see lay Aboriginal actors appearing both in the role of lawbringers and outlaws, although it is never clear who is who. Nor do we ever get a sense of what has motivated this violent shoot-out. Revenge? Bounty hunting? Besides the marksmanship, we also see the actors engaging in feats of outstanding horsemanship. And all within a setting that is identifiably that of the Italo-Western. As a non-Indigenous viewer, part of the appeal of this footage is the slippage into fiction, which comes as a relief from the documentary grit of the film up to that point. But what to make of it? There is something impenetrable for the white viewer, and this is visually signalled too. While we see several extreme close-ups of Aboriginal faces in the Western sequence and the actors seem to delight in the roles they are acting, there is never any direct eye contact with the viewer. Is this “presenceing of Indigeneity for non-Indigenous audiences” (Magowan and Neuenfeldt 2005, 8) an instance of mimicry for the camera or is there some type of identification involved? Before beginning to assay the possible terrains of Indigenous identification, I wish to contemplate what the sequence signified for Edols. From the perspective of the white filmmaker, there was a joy in experimentation and a willingness to play with genres his contemporaries may have thought to be non-starters in the Australian context. Edols’s filmmaking practice at Mowanjum was so improvised that it allowed for whatever the observational cinema approach might throw forth, but thankfully it also gave space to the possibility of fiction. Edols’s approach was not without its difficulties, though. Indeed, he initially discovered he had exposed a third of the allocated film in an endeavour to obtain an insight into the current situation, but because of [his] own preconceptions, ended up with material that was virtually meaningless (Edols qtd. in Woolagoodjah 1975).

138  Andrew W. Hurley The filmmaker found he had particular difficulties interacting with the younger generation of Aboriginal people living at Mowanjum. This might not surprise, given the elders’ critical brief, of which the younger generation must have been well aware. The critical message emerges during Floating, not least in the testimony of informants like Mowaljarlai, who delivers a lengthy discourse to the camera about the removal of the people from their “spiritual country” and about the young people’s distance from “Aborigine wisdom” (Mowaljarlai quoted in Floating). The editing of Floating has its own messages, too. The new-morning ending to the Western suggests the answer for dysfunctional Aboriginal life dwelling on the fringes of rural towns like Derby – for which the Western sequence seems to serve as an e­ pitome – is in a re-engagement with ancestral lands via the outstation movement, and this aligns Edols with the views of Mowaljarlai. However, Edols was genuinely interested in the emotional geographies of contemporary life in Mowanjum and in what the Western might mean for young people. The intercutting device he uses within the Western sequence suggests he appreciates only too well how genre cinema like the anti-clerical Italo-Western could be so much more appealing to young Aboriginal audiences in Derby than the cultural offerings of white church folk.13 Edols’s high literacy in the Italo-Western genre allowed him to form links with disaffected younger people, whose life he was supposed to critically portray. Indeed it was only through playing with the Western genre that Edols was able to build a bridge to these younger people. As he noted in 1975: I had to find a new approach, something that would stimulate both the community and ourselves and finally used their fascination with the American Western as a starting point. As time went on, it was possible to make more intimate contact and discover the layers between the traditional older generation and the floating youth of the community (Edols qtd. in Woolagoodjah 1975). Edols and his film crew, including Esben Storm, were young, white Australian filmmakers with an investment in the reinvigoration of a critical Australian film culture. As we have seen in the discussion of the film 27A, there was a willingness on their part to play with generic expectations, to bleed between documentary and fiction, and to use laypeople as actors. This, together with a readiness to use the critical Italo-Western genre as a vehicle for aesthetic experimentation – and an openness to the possibility of recontextualizing the genre for local Australian conditions – explains how the Aboriginal Western sequence came to be made. For Edols, the Aboriginal Western sequence was immensely rewarding, and he even conceived of making a feature-length film in that genre. Unfortunately, that concept never came to fruition. He was unable to interest film funding bodies and he then became involved in other film projects. To my knowledge, no other protagonists of the Australian New Wave were inclined to expand on the Aboriginal

Aboriginal Cowboys?  139 Western genre either. The subject matter seems to have lain fallow only to be picked up by Ivan Sen in the last decade. If the Aboriginal Western notion beckoned as a promising path for some white Australian film culture in the 1970s, then what did the Aboriginal Western sequence signify for the Mowanjum people? “Outlaws,” “Lawbringers,” and Cowboys Both Lalai and Floating were screened in Derby shortly after their completion. A decade later, they were made available on video, around the time Edols returned to Mowanjum to make the follow-up, When the Snake Bites the Sun. They were finally released on DVD in 2011. Lalai in particular continues to live on in the community. Indeed, some thirty years after the film’s making, Sam Woolagoodja’s son Donny and his co-author, the anthropologist Valda Blundell, note: “Donny and his relations at Mowanjum have watched Lalai many times” (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005, 136). It ­“continues to be an inspiration to the Mowanjum people” (Blundell qtd. in Edols 2005, 15). Or, as Donny put it, it is a “special film” (Woolagoodja 2010). By contrast, the companion film – which, it will be recalled, answered Edols’s original brief – is less well known and is given far less attention in Blundell and Woolagoodja’s book. This reflects a variety of issues. Firstly, until the DVD release, access to the films was not what it could be.14 Secondly, Michael Edols is not an uncontroversial figure in the Mowanjum community, for reasons that are too complicated to fully canvas here.15 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there must have been much less impetus to watch a problem film like Floating, especially after the passing of the older generation who had commissioned it in the first place.16 Floating is more of its time, especially compared with Lalai, which deliberately stands outside of time. Floating is also not an easy viewing experience, if non-Indigenous responses like those of Werner Herzog are anything to go by. For all of these reasons, the Aboriginal Western sequence has also receded a little from view. Yet it was not always thus. The Aboriginal Western sequence was in fact a passage that achieved a great deal of attention among Aboriginal film-goers when Floating was screened at the Derby cinema in 1975. Edols reports the applause for the Aboriginal “actors” being thunderous (Edols 2006). In the following I will suggest the Italo-Western sequence in Floating was open enough to allow for at least a three-part identification on the part of young Aboriginal audiences of the day. Audiences might identify with the role of the gun-toting outlaw; they could also identify with the Aboriginal law-bringers. Finally, young Aboriginal men could identify with the feats of horsemanship on display. Each of these aspects mapped onto dimensions of the Aboriginal experience in remote Western Australia. As Hayward has observed, the Western’s key themes are of civilization versus wilderness, and the white hero operates “at the point of conjuncture

140  Andrew W. Hurley of these two opposing values” (Hayward 2006). Limbrick talks about the “settler colonial mode” of many classical Westerns, including those made in Australia, which tended to subdue the interracial conflict that occurred at and behind the frontier, either removing Indigenous people from the diegesis or representing them as “already colonized, docile or compliant, or assimilated” (2007, 87). We might join Rachael Langford when she asks what might possibly appeal to the colonized in films that possess such an undergirding ideology. Perhaps the appeal is partly to do with what she calls “utopian escapism” bound up in “the opportunity it affords both audience and characters to assume hegemonic identities linked to power and domination” (Langford 2009, 83). However, the example of Django begetting Third Cinema features like The Harder They Come indicates how the ItaloWestern’s subversion of classical Western ideologies of space and civilization would fall on fertile ground in the Global South. The Italo-Western was also something to which Aboriginal people living in a remote part of Western Australia in the 1970s could relate in quite complex ways. To them, wilderness and civilization (i.e. colonization) and the conflicts of the frontier were no mere historical fantasies. They were at the heart of their experience over the previous one hundred years. So much can be seen if we turn our attention, for example, to Sam Woolagoodja, one of Edols’s key collaborators. Woolagoodja had been born in the early 1900s, prior to the establishment of the Kunmunya mission in 1912. He was old enough to have felt the immediate effect of colonization, which had been protracted and violent in parts of the Kimberley. Only two decades before Woolagoodja’s birth, the Bunuba tribesman, Jandamarra, had led a brief but effective armed insurrection in the Western Kimberley.17 This involved Jandamarra’s killing of a colonial policeman who had arrested a large number of people, as well as of two white men who were attempting to set up a cattle station in the heart of Bunuba lands. Jandamarra’s actions led to white outrage in towns like Derby and to violent reprisals against the Aboriginal population in various parts of the Kimberley, including against Sam Woolagoodja’s people, the Worrorra. Jandamarra managed to evade his would-be capturers for almost three years. Significantly, this Bunuba uprising was not so much a matter of spears, as of rifles and revolvers, stolen from the police. Indeed, it has even been described as guerrilla warfare (Pedersen and Woorunmurra 2000, 8). And yet Jandamarra and many other Aborigines at the time also had an ambiguous relationship with the colonial power. Prior to his period as guerrilla, Jandamarra had been a stockman, occasionally acted as a bounty hunter, and had assisted the police as a tracker. Indeed, in the incident which triggered the armed resistance, he had assisted with the arrest of a group of Bunuba people, who then persuaded him to liberate them. His ultimate demise was also thanks to another Aboriginal man from a different region, Micki, who felt no allegiance to the so-called outlaw and who, at the behest of the colonial government, tracked Jandamarra down and shot him.18 In other words, Aboriginal figures could be identified on both sides of the

Aboriginal Cowboys?  141 colonial divide. Indeed, sometimes the outlaw and the law-bringer were one and the same person. These figures of identification were not all that historically remote, either. As Banjo Woorunmurra’s contribution to Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance shows, the story of Jandamarra lived on strongly in the collective memory of Aboriginal people of the Kimberley. Donny Woolagoodja also notes Jandamarra is remembered as a folk hero – “like a Robin Hood” – by Aboriginal people in the area (Woolagoodja 2010). There was also a revival of interest in Jandamarra in the 1970s amongst other Aboriginal people. In 1979, for example, the author Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) published a novel called Long Live Sandawara, which revolved around the figure of Jandamarra and which sought to show how his story could remain relevant in the present day. Most importantly, the white context in Derby suggests things may have changed only slightly since colonial days. Indeed, the documentary footage in Floating is a remarkable archive of the survival of colonial attitudes and violence into the post-colonial era. For example, there is a sequence that just precedes the Western section in which an unnamed Indigenous man speaks to “Henry,” a white man, at the Spinifex Hotel. This establishes Henry had chased the unnamed man with an axe a few years earlier and had supposedly taught him the value of work in the process. According to Henry’s warped logic, the other man now respected him “as a brother” and this was evidence of “respect of the boys in the Kimberley.” Interracial violence and the ways of the past are clearly not just distant memories. All the more reason, perhaps, to identify with the violence of the Italo-Western. It is therefore not difficult to see how stories of Aboriginal violence and insurrection and/or Aboriginal involvement in the capture of outlaws could be imaginatively transposed into the Italo-Western genre. After all, ­Jandamarra was an Aboriginal gunman; so too was his killer. Yet this fertile field of imagination/identification does not exhaust the modes of identification with the Western genre. Another relates to the significance of horsemanship among young Aboriginal men. It might be added that in addition to his skills with a firearm, Jandamarra was also known as a talented horseman (Pedersen and Woorunmurra 2000, 69). Michael Edols has posited the popularity of the Western in the ­Mowanjum community in the 1970s was partly based on the high regard horsemanship was held. Many Aboriginal men had found employment as horsemen on the large cattle stations in the Kimberley, and had developed fine skills.19 And there is something more generally liberating about the horseman, and Edols, via a low shot looking up to the gunman on horseback just as he is about to escape, captures this well. Writing about the Bushranger myth a few years before Edols set off for the Kimberley, Colin Cave noted that riding a horse “makes a man ten feet high, something to look up to, something quick to come and quick to go, something with that air of mystery and mastery which stirs us” (1968, 9). But such an attitude, imbued with nostalgia for white city dwellers, was overlaid by others in the Kimberley. Horsemanship – as

142  Andrew W. Hurley demonstrated on the station or in the rodeo ring – offered an arena in which white racism might be temporarily forgotten, given that feats of horsemanship would be respected by white and black alike. Edols considers the Aboriginal reception of the Western film was thoroughly articulated with the general reception of rodeo culture and with its concomitant, country and western music. Indeed, he was originally inspired to try to engage local people with the Western genre after having seen Barney Tataya return to Mowanjum dressed in his rodeo garb.20 This link is there to see in the film, too. Several minutes before the Western sequence featuring Tataya as hero, we see him in documentary mode, breaking in a wild horse, watched by young Aboriginal boys riding gates as if they were bucking broncos. Watching a Western therefore could also allow Aboriginal men a space for embodied connoisseurship of the “mystery and mastery” of horsemanship – all the more so when the horseman depicted was Aboriginal, as in the sequences in Floating. Conclusion and Coda Floating is innovative in terms of genre, and marks an important, if little known, historic intervention in white Australia’s filmic interactions with Aboriginal Australia. Yet it is not only a milestone in white Australian filmmaking. Mowanjum elders wanted Edols to communicate their concerns to the floating youth of the community by means of a medium that enthralled these younger people. It is ironic that one of the most powerful passages in Floating occurs when these younger people played with their– and Edols’s – fascination with the Western genre. For a while, they became the stars in a short Aboriginal Western, acting out a wide range possible identifications: with the Aboriginal outlaw, the Aboriginal police tracker, and the Aboriginal rodeo rider/cowboy. For a while, Edols was given access to another dimension of life at Mowanjum, one that had been withheld from him until then. After more recent trips, he has observed it is not so much the Western (anti)hero who enthrals contemporary young Aboriginal men but the gangsta rapper. However, Ivan Sen, an Indigenous filmmaker who was born in another part of remote Australia a year before Edols started shooting in Mowanjum, has shown that, in conjunction with the gangsta rapper, Western motifs continue to have traction among contemporary young Indigenous men. Sen, born 1972, grew up in Toomelah in regional NSW. He rose to prominence in the post-Mabo moment after the 1992 finding of the High Court of Australia that acknowledged Australia was not “terra nullius” when settled by the British in 1788. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argue this moment has allowed for greater recognition of the colonial past in contemporary Australian film and for a backtracking into that past, digging out, for example, figures like the blacktracker.21 Australian filmmakers, often motivated by a melancholic mix of “anxiety and ambivalence,” now better recognized an enduring “historical amnesia” and implicitly recognized “that indigenous

Aboriginal Cowboys?  143 and settler Australians alike are still living through the unresolved trauma of colonial settlement” (2004, 7, 81).22 It is this moment that has caused the re-evaluation of an earlier Aboriginal outlaw film like The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Ivan Sen’s films are alive to the ways in which the past lives on in the present, and it is in this context that two of his recent feature-length films, Toomelah (2011) and Mystery Road (2013), dwell on some of the Indigenous outlaw/law-bringer roles that Floating’s Western fragment had gestured towards almost forty years earlier. Mystery Road was conceived of as “a kind of Australian Western, with the visual sweep of American Wild West movies” (Robb 2011). In addition to the familiar longshots of landscape, it also features various other shots typical of the Western – for example, the close-up ultra-low shots of cowboy boots walking across the screen and, of course, the final shoot-out at the end between the isolated hero and his numerous villainous opponents. The soundtrack, also by Sen, features a twangy sound at one point, reminiscent of Ennio ­Morricone’s soundtracks for Italo-Westerns. However, the intertextuality remains restrained, and Mystery Road never becomes a pastiche. Shot on remote location near the Queensland/NSW border, it portrays Jay (Aaron Pedersen), an Indigenous policeman who returns to his hometown after an unspecified absence and starts by investigating the murder of a local ­Aboriginal girl. The screenplay was prompted by the death of Sen’s cousin, Theresa Binge, who in 2002 had been found dead under an overpass near Toomelah. Her unsolved murder “precipitated Ivan’s feelings about the past and present of all the places round here that he and his family come from” (Robb 2011). Jay, who wears Western shirts, a cowboy hat, and slings his regulation police handgun from his belt, senses white perpetrators are involved, but when he advances that view, his white superior officer is unwilling to stir up a hornet’s nest by expanding the investigation: “Fight one war at a time, Jay,” warns the Sarge. As in some of the Bushranger and outlaw Western narratives, the integrity of the white police is called into question via the ambiguous role of Jay’s colleague, Johnno (Hugo ­Weaving), who is involved in some opaque way in the white wrongdoing behind the murder and who warns Jay away from investigating too closely. Like Sen’s other films, Mystery Road points to the continuation of the brutal colonial past in the present, given that the dead Aboriginal girl is found near Massacre Creek, a site clearly named after an episode of frontier violence in the not-too-distant past.23 The ongoing results of violent dispossession are clear. It is a white landowner, Mr. ­Bailey, whose children are well set up for the future. Aboriginal children, on the other hand, face very uncertain futures. Jay occupies an uneasy Aboriginal law-bringer role in this scarcely post-colonial setting, where the police seem to be on the side of the white landowners and where his colleague Johnno calls him “Jay-Boy,” alluding to derogatory forms of address common in the colonial past.24 The police are responsible for incarcerating many of Jay’s people, and he himself is the subject of surveillance. Jay lives an ambiguous existence. He is financially comfortable yet lives alone, estranged from

144  Andrew W. Hurley his ex-partner and his daughter, and from the Aboriginal community more broadly. His presence provokes uneasy responses from town locals, black and white. Mr. Bailey asks him, for example, whether he is “a real copper or one of them blacktrackers who turns on his own type.” Young Aboriginal children see him either as a despised policeman – “You a copper, brother? We hate coppers. We kill coppers, brother” – or alternatively as a figure of fascination, someone who carries a police handgun, a desirable symbol of authority and power, someone with whom a young Aboriginal child might co-operate and even identify. As in other Sen films, the Indigenous protagonist refuses to answer the questions put to him by interlocutors who cannot make out his racial allegiances. He is, and he gains power from his refusal to be drawn. Whereas it is the law-bringer, Jay, with his marksmanship and his meting out of justice on white wrongdoers, who evokes sympathy in Mystery Road, the contrary outlaw identification forms the subject matter of Toomelah, a narrative set in the eponymous former reservation-cum-mission-cum-­settlement. Toomelah revolves around Daniel, a young boy from a dysfunctional family who is attracted by the camaraderie available through the local drug-dealer, Linden, and his band of “plastic gangsters.” Here, pace Michael Edols, the role models derive from gangsta hip-hop. Nevertheless, Linden’s band of gangster outlaws might have otherwise populated a Western. They are not entirely bad and as a white viewer, one gains a sense of why Daniel fails to engage with school and gravitates towards the verve of Linden’s group. What other options does he have in this place? Linden himself is by no means an unsympathetic figure, even though his fate is to be incarcerated over the killing of a rival Toomelah drug-dealer in a turf war. In combination, Mystery Road and Toomelah explore some of the ways that, in an enduring post-Mabo moment when “the unresolved trauma of colonial settlement” lives on, contemporary Aboriginal people might still identify with the Western and similar genres. Presumably unknowingly, they develop materials and roles that are present in fragmentary form in the Aboriginal Western sequence buried in Floating. Whilst the location and some of the cultural markers have changed, Sen’s oeuvre suggests ­Aboriginal existences in the Australian postcolony might not have changed that much at all; they might be part of a changing same, structured by enduring power relations. These films all demonstrate how, despite the underlying colonialist ideology of many classical Westerns that acts as a white guarantee over place and Indigenous subjects, the materials of the transnational Western genre can speak to the complex experience of Aboriginal people in regional Australia, and they can use those materials to undermine the colonialist ideology. Floating and Mystery Road are not about the erasure of ­Aboriginal place in Australia, as some of the white-settler variants of the Western might be, but rather depict Aboriginal bodies and histories in the landscape. This is not to say we can fully resolve the meanings of these films. In Sen’s films, which so often leave questions answered by other questions, as well as in the curious stranded fragment of Aboriginal Western in ­Floating, there are

Aboriginal Cowboys?  145 always “points … that are unavailable to the viewer, especially if they are non-Aboriginal” (Gall and Probyn-Rapsey 2006, 427). But perhaps it is precisely in these ambiguities that a type of resistance to the ­univocalism of white-settler culture might be located, as the anthropologist Diane ­Austin-Broos has observed in another context (2009, 49).

Notes 1. The first film to be labelled as such seems to have been Charles Chauvel’s second feature, Greenhide (1926), which the Australian director made after returning to Australia after a sojourn working in Hollywood. Stuart Cunningham (1988) has called Greenhide a transposed Western. 2. On the Ealing Studios Westerns – The Overlanders (dir. Harry Watt, 1946), ­Bitter Springs (dir. Ralph Smart, 1950), and others – see e.g. Limbrick 2007. 3. On this film and its reception, see e.g. Wilson 2007. 4. Burstall was in good company. In 1953, André Bazin had also seen ­Australian Westerns as “counterfeit, pastiche or parody” (Limbrick 2007, 70). Stuart ­Cunningham would also look at “kangaroo Western” films like Greenhide as being “a weak form of generic hybridization that seeks to transpose a ­Hollywood genre” (Cunningham 1988, 63). 5. See Hurley 2007. 6. Edols was cinematographer for both Or Forever Hold Your Peace and for 27A, for example. 7. Edols began his independent freelance career in 1978. For the filmmaker’s personal account of “aspects of [his] life working with Indigenous Australians,” see Edols 2011. 8. These films were released on DVD in 2011. 9. For a discussion of the “wurnan” system of gifts and protocols in the ­Mowanjum community, see e.g. Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005, 100. Edols explains the “wunan” [sic] system as relating both to sacred lore and to the law that dictates relations between people in the area (Edols 2011, 4). 10. Floating also shows footage of young Aboriginal men congregated outside the Derby cinema. 11. Ian Kerr, of Edith Cowan University, used Lalai to instruct tertiary students about Aboriginal culture, and was struck by the number of students who, many years later, remembered Lalai and its “almost surreal quality” (Kerr 2007). 12. Translations from German are mine. 13. On the anti-clerical aspects of the Italo-Western, see e.g. Clifford Manlove’s chapter in this volume. 14. Thanks to Mark Norval for pointing this out. 15. Some of the reasons why this is so are explained in Edols’s very personal third Mowanjum film, When the Snake Bites the Sun. 16. Edols understands Floating is still watched from time to time, as it gives an opportunity for Mowanjum people to see on screen some of their dear relatives (Edols 2006). 17. This account of Jandamarra’s activities is derived from Pedersen and ­Woorunmurra 2000.

146  Andrew W. Hurley 18. Given the colonial history of Australia, terms such as “outlaw” are highly contentious. While much of white Australia may have chosen to see Aboriginal people who resisted colonisation as outlaws, this is not the way in which they are remembered by Aboriginal people and critical historians. Rather, they are seen as fighting “for a recognition of [their] legitimate rights and interests as owners of country” (Peter Yu, quoted in Pedersen and Woorunmurra 2000, vii). 19. This situation began to break down after the introduction of equal pay for Aboriginal stockmen in 1968. White pastoralists began to claim they could no longer afford to support Aboriginal workers and their families and pressured them to leave the stations (see e.g. Pedersen and Woorunmurra 2000, 198). Technological changes also contributed to the demise of the Aboriginal stockman. By the later 1970s, horsemen were beginning to be replaced to some extent by “helicopter ringers,” as the Kimberley’s Aboriginal politician and balladeer, Ernie Bridge, revealed in his song “The Helicopter Ringer.” 20. For a popular account of Aboriginal Australia’s lesser-known engagement with Country and Western music, especially in the 1970s, see Clinton Walker’s book Buried Country (2000) As a figure like Ernie Bridge indicates, and as footage in Edols’s Floating shows, the Kimberley (and Mowanjum) was also highly receptive to Country and Western music at this time. 21. As in Rolf DeHeer’s film The Tracker (2002). 22. This moment has also allowed new non-Indigenous reach for the Western, as in John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), which Thomas Klein (forthcoming) considers to be an outlaw Western. 23. On Sen’s use of similar devices in other films, see Birch 2005; Gall and ProbynRapsey 2006. 24. Mr. Bailey and family enjoy an intimate relationship with the police. It is also they who are behind the murder.

References Austin-Broos, Diane. 2009. Arrernte Present Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Birch, Tony. 2005. “Surveillance, Identity and Historical Memory in Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds.” Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, Scott McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis, eds., 185–201. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Blundell, Valda and Donny Woolagoodja. 2005. Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh: Sam Woolagoodja and the Enduring Power of Lalai. Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press. Bridge, Ernie. 1980. The Helicopter Ringer. CM Records (Dubbo). Cave, Colin. F. 1968. “Introduction.” In Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Colin F. Cave, ed., 1–11. North Melbourne: Cassell. Chauvel, Charles, dir. 1926. Greenhide. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. 2004. Australian Cinema After Mabo. ­Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Corbucci, Sergio, dir. 1966. Django.

Aboriginal Cowboys?  147 Cunningham, Stuart. 1988. “Disaggregating Landscape and Nation in Chauvel.” Island in the Stream. Myths of Place in Australian Culture, Paul Foss, ed., 61–82. Leichhardt: Pluto Press. Davis, Therese. 2007. “Remembering Our Ancestors: Cross-Cultural Collaboration and the Mediation of Aboriginal Culture in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigrr, dirs., 2006).” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1: 5–14. deHeer, Rolf, dir. 2002. The Tracker. Doring, Jef and Su Doring, dirs. 1974. Tidikawa and Friends. Edols, Michael, dir. 1973–1975. Lalai Dreamtime. ———. 1973–1975. Floating like wind blow’em about. ———. 1985–1986. When the Snake Bites the Sun. ———. 2005. Wandjina Wisdom: In the Dawn of the First Light. Eleventh draft. Typescript in the possession of Andrew W. Hurley. ———. 2006. Author interview with Andrew W. Hurley, Dec. 12–13. ———. 2011. Aspects of a Life Working with Indigenous Australians. Mitchell, ACT: Ronin Films. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fouz-Hernandez, S., ed. 2009. Mysterious Skin: The Male Body in Contemporary Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Gall, Adam and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. 2006. “Ivan Sen and the Art of the Road.” Screen 47.4: 425–439. Hagg, Russell, dir. 1977. Raw Deal. Hayward, Susan. 2006. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. Third ed. London and New York: Routledge. Henzell, Perry, dir. 1972. The Harder They Come. Herzog, Werner. 1978a. “Faszination um ein Sterben.” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, April 1–2, 14. ———. 1978b. “Herzog enters Dreamtime.” Berlinale–Tip No. 5, 10–11. ———. dir. 1984. Where the Green Ants Dream. Hillcoat, John, dir. 2005. The Proposition. Hurley, Andrew W. 2007. “Whose Dreaming? Intercultural appropriation, representations of Aboriginality, and the process of filmmaking in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.2: 175–190. ———. 2010. “From Aboriginal Australia to German Autumn: On the German ­ inema reception of thirteen ‘films from Black Australia.’” Studies in Australasian C 3.3: 251–263. Johnson, Colin (Mudrooroo). 1987. Long live Sandawara. South Yarra: Highland House. Kerr, Ian. 2007. E-mail to Andrew W. Hurley, October 19. Klein, Thomas. 2015. “Geschichte - Mythos - Identität: Zur globalen Zirkulation des Western-Genres.” Berlin: Bertz & Fischer. Langford, Rachael E. 2009. Post-Colonial Cowboys: Masculinity and the Western in Francophone African Cinema. Mysterious Skin: The Male Body in Contemporary Cinema. Fouz-Hernandez, S., ed. London: I.B. Tauris. Leone, Sergio, dir. 1966. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Limbrick, Peter. 2007. “The Australian Western, or a Settler Colonial Cinema par excellence.” Cinema Journal 46.4: 68–95. ———. 2010. Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

148  Andrew W. Hurley Magowan, Fiona and Karl Neuenfeldt. 2005. Introduction. Landscapes of Indigenous Performance, Fiona Magowan and Karl Neuenfeldt, eds., 1–11. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Moore, Claire and Stephen Muecke. 1984. “Racism and the Representation of Aborigines in Film.” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1: 35–63. Noyce, Phillip, dir. 1977. Backroads. O’Regan, Tom. 1996. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge. Pedersen, Howard and Banjo Woorunmurra. 2000. Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance. Second ed. Broome: Magabala Books. Robb, Peter. 2011. “A Journey through North-western NSW with F ­ ilmmaker Ivan Sen.” The Monthly, November. Accessed Oct. 18, 2014. http://www.themonthly. com.au/issue/2011/november/1326604262/peter-robb/journey-throughnorth-western-nsw-filmmaker-ivan-sen. Routt, William D. 2002. “More Australian than Aristotelian. The Australian Bushranger Film 1904–1914.” Senses of Cinema 18. http://sensesofcinema. ­ com/2001/feature-articles/oz_western/. Accessed Oct. 18, 2014. Schepisi, Fred, dir. 1978. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Sen, Ivan, dir. 2011. Toomelah. ———. dir. 2013. Mystery Road. Smart, Ralph, dir. 1950. Bitter Springs. Storm, Esben, dir. 1974. 27A. Various directors. 1970. Or Forever Hold Your Peace. Walker, Clinton. 2000. Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music. Sydney: Pluto Press. Watt, Harry, dir. 1946. The Overlanders. Weir, Peter, dir. 1977. The Last Wave. Wilson, Janet. 2007. “Reconsidering Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978): screen adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel (1972).” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.2: 191–207. Woolagoodja, Donny. 2010. Author interview with Andrew W. Hurley, October 19. Woolagoodjah, Sam. 1975. Lalai Dreamtime. North Sydney: Aboriginal Arts Board (Australia Council).

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Michael Edols and Donny Woolagoodja for their time regarding interviews. Thanks also to Mark Norval and to Henk Rhee, CEO and Koolan Island Administrator of the Dambimangari ­Aboriginal Corporation, for facilitating feedback from the Mowanjum community. Finally, thanks to Thomas Klein and Stephen Muecke for their promptings.

9 Tears of the Black Tiger The Western and Thai cinema Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea

Thai Old West: Not So Old, Not So West In this chapter we discuss the impact of the classic Western on Thai cinema, the film Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) in particular, which was the featurefilm debut of director Wisit Sasanatieng. Through our reading of the film we examine the phenomenon of transculturalism, how the globally shared generic icons and conventions of the Western mix with Thailand’s cultural idiosyncrasies, hardly known beyond its borders before the release of this film. Thus Tears of the Black Tiger serves to illustrate ongoing debates about postmodernist appropriations of cinematic references and about the ability of such stylistic exercises to reflect on the contexts where they were produced, especially when they resort to foreign genres as the vehicles for their discourses. In his influential study of classic Hollywood film genres, Thomas Schatz (Hollywood Genres 1981, 45–46) comments on how both the inception and the later evolution of the Western as a cinematic genre were intricately interwoven with the origins and conformation of the Hollywood studio system itself. This perception was shared by observers from outside America, such as French film critics André Bazin and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, who titled their 1953 treatise on this genre Le Western ou le cinema américain par excellence. Nevertheless, the appropriation of the lore of the Western by European filmmakers, starting in the mid-1960s, played a crucial role in the revitalization of the genre during the following decade and a half, bringing a new conception of both forms and contents to the canon – if there ever were such a thing – of the Hollywood Western generic formula. Italian Spaghetti Western directors such as Sergio Leone applied a different sensitivity, doubtlessly attributable to the specificities of their cultural backgrounds, to the conventions of this genre, leading to a certain demythification of its stereotypes as well as to innovative ways of visualizing both its typical actions and the space of its fictions. Even if the actual places where these films were being shot were an ocean away from it, and their national histories obviously differed from the American past, the fictional space-time of the Spaghetti Western stories, their chronotope,1 was still roughly the same as in Hollywood productions, “the American West (defined generally as the land west of the Mississippi) from the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century” (Schatz 1988, 26).

150  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea In some aspects, the Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah talai jone, 2000) inscribes itself in the lineage of appropriation of the American ­Western film initiated by the Italo-Spanish Spaghetti Westerns, but this Southeast Asian film advances several new steps further in that direction as the fictional setting of the action is not the Old American West. Instead, its chronotope is set somewhere in Thailand, between the occupation of this South East Asian country by the Japanese during World War II and the decade of the 1950s.2 In addition, a plethora of highly distinctive elements of this country’s culture ornament the actions and the scenery, and the characters are obviously Thai, evident because of their names.3 Consequently, the whole production is conceived as a picturesque blend of Western film conventions filtered through the aesthetic peculiarities of the Thai tradition. The result is a visually striking pastiche, to say the least, which had little commercial success in its native country (Harrison 2007, 194) and may well have perplexed American and European audiences. But Tears of the Black Tiger got a warm, sometimes even enthusiastic, reception within the circle of foreign critics, as it was the first Thai film to be selected for competition in the Cannes Film Festival (2001) and was nominated for several awards at other prestigious film festivals throughout Europe and Canada.4 Tears of the Black Tiger was the feature-film debut of director Wisit Sasanatieng (born 1964), who by that time already was an experienced director of commercials. He had already collaborated with fellow Thai filmmaker Nonzee Nimibutr, writing the screenplays for the successful Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters (antapan krong muang, 1997) and Ghost Wife (Nang nak, 1999), two essential titles within the late-1990s New Wave of Thai cinema. Both films contain elements that somehow prelude some of the themes dealt with in Tears of the Black Tiger, especially their tones of fatalistic tragedies in which the main characters seem to be the prisoners of designs far beyond their own wills. As a matter of fact, this is a common feature of Thai cinema. “The humanity of Thai movie characters often seems to be balancing precariously against the stern demands of Buddhism and karma (destiny)” (Lewis 2006, 147). Tapping into the Shakespearean vein so dear to some Western classics, such as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), in Tears of the Black Tiger Sasanatieng refers to Romeo and Juliet, as he tells the story of ill-fated love between Rumpoey Prasit (Stella Malucchi), the urbanite daughter of a wealthy man who gets to be the governor of the region where they live, and Dum Dua (Chartchai Ngamsan), the rural son of a humble peasant and sort of a servant of Rumpoey’s father. This is a long-standing tradition in Thai romantic tales that has been interpreted as a strategy of reinforcement of social conventions: The idea of an enduring relationship across class lines, particularly between a lower-class man and a higher-class woman, was virtually inconceivable. … Individual feelings and desires were of secondary importance to the social imperative of maintaining class boundaries (Barmé 2002, 199).

Tears of the Black Tiger  151 From the beginning the story is virtually divided between two worlds that also respond to different generic frames: on one hand, that of the melodrama with highly sentimental overtones; on the other, the violent fistfights, shootings, and cavalcades so closely associated with the Western film from its very origins. Furthermore, applying Deleuze’s approach to cinematic discourse, this film has been described also as portraying a struggle within the framework of postcolonial critical theories: “The neo-western Fah talai jone … demonstrates the colonial tensions and break-up between peoples using a non-explicit aesthetic” (Colman 2011, 149). The cascade of dichotomies between high and low social classes, as well as between love and violence, and also between national identity and global influences, is further epitomized by the conflict between the status quo and outlawlessness, as represented by the character of Dum, the Black Tiger of the title. This dualistic nature clearly belongs in the antihero category that goes back to such classics as Ringo Kid in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) or the eponymous protagonist of George Stevens’s Shane (1953) and that was consecrated in the aforementioned Spaghetti Westerns of the 1970s and, on American soil, in the crepuscular Westerns filmed by the likes of Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, or Clint Eastwood, to name just a few. Nonetheless, Tears of the Black Tiger cannot be looked on as a straight appropriation, either parody or homage, of the Western generic conventions as directly imported from America or Europe. Actually, it is a postmodern rereading of the themes and visuals of the popular action genre films made in Thailand in the 1950s and 1960s, which had already served as melting pots of foreign influences with Thai idiosyncratic aesthetics, narratives, and storytelling techniques. A Half Ironic, Half Respectful Homage to Thai Cinema Arguably, one relevant reason Thailand has kept much of its cultural legacy alive and distinct has to do with the fact that this nation was never formally colonized, a rara avis condition in South East Asia during the late 19th century when all its neighboring countries were under the control of European powers. The old Siam took charge of its own process of modernization,5 so it did not take very long for the cinematograph to get to Thailand after it was first presented in Paris. In the course of a journey through Europe in 1897, King Chulalongkorn’s brother, Prince Sanbassatra, bought one exemplar of the Lumière brothers’ invention and used it to make a series of short documentary films in the early 1900s (Peleggi 2002, 15). During the three following decades, “Audiences were exposed to an extraordinary array of material” (Barmé, 48). However, the vast majority of films exhibited in Thailand were nang farang, that is, films imported from Europe and America, including, among many other genres, cowboy films. Being silent and most often with their intertitles in English, very few viewers could understand the

152  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea written dialogues and explanations for subtleties in the stories. Under such conditions, it should not come as a surprise that Thai audiences opted for action and adventure-oriented films, especially ­Westerns, so their favorite stars were the likes of Eddie Polo, Francis Ford, and Tom Mix. Integrally autochthonous production of films in Thailand only started in 1927, with Manit Wasuwat’s Double Luck (Chok song chun), but several films had already been shot in the country during the previous years by foreign crews, including the American production Miss Suwanna of Siam (Nang sao suwan, 1923), written and directed by Henry McRae. Starring Thai actors, McRae’s film is a pioneering example of the juxtaposition of ancient ­Siamese exoticism with more modern aspects of the country such as planes and trains, all of it functioning as the background for a typical love-triangle plot consisting of the hero, the heroine, and the villain. Hollywood’s influence on Thai productions and tastes would remain strong during the following years and, according to missionary and Southeast Asia specialist Kenneth Perry Landon, in the late 1930s Siamese youth were dressing and behaving as characters from American movies and many of them were wearing cowboy hats, shirts, and neckerchiefs (1968, 175–176). Even though both citizens and authorities demonstrated their interest in cinema, it was not until the end of World War II that Thailand started developing a stable film industry that underwent sustained growth, ­leading to their own particular version of a studio system. This trend was triggered by the huge success of Thai Gentlemen Fighters (Suparb burut sua thai, M.C. Sukornwannadit Ditsakul & Tae Prakartwutisan, 1949), which told the story of a honest man who is accused of a crime he has not committed and takes on the identity of a bandit in order to help those in need. To a certain extent, it advances some of the themes in Tears of the Black Tiger, whose protagonist, Dum, is forced by circumstances beyond his control to join a gang of bandits. In the 1950s, the popularity of the Thai star system rivaled that of foreign famous actors, and during the following decade the national industry experienced a veritable explosion as production companies refined and standardized generic formulas in response to the preferences viewers expressed through box offices. Among the peculiarities of Thai films of the 1940s and 1950s was the fact that, since the shortage of 35mm film during World War II, the studios resorted to 16 mm stock, which also forced the production of silent films that were dubbed live in the cinemas. This practice would survive into the late 1960s, although the adoption of the professional 35mm format was started in 1954 by Ratana Pestonji. That year, this highly influential director founded the Hanuman Film Company (Hanuman Papayon) in order to eradicate obsolete characteristics of Thai films and elevate their standards so they could compete with the imported films under more equal conditions. Though not a prolific director, the importance of Pestonji in the history of Thai cinema cannot be overestimated. His first 35mm film, Kru Marut’s Santi-Weena (1954), on which he worked as cinematographer, was

Tears of the Black Tiger  153 the first Thai film to achieve international recognition when it was entered into competition at the Asia Pacific Film Festival in Tokyo. A few years later, Black Silk (Prae dum, 1961), a noir film in which Pestonji took charge of writing, production, direction, cinematography, and editing, became the first Thai film to compete at the Berlin International Film Festival. Like many other contemporary Thai filmmakers, the director of Tears of the Black Tiger is indebted to the works of Pestonji, as he himself admitted in the course of an interview: But the presiding inspiration was probably the director Rattana Pestonji, who was never exactly in the mainstream of the industry in the 1950s or the 1960s. He was a cinematographer who began directing and producing his own, very idiosyncratic films, and he was very conscious of the need to create a genuinely Thai film culture and film industry (Rayns 2001, 9). Meanwhile, right at the center of that mainstream of which Pestonji was not a part, the greatest stars were the couple formed by action hero Mitr Chaibancha and his leading lady, Petchara Chaowara. Chaibancha first appeared in the film Tiger Blood (Chart sua, 1958) and became famous thanks to his second one, Top of the Tough Guys (Jaona kleng, 1959), a tale about masked detectives. His consecration as the most beloved Thai film star ever arrived when he teamed up for the first time with Chaowara in The Love Diary of Pimchawee (Bunteuk rak khong Pimchawee, 1962). Chaibancha’s complete cinematic career consisted of more than two hundred and sixty-five roles in less than fifteen years, and about a hundred and fifty of them co-starred Chaowara, which meant more than half of the films produced in Thailand during that period. These titles cultivated almost every imaginable genre, ranging from folkloric legends to family dramas to adventures and exotic Westerns. Both physically and psychologically, the typical roles of the Chaibancha and Chaowara couple contrasted the strength of the male characters against the sweetness of the female ones, thus enforcing the gender configuration of the agrarian Thai society. Moreover, one common theme underlying all these films was the opposition between modernity and tradition, which was portrayed as a more desirable depot of virtues. Chaibancha exerted an enormous influence on the more commercial side of the Thai film industry during what is unanimously considered its golden age, the late 1950s and 1960s. As a matter of fact, it was his huge box-office appeal that kept the 16mm film production going in Thailand for so long, and it was his accidental death in 1970 that started the quick decline of this format for professional use in favor of the standard 35mm film. Tall, handsome, and athletic, Mitr Chaibancha appears as an obvious reference for the character of Dum in Tears of the Black Tiger, the director of which was consciously parodying/homaging the Thai adventure genre actors of the 1960s, as he explained that

154  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea In casting, I didn’t look for experienced actors for the main roles. Rather I looked for people who had the kind of charisma you used to see in film stars of the 1960s. Some of those vintage stars weren’t that great as actors, but they did have terrific charisma (Rayns 2001, 9).6 Furthermore, in Sasanatieng’s film the role of Fai, the leader of the bandits and a sort of father figure for Dum, was played by veteran actor Sombat Metanee, who became the most popular Thai star in the action-film genre after Chaibancha’s demise. Additionally, in Tears of the Black Tiger, Rumpoey is the only relevant female character and just as passive as those Chaowara used to embody in her films with Chaibancha. Also regarding the character of Rumpoey, Damian Sutton’s Deleuzian reading of this film interprets her situation as a political allegory of the decade during which cinema is parodied/homaged: Caught between Dum and Kumjorn, and also Mahesuan, Rumpoey’s misfortune is to be the focus of three powers that reflect the situation of Thailand in that critical historical moment of the 1950s, represented by the university, the military state, and the bandit fiefdom: civilization, totalitarianism and anarchy (Sutton 2012, 44). In this sense, as in so many others, Sasanatieng’s film emerges as a postmodernist exercise of half-respectful, half-ironic re-enactment of the cinematic traits of bygone days from the awareness of a new generation of Thai filmmakers, which is not void of content but serves as the vehicle for a number of messages. Once Upon a Time in South East Asia Led by the commercial success of Nonzee Nimibutr7, several other young directors started making their own films in the late 1990s, including Penek Ratanaruang, Jira Malikul, M.L. Mingmongkol Sonakul, Yongyuth Thongkongthun, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and the director of Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng. In one decade, their works have revolutionized the face of the Thai film industry, both in form and content, and have taken Thai cinema beyond the frontiers of their country. In particular, Sasanatieng’s delirious pastiche of Western and Thai action (nang bu) films, with its blend of kitsch and traditional Thai aesthetics, has developed an enthusiastic cult of admirers outside Thailand. The Financial Times film critic Nigel Andrews commented: “The insanely lyrical, idiotically enjoyable Tears of the Black Tiger puts a new country on the world movie map,” and added about the director that “he is the most inventive stylist east of anywhere” (2001). N ­ otwithstanding the exaggeratedly absolute quality of such an assertion, the fact is Sasanatieng’s fine talents – and those of

Tears of the Black Tiger  155 cinematographer Nattawut Kittikhun – show, at least on a plastic level, as soon as even the most casual viewer has his or her first contact with this film. The calculatedly oversaturated colors, chiefly green-turquoise-blue and red-crimson-pink hues, deliver an out-and-out blow to the visual sense from the opening scene. According to Sasanatieng, he wanted that look for his film because I think it is very Thai. When I travel up-country, the temples, houses, clothes and posters I see are all like that: bright and colorful, very appropriate to a hot country. Sometimes the way that clashing colors are mixed together is quite daring (Rayns 2001, 9). But for a viewer from a Western country, it is impossible not to associate this striking chromatic palette in a film with an early Hollywood venture into color cinematography such as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) or, with a later film closer to the domain of the Western genre, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954). The painted tableaux and the farcical, tight attires of the bandits in Tears of the Black Tiger powerfully bring to mind their equivalents in Donen’s musical, but the actual references of the Thai director are otherwise. On one hand, the inspiration for the painted backdrops came from their traditional use in a Thai form of popular theatre called likay, whereas the unrealistic cowboy-like clothing the outlaws wear are more directly borrowed from the garments of the heroes in 1950s and 1960s Thai action movies even if, in turn, they may have been modelled after those of American B movie Western heroes.8 Therefore, it appears as obvious that the reception of the many visual references in the film might be overtly different, depending on whether the viewer is familiar or not with Thai folklore and mass culture. With regard to that coexistence of culturally remote ingredients, Stephen Teo has reflected – and wondered – on the transcultural nature of this film: In its evocation of the local conventions of melodrama and the incorporation of a foreign genre, the film demonstrates that transculturalism is a two-way process. … Tears of the Black Tiger is an entertaining film that introduces the conventions of Thai melodrama to a global audience while integrating a Hollywood genre into its overall narrative. … Is Tears of the BlackTiger a parody or satire of transculturalism, or is it really transcultural to the extent that it conveys the same meaning to everybody, East and West, North and South? (2010, 425). Thai cultural studies specialist Rachel Harrison had already provided her opinion about this issue, stating that a radical differentiation could be made between Tears of the Black Tiger,9 as received by Western audiences, and Fah talai jone, using the original Thai title to designate the film as seen and decoded by Thai viewers (195). Also, supporting Harrison’s perception,

156  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea there is the fact that after picking up the rights to distribute the film in the U.S., Miramax edited it heavily, much to the disgust of its director (Chaiworaporn & Knee 68). Nevertheless, Harrison herself recognizes that elements from both cultural worlds coexist in the film, as best exemplified by its musical soundtrack,10 consisting of echoes of Ennio Morricone to excerpts from Dvorák’s New World Symphony at its more tender, emotional moments. These Western-style scores are interspersed with a variety of renditions of popular Thai songs from the 1950s, such as those of Phensi Phumchusi, rerecorded by contemporary performers in the true-to-form style of postmodern pastiche (201). The expression “postmodern pastiche”11 perfectly describes the approach of Tears of the Black Tiger as what Harrison considers “the cowboy Western that forms the significant non-Thai cinematic referent in this director’s intertextual jaunt” (201). According to Linda Hutcheon, one of the most characteristic traits of postmodernism is the fact that “the categories of genre are regularly challenged these days” (59), while, according to French narratologist Gérard Genette, the ideal state common to pastiche and caricature can be defined as the state of an imitation “perceptible as such.” The most appropriate and accurate term might be “saturation”: the recurrence of a stylistic or thematic feature characteristic of an author (86–87). Or, it could be added, the recurrence of a generic convention. The way Sasanatieng deals with the Western genre is not too different from the way he conceives the music of his film, as a sort of composite of diverse influences, but he also remarks or exaggerates each use of a generic convention in order to show it naked and obvious to the viewer. In doing so, the Thai director is also making a statement about where Tears of the Black Tiger stands in the evolution of the Western film genre and, perhaps, even revealing his own ideas about Thailand, America, and the price of globalization. Notwithstanding how much of a postmodern pastiche it is, Tears of the Black Tiger still observes what many film scholars such as Schatz consider the one essential feature of any story in the Western genre: “an elemental conflict between civilization and savagery. This is the thematic nucleus and the defining characteristic of this genre, and it informs virtually any aspect of its narrative composition, from character and setting to plot structure and thematics” (The Western, 28). In its appropriation of the Western’s conventions, Sasanatieng’s film also abides by Schatz’s corollary to the former rule: “The opening to virtually any Western immediately cues us to just how the basic oppositions will be animated in this particular ‘telling’ of the generic tale” (The Western, 28). In this case, it is the contrast between the two spaces in the film’s opening sequence that establishes the basic dichotomy within the story. The film begins with a slowly paced, almost oneiric scene in which Rumpoey gets to the sala raw nang,12 where she will wait for the beloved Dum. On the other hand, the second sequence introduces the audience to the violent world of Dum in his guise as the Black Tiger, as he and his bandit partner Mahesuan (Supakorn Kitsuwon) kill several men who have betrayed

Tears of the Black Tiger  157 their leader, Fai. The lonely figure of Rumpoey in the sala stands for melodrama, with its melancholic musical accompaniment, its wrapping in oversaturated red and green pastel colors, and the lengthened shots that convey every parsimonious movement of the character. On the contrary, when the film moves to the gunfight, the change of generic categories is clearly underlined by the inclusion of parts of Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (Per qualchedollaro in più, 1965), easily recognizable as belonging to the Western genre, while the progressively vertiginous analytical montage drives the viewers on a roller-coaster-like showcase of Dum’s virtually superhuman shooting skills.13 Dum’s face functions as the continuity element in the first transition between the two alternate spaces in the sequence, as the black-and-white photographic portrait that Rumpoey and the audience are looking at transmutes into the features of the present-day Dum in a pensive attitude, just a moment before unleashing lethal violence against his gang’s enemies. And when the killing is over, it is also the character of Dum who tries to cover the distance that separates his world from Rumpoey’s, only to find his effort was in vain because his beloved one has already left the place where they had arranged to meet each other. Thus Dum, the Black Tiger, clearly emerges from the beginning of the film as an unwilling mediator between two opposite realities, one in which he behaves most competently and another to which he would like to belong but that rejects him.14 From this point of view, Dum is no different from so many other gunmen from classic Westerns. In Stagecoach, Ringo Kid is sort of an exception, as he eventually solves his debts with justice – actually, he is irregularly absolved of his charges – and gets to leave in the company of a bride, even if she is as much of an outcast as himself. As for Shane, after fixing the conflicts in the town, he finally rides alone, leaving the family that had given him a home. Likewise, in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, closes the door behind him from outside after leaving the niece he has just rescued from the Indians with the family to which she belongs but of which he cannot expect to be a part. Similarly, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is necessary to put an end to the threat of savagery and violence embodied by Valance (Lee Marvin) but, years later, he is buried as a forgotten and barefooted nobody, once the civilization represented by the now Senator Ramson Stoddard (James Stewart) has imposed itself on the formerly Wild West. In Tears of the Black Tiger, Dum materializes as a legitimate inheritor of these characters’ legacies to the extent he is portrayed from the beginning as someone whose real talent resides in his capability to exert violence over others, even if he does not wish to do so. Since the first flashback, the young Dum reveals himself as someone who may entertain himself playing the flute but actually exhibits inordinate interest and skill in killing birds with a slingshot, to the surprise of a prepubescent Rumpoey. Moreover, his

158  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea brutal defence of Rumpoey against the kids who offend her in the river manifests itself as a sort of liberation of the belligerence the shy Dum keeps inside, but it leaves him with a permanently scarred forehead and literally finishes with Dum bathing in blood. In that case, Dum’s unleashing of violence almost leads to Rumpoey’s accidental death, and when the situation repeats itself all over again several years later, the result of Dum’s rescue is the assassination of all his family and his being forced to join Fai’s gang of bandits. ­Actually, in a symbolical sense, it is the habitually passive Rumpoey who sets Dum on a collision course with his own repressed violent instincts as, in an early encounter, she angrily breaks his bucolic flute so he pays her attention, and later compensates him with a harmonica, an instrument that encloses very distinct connotations for anyone familiar with Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, 1968).15 Whether Dum actually wishes or not to give a free rein to his potential for sheer violence is not a matter of the character’s willingness to do so, insofar as he is just a pawn of fate. As in the best Greek tragedies, which, in turn, inspired Shakespeare and much later left their own imprint in many Western films, the protagonists’ destinies are not theirs to decide; they are already written and predetermined. When Dum tells Rumpoey the legend about the origins of the sala raw nang, he is inadvertently describing the course of their own futures: a poor woodcutter built it with his own hands as a gift for the girl he loved, but they never got to meet there as the girl’s wealthy father locked her in her room, and the heartbroken woodcutter killed himself. In the same way, Dum’s relation with Mahesuan is fixed since the latter pronounces his solemn oath as they are about to become blood brothers: By everything sacred in this world, I, Mahesuan, swear, with the ­Buddha as my witness, I’ll always be true and loyal to my blood brother, Dum, the Black Tiger, who saved my life. If I break this oath, may his gun take my life. And, unsurprisingly, later in the story, Mahesuan break his oath and Dum kills him in the film’s ritualistic final showdown. It is as if the characters were covering already fixed paths as a result of their belonging to the rigid conventions of a genre, where they are but gears within a great narrative machine and the outcome of the plot can offer little surprises. For that reason, Sasanatieng does not only divide the film between two opposed spatial ­realities – the civilized, urbanite world of Rumpoey and the primary, wild world of the Black Tiger – but he also organizes his tale in a non-­chronological way, with frequent analepses that gradually reveal the backstory that leads the protagonist to his inescapable end. Even if the couple only shared a few brief minutes of peace together twice in the past, both times disturbed by the irruption of violence, that past is perceived as a golden age and it is indeed a nostalgic goal they will never achieve in the present. In this sense, Chaiworaporn and Knee have described Tears of the Black Tiger as “The

Tears of the Black Tiger  159 film that most lovingly and most self-consciously evokes … a nostalgia for times gone past … in an era of rapid, foreign-influenced social and economic change” (2006, 63).16 After Dum’s own talent for bloodshed has freed Rumpoey’s peaceful world from the threat of the bandits, Rumpoey’s fiancé, the ineffective Police Captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth), shoots Dum to death, proscribing him forever from their regulated and safe existences. Just like Shane, Ethan Edwards, or Tom Doniphon, Dum is no longer necessary once he has played his decisive role in saving civilization from the savagery only he can combat with its own weapons. The Wild West hero becomes obsolete after fulfilling his role in the Western formula: “There is a conflict within the community. The hero eventually decides to take part in the conflict and his involvement precipitates the death-struggle between himself and one or more villains” (Tuska 1985, 18). Doubtlessly the fact that, in the end, Dum dies after accomplishing his mission opens the doors to a variety of possible readings on the significance of the transition from savagery to civilization, or even of the place of the traditional Thai culture in the frame of a globalized world. However, director Sasanatieng merely attributes such a choice in his film’s plot to one more tip of the hat to the old action movies because, as he explained: “The idea that the hero should die, so that everyone cries on the way out, was a staple of those movies too” (Rayns 2001, 8). A Thai Western Film and the World Movie Map It has been written in reference to Tears of the Black Tiger that “the movie rejuvenates old genres by simultaneously re-enacting, reinventing, ridiculing and revering them” (Harrison, 201). Its director combined generic conventions, ranging from classic Westerns to Spaghetti Westerns to contemporary ones, with a deliberately retro look in some scenes, exotic aesthetics, and a playful postmodern approach and the result was an exuberant pastiche that constitutes yet another face of the traditionally versatile Western film genre. Whether Tears of the Black Tiger was designed to constitute a step ahead in the development of this genre is hard to say, since, to a certain extent, the film’s own postmodern vocation is at odds with the notion of a linear evolution of cultural phenomena. Definitely, in his film Sasanatieng acknowledged the historical weight of the Western as “the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself” (Bazin 2005, 140). He did so in the beginning of the first flashback, which takes the viewer to the instant when Dum and Rumpoey meet for the first time. The shot of her arrival by train has obvious echoes of both the Lumière brothers’ primordial Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, 1897) and Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which inaugurated, among other things, the use of the train as a generic trope symbolizing the intromission of civilization in the Wild West. It might be understood

160  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea as if Sasanatieng was recognizing such a primitive ancestry from the other side of the history of cinema, a far more advanced evolutionary stage in which generic conventions and self-references have completely replaced real-world referents as the objects of interest in cinematic representations. Such a posture would be coherent with Schatz’s linear vision of the development of genres, according to which they evolve towards greater embellishment and elaboration following “patterns of increasing self-consciousness” (Hollywood Genres, 36). But, then, there is another moment in the film that also bears great significance in regard to the Western genre and the theory of genres, and it should not be discarded as merely casual, given Sasanatieng’s evidently ample knowledge of film history. In the opening sequence, Dum realizes there is a gunman hidden on the floor above, thanks to a few sweat drops falling on his hat. It is interesting that in his denial of linearity in the evolution of the Western genre, Tad Gallagher chose the reiterated use of that conventional17 resource to exemplify his argument that the audience of the silent Western movies had a greater knowledge of the genre’s conventions than the relatively unsophisticated audiences of the following decades, leading him to the conclusion that “A superficial glance at film history suggests cyclicism rather than evolution” (268). For the time being, in the absence of an explicit statement by the director, Sasanatieng’s stance in the debate over the nature of the genre’s evolution – linearity vs. cyclicism – will remain unknown, in addition to whether he has a definite opinion in that regard. Till then, how he perceives the status of Tears of the Black Tiger within the context of the Western genre will also be a matter of speculation. Is it part of an evolution towards ever greater heights of self-consciousness or is it just part of a circular process in which generic patterns and viewers’ responses periodically repeat over time? What seems to be for sure is that this film’s release marked a point of no return in the history of Thai cinema. For example, best-selling novelist Eric Van Lustbader, of Jason Bourne fame, wrote the following lines in Beloved Enemy, the new installment of the Jack McClure series, published in 2013: Dandy, beside him on her black mare, laughed. “Did you ever see Tears of the Black Tiger?” Redbird remembered it: a crazy spaghetti Western that had achieved the highest cult status in Thailand. “Before Tears,” Dandy went on, “we had no idea what an American cowboy was. Now we can’t get enough of the experience” (2013, 111). Though terminologically and historically inaccurate, this allusion to the film by one of the most popular authors in the world only attests to the standing significance of Sasanatieng’s opera prima. In the wake of the enthusiastic critical appraisal of Tears of the Black Tiger at several international film festivals, its director had already declared to The Nation/AsiaNews Network: “We have gone international. We aren’t strangers any more” (Harrison, 196).

Tears of the Black Tiger  161 The fact that, in his endeavor to – paraphrasing critic Nigel Andrews – “put Thailand on the world movie map,” Sasanatieng chose the Western as the specifically non-Thai ingredient he needed to add to his blend of diverse native cultural influences may well be interpreted as an authentic salute to the perpetual and worldwide importance of this American cinematic genre par excellence. Notes 1. Bakhtin coined this term, which he defined as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84), and he considered this concept to have “an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time” (84–85). Robert Stam translated the notion of chronotope to the terrain of film studies, explaining “the cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across a screen with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time (usually 24 frames a second), quite apart from the fictive time/space specific films might construct” (11). 2. Some of the weapons displayed by bandits and policemen in the film, including modern rocket launchers and machine guns, contribute to the sense of an anachronic portrayal of the 1950s, especially when held by men dressed as cowboys riding their horses. 3. According to Rachel Harrison, who refers to a 1997 article by Manat Ophakun, the names of the main bandits were inspired by those of real-life Thai gangsters of the 1950s (203). 4. It eventually won The Dragons and Tigers Award at the 2000 Vancouver International Film Festival and the Award for the Best Art Direction at the 2001 Gijon (Spain) International Film Festival. 5. Reflecting the opinion of critical historians, Arnika Fuhrman has pointed out colonialist and post-colonial debates can be applied to Thailand because this country “only retained nominal independence and modernized under colonial-imperial pressure” so that, actually, it shows “semi- and/or autocolonial characteristics” (7). 6. On the other hand, May Adadol Ingawanij has pointed out a similar practice among the social realist Thai filmmakers of the 1970s “to cast as heroes and heroines little known actors and actresses (or occasionally nonprofessionals)” (85). Also, Glenn Lewis expands on this subject, tracing it back to traditional Thai theater: “… Thai actors are often chosen for their looks and not their acting ability. This is due to the Thai habit of equating an attractive appearance with a good character. There is also a tendency to film type-casting that has its antecedents in Thai likay (a popular masked light drama form …), which has a stock cast of characters” (147). 7. Like the above-mentioned Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters and Ghost Wife, his third film, Jan Dara (2001), was also a great commercial success. 8. “The costumes and other physical trappings seem to be drawn from B-movies of the 1940s, with Gene Autry-style hand-tooled boots and embroidered shirts in gaudy colours much in evidence” (Buscombe). 9. According to Harrison (207), this title, which is not a direct translation of the hardly translatable original one, was chosen because of the then recent success

162  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohucang long, 2000). Yet the Thai word seua may mean either “bandit” or “tiger” (Harrison 208). 10. In her doctoral thesis, Patsorn Sungsri adds interesting information about the way Sasanatieng uses the kind of music known as plaenglukkroung (“song for the urbanite”) “to help create the atmosphere of the post-war period” in some flashbacks in Tears of the Black Tiger (52). 11. Fredric Jameson associated postmodernism with pastiche when he stated: “One of the most significant features or practices in postmodernism today is ­pastiche. … Pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles” (4). 12. The background information in the press notes published by Magnolia Pictures, the American distributor of Tears of the Black Tiger, explains: “The sala is the quintessential Thai shelter. An elegant and simple concept, the sala can be a grand public assembly space or a bus stop, a beautiful pergola or a simple hut in the middle of a rice field, giving farmers respite from the midday sun. In bygone times, the town sala provided safe and free shelter for those passing through or stopping for a few days. It is an evocative, phenomenological space. It is shelter itself. The sala featured in Tears of the Black Tiger is a lovers’ space, imbued with myth. Set on the bank of a river, it is named the Sala raw nang: ‘Awaiting the maiden’” (Magnolia Pictures 3). 13. Given Sasanatieng’s interest in homaging the Thai action films of yesteryear, Dum’s superior fighting and shooting skills are clearly inspired by such heroes as the popular Red Eagle, which Mitr Chaibancha played in several productions. 14. The duality that separates the two lovers is firmly anchored in the tradition of Thai cinema. In her already classic study of popular Thai films, JureeVichitVadakan found several main topics that also appear in this film: the duel between good and evil; the conflict between people of different social and economical classes; destiny, misunderstandings, and human weaknesses; rivalry between brothers, which could be applied to blood brothers Dum and Mahesuan in this film (43–44). Namely, the impossible love between a humble man and a young woman whose father wants her to marry a rich man is the subject of the above mentioned Santi-Weena. 15. In this film, Harmonica (Charles Bronson) is a mysterious gunman whose nickname is due to the fact he is usually playing that instrument. Rachel Harrison describes some specific similarities between the two films: “Direct visual reference is made to Woody Strode’s cameo performance in the slow-paced and measured opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West in the water that drips onto seua Mahesuan’s (Supakorn Kitsuwan) hat” (201). Like Dum in Tears of the Black Tiger, in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West, Harmonica kills several men who are part of some scheme against Cheyenne (Jason Robards), the leader of a gang of bandits. Also, like Dum, Harmonica is an infallible marksman haunted by his past. 16. Definitely, nostalgia is a postmodern attribute, according to Jameson: “We seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach” (Jameson 10). 17. “No one complained in 1956 when a baddy’s presence in Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks) is revealed when his blood drips down from the floor above; but when the same gag was used back in 1918 in Ford’s The Scarlet Drop it was contemptuously dismissed as ‘old hat’ by Exhibitors’ Trade Review” (Gallagher 266).

Tears of the Black Tiger  163 References Andrews, Nigel. “Tiger Savages Monkey.” Financial Times, 16 Aug. 2001. Web. Bakhtin, Mijaíl Mijáilovich. 2004. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barmé, Scot. 2002. Woman, Man, Bangkok. Love, Sex & Popular Culture in T ­ hailand. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Bazin, André. 2005. What is cinema? Vol. 2. Hugh Gray, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buscombe, Edward. Sept. 2001. “Way Out East. Film of the Month: Tears of the Black Tiger.” Sight and Sound, Web. Chaiworaporn, Anchalee and Adam Knee. 2006. “Thailand: Revival in an Age of Globalization.” Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame. Anne Tereska Ciecko, ed. Oxford and New York: Berg. 58–70. Colman, Felicity. 2011. Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts. Oxford. New York: Berg. Fuhrman, Arnika. 2009. Ghostly Desires: Sexual Subjectivity in Thai Cinema and Politics after 1997. Chicago: University of Chicago. Gallagher, Tad. 2003. “Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western.” Film Genre Reader III. Barry Keith Grant, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. 262–276. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hamilton, Annette. 1994. “Cinema and Nation: Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand.” Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema. Wimal Dissanayake, ed. Bloomington: Indian University Press. 141–161. Harrison, Rachel. 2007. “Somewhere over the Rainbow: Global Projections/Local Allusions in Tears of the Black Tiger/Fathalaijone.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies8 (2). 194–210. Higgs, Robert J. and Ralph Lamar Turner. 1999. The Cowboy Way: The Western Leader in Film, 1945–1995. Westport: Greenwood Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2004. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Ingawanij, May Adadol. 2006. “Transistor and Temporality: The Rural as Modern Thai Cinema’s Pastoral.” Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield, eds. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 80–99. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso. Keough, Kyle. 2008. “Cowboys and Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese ­Jidaigeki, and Cross-Cultural Exchange.” Senior Honors Projects. Paper 106. Landon, Kenneth Perry. 1968. Siam in Transition. New York: Greenwood Press. (Original publication: University of Chicago Press, 1939.) Lewis, Glen. 2006. Virtual Thailand: The Media and Cultural Politics in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Lustbader, Eric Van. 2013. Beloved Enemy. New York: Forge. Tears of the Black Tiger. Wisit Sasanatieng, dir. 2001. Magnolia Pictures. Meiresonne, Bastian, ed. 2006. Thai Cinema. Le cinémathaïlandais. Lyon: Asiexpo Edition.

164  Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea Peleggi, Maurizio. 2002. Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rayns, Tony. 2001. “Dinosaur, Get Out! An Interview with Wisit Sasanatieng.” Tears of the Black Tiger. Press Notes. Duangkamol Limcharoen, trans. New York. Web. Accessed Oct. 13, 2010. http://www.magpictures.com/films/blacktiger/blacktiger. doc. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis and André Bazin. 1953. Le Western: Ou le cinémaaméricain par excellence. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Schatz, Thomas. 1981. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House. Schatz, Thomas. 1988. “The Western.” Handbook of American Film Genres. Wes D. Gehring, ed. Westport: Greenwood Press. 29–50. Stam, Robert. 1989. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film. ­Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sukwong, Dome and Sawasdi Suwannapak. 2001. A Century of Thai Cinema. ­London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Sungsri, Patsorn. 2008. Thai Cinema as National Cinema. Saarbrüchen: VDM ­Verlag Dr. Müller. Sutton, Damian. 2012. “Philosophy, Politics and Homage in Tears of the Black Tiger.” Deleuze and Film. David Martin-Jones and William Brown, eds. ­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 37–53. Teo, Stephen. 2010. “Film and Globalization: From Hollywood to Bollywood.” The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies. Bryan S. Turner, ed. Oxford and New York: Routledge. 412–428. Tuska, Jon. 1985. The American West in Film. Westport: Greenwood Press. Varner, Paul. 2008. Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Vichit-Vadakan, Juree. 1977. “Thai Movies as Symbolic Representation of Thai Life.” Journal of Social Sciences/WarasanSangkhomsatk 14 (1). 42–68.

10 Tamil B Movie Westerns The Global South and Genre Subversion Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai

In this essay I engage with the Westerns of the Tamil film director M. K ­ arnan to argue for their unique contributions to B movie aesthetics and our understanding of filmmaking in the Global South. Karnan was a well-known technician with one hundred and fifty South Indian films to his credit as the cinematographer (one hundred and forty-one in Tamil, four in Telugu, four in Kannada, and one in Malayalam), twenty-two films as the director, and fifteen as the producer (Karnan 2006). He began his career in 1957 as an apprentice at Revathi Studio in Madras and quickly honed his skills to become the director of photography within two years in President ­Panchatcharam (dir. A. Bhimsingh, 1959) (Karnan 1963, 73–76). After a decade as Tamil ­cinema’s illustrious cinematographer for films like Saradha (1962), K ­ arpagam (1963), and Kai Koduththa Deivam / The [Godly] Benevolent Friend (1964) with director K. S. Gopalakrishnan, and Veerapandiya Kattabomman / The Valiant Chieftain Kattabomman (1959) with the iconic B. R. Panthulu, Karnan turned producer, in addition to being the cinematographer, with the film Pennai Vazha Vidungal / Let the Woman Live (1969). R. Devarajan, the editor of the film, was also the director. The very next year saw ­Karnan debuting as a director with the Western Kaalam Vellum / Time Will Prevail (1970), which he also produced and served as cinematographer. Thereafter in five years, K ­ arnan directed three more Westerns: Ganga (1972), Jakkamma (1972), and Enga Pattan Sotthu / My Inheritance (1975). Today, Karnan is remembered for these significant Westerns as much as for his long career as a cinematographer from 1959 to his final film Irattai Kuzhal Thuppakki / The Double-barreled Gun in 1989, which, as the title suggests, had the traces of his own earlier ­Westerns, as it was also directed and produced by him. In this paper, however, I engage with the significant Westerns of ­Karnan, made between 1970 and 1975, mainly through a detailed reading of Kaalam Vellum, Karnan’s inaugural and seminal Western, to argue for the dominant reason for its unparalleled and continuing popularity as the skillful appropriation of the generic elements of the Western to make a local Tamil film and in its privileging of cultural specificity and the centrality of women through the prioritizing of their love and desire in the narrative. Such subversion of the genre, mainly achieved through women who propel the narrative, makes these B movies in Tamil unique as they deconstruct the dominant binary oppositions of American and European Westerns even as they pose

166  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai a challenge to their southern counterpart, the popular Spaghetti Westerns, by pulling the rug from under the feet of its macho world by making the vow of hurt and aggrieved/murdered woman, and not money, as the specter that haunts the men’s world. Such an undermining of a commonly assumed binary between the West and the rest, and the decentering of the masculine through its containment and replacement by the feminine, make these films unique as they relocate women to the center of the narratives by blurring the boundaries between the private and the public. Karnan and the Western Karnan’s first film as a director informs us of his investment in a genre that had fascinated him throughout his career as a cameraman. Karnan was in awe of cinematographers Bert Glennon (Stagecoach, 1939) and Winton C. Hoch (The Searchers, 1959) and their framing of Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border in the Southwest U.S., which inspired him to travel two hundred and eleven miles southwest of Chennai to Salem, and to locate his own Magnesite Valley, a range of the Chalk Hills with its magnesite deposits, the Shevaroy Hills with its bauxite deposits, and the ­Kanjamalai and Goodamalai areas with their iron ore deposits (Karnan 1999). These three neighboring locales, often referred to together as the Salem Mines, figure prominently in Karnan’s Westerns as sites of significant chase and fight sequences. Nonetheless, in Kalam Vellum, the closest visually to the Monument Valley rock formations and its totem pole were the sequences shot in an area near the Chennai airport, the quarry at Tirusulam. One of the legacies of Karnan is the ubiquity of these locations in Tamil and Telugu films, particularly the Westerns. Karnan was inspired by Sergio Leone’s trilogy A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). He had also seen Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) after his first film as a producer, Pennai Vazha Vidungal, was released on 1 August 1969. Karnan started the pre-production work for his first directorial venture, Kaalam Vellum, in January 1970 (Babu 2014), eight months prior to its release on 11 September 1970 (Anandan 2004, 28 [145]). If his reverence for Ford is expressed visually through the locales, his fondness for Leone is conveyed aurally through the music of his Westerns, which has passages appropriated from Ennio Morricone’s canonical music for their themes. According to Karnan, the easy availability of Morricone’s music made his job easier as he could buy the vinyl records in Chennai, play them for his music directors (Shankar and Ganesh), and leave a couple of vinyl records with them for reference (Karnan 2007). Additionally, the loose copyright laws in India made his task unobtrusive as the popular tunes of Morricone could be recorded with musicians in Chennai and posted onto the soundtrack and later mixed with dialogues, which were recorded on

Tamil B Movie Westerns  167 location, and the sound effects, particularly of the galloping and ­whinnying horses. Karnan’s sound tracks were meticulously designed, as Revathi ­Studios, where he had his training, was founded by the iconic audiographer V. S. Raghavan (Arurdass 2007, 190–91). Karnan’s investment in Westerns, particularly in his predilection for the genre in debuting as a director after having photographed forty-nine films, including the ones as an operative cameraman, is best exemplified by his frequent use of the wide-angle 9.8 mm lens, a trait associated with his name by technicians – “Fish-eyed (lens) Karnan” – and the handheld shots on rugged locales where he chose to chase the cowboys on the galloping horses from a speeding jeep sideways or from the front or behind (Babu 2014).1 The use of the wide-angle lens in framing a team of horses on the run on the one hand helped with overcoming the difficulty of steadily focusing on a rapidly moving object, as its innate quality of deep focus kept everything inside the frame in focus, while on the other posed the challenge of synchronizing the speed of the jeep to the pace of the horses on uneven terrains, since “two steps away from the optimum distance meant the horses will be too small in the frame due to the extreme wide angle lens.” Nevertheless, he “always preferred the wide angle lens as it made the rugged backdrop of the mine or the hills look more magnificent and fabulous” (Karnan 2007). A film like Kaalam Vellum, as envisaged by Karnan, recycles the basic iconography of a Western, like horses, guns, hats, and cowboy costumes like the poncho and the leather jacket, and retools the binary-driven narrative of the good, lonely hero versus a bunch of evil villains in its attempt to celebrate the adaptability of the genre to highly different South Indian conditions. Similarly, Leone’s style is transposed through the wide-angle-inflected, long-take aesthetics (Kaalam Vellum, Ganga, and Jakkamma), the montage during the high-voltage shootouts (Ganga), and the framing of the landscape during the climax (Kaalam Vellum, Ganga). Nevertheless, ­Karnan’s films stand distinctly apart from a Ford or a Leone Western. A careful analysis of the narrative of Kaalam Vellum is in order here. Kaalam Vellum: Melodrama/Western Karnan’s inaugural/preceding film as a producer, Pennai Vazha Vidungal (Let the Woman Live), is a melodrama revolving around the change of heart of a wayward husband due to his submissive but just wife who, as a lawyer, fights for the rights of her own bigamous husband’s other wife who has been deceived and maligned due to his promiscuity. The film, in keeping with the melodramatic trope of reaffirming the family, has the other woman dying during the film’s climax, thereby allowing the family to remain intact at the end. The verbose nature of the dialogue-oriented film, however, left little room for Karnan’s play with camera movements except during the song sequences (Karnan 2006). The relatively long car chase, lasting for about

168  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai four minutes and fifteen seconds, is well crafted as it is punctuated with hand-held shots from a constantly mobile camera from the interior/trunk of another car. The skillfully structured chase sequence gives us a glimpse of Karnan’s expertise in the use of the fish-eyed lens, particularly when the camera pans with the moving cars and adjusts to reframe as it plays with the perspective by initially distorting the automobiles at the edges and then restoring normalcy by framing them at the center when the shots come to rest. Such a move reflexively draws attention to the camerawork and, in this case, the cameraman/producer behind the camera, and raises our expectations for more such visually charged sequences that, nonetheless, only ­Karnan’s subsequent film, Kaalam Vellum, would fulfill. After the huge box-office success of Pennai Vazha Vidungal, melodrama seems to subsume Karnan’s promise of a Western as expressed through the posters and production stills of Kaalam Vellum that adorned his office (Karnan 1999). Indeed, the first twenty-five minutes of the one hundred and twenty-eight-minute film, as available on DVD today, is intensely melodramatic. The beginning of Kaalam Vellum establishes the tight-knit bond among Velu’s (Jaishankar) family members, particularly his closeness to his about-to-be-married younger sister, Dhanam (Usha), and his profound affection for his mother (Kanthimathi) and wife Kannamma (Vijayakumari). Simultaneously, we are introduced to the oppressive ­landlord, Periyaraja (O. A. K. Thevar), and his repulsive youngest brother, Chinnaraja (M. R. R. Vaasu). Having set up the binary, the narrative weaves the conflict through the urgent requirements for Dhanam’s marriage by focusing on the money needed for both the culturally specific dowry or the jewels to be given and the expenses for the marriage, thereby leading the naive Velu to plead with the landlord to forego his interest for a year on the loans owed by his family in terms of the harvested grains in his paddy/ rice field. The reluctant landlord half-heartedly agrees by asking Velu to start the work on his farm, to the disapproval of the uncouth Chinnaraja. Having received the reprieve from Periyaraja’s exploitative hands for a year, Velu, in a brief, documentary-like montage sequence, is seen plowing the land against the backdrop of fields ripe for harvest when a panicky farmer comes running and informs Velu of Chinnaraja’s men already harvesting his field. Thereafter, as a furious Velu questions the injustice, an arrogant Chinnaraja asks him to wait until the next harvest for his sister’s marriage, which leads initially to an altercation and then a fight between Velu and his friends on one side and Chinnaraja and his henchmen on the other. As Velu is targeted by Chinnaraja’s men, he tackles them in a stickfight, which is choreographed with Karnan’s swiftly mobile camera. During the intense fight, we see Chinnaraja on his galloping horse, after leaving his men with the task of attacking Velu, catching hold of a screaming and pleading Dhanam by her hair, pulling her away a long distance, and finally throwing her on the ground, where she lands up dead. In the meanwhile, Velu keeps defending himself by beating up the goons until Chinnaraja returns

Tamil B Movie Westerns  169 to fight with him. Subsequently, Velu severely attacks and sends a defeated ­Chinnaraja back on his horse, and breathes a sigh of relief, but soon after is shocked to find his dead sister. His sister’s untimely and violent death leads to Velu’s walking with her corpse, along with few of his friends, to the landlord’s mansion, where he asks for justice. When he is vigorously attacked by the stem of a gun and felled to the ground, Velu retaliates by snatching a stick nearby and hitting Naduraja, the in-between younger brother, who bleeds to death. Thereafter Velu vows revenge against the landlord ­Periyaraja and his family at his sister’s grave, and takes the symbolic bath that signifies the end of the rituals associated with her death. But after the bath, when he is about to get out of the lake, he notices he is surrounded on the shores by Chinnaraja and his goons. He ducks under water to escape and swims a great distance before reaching shore and fainting. At this point, we see a team of horses entering the frame from the other side of the shore and the leader of the cowboys, Narasingham (Shanmugasundaram), rescues Velu. The iconography of the horses and the costumes of the cowboys here mark them as harbingers of freedom in contrast to the oppressive whipcracking Chinnaraja on his horse, surrounded by his thugs earlier during the fight sequence. This sequence is punctuated by Velu’s cremation of Dhanam in the graveyard and, while lighting up the pyre, his vow to avenge her death. As the dung cakes above and the corpse underneath are aflame, Velu’s promise seems to be addressed to Dhanam’s specter, which will act as the witness to the fulfillment of his vow. More importantly, her grave signifies the burial of his sentimental past and his entry into a space away from that of the domestic sphere of the family, where he will be arrested if he returns. This is contained by melodrama and its tropes of serendipity and coincidences, rather than the adventure based on volition and desire in a Western in its expansive landscape marked by violence and uncertainty. Besides, love between siblings, particularly between the elder brother and the younger sister, has become a specific marker of Tamil culture, mainly due to the impact of canonical Tamil films like En Thangai (My sister, dir. M. K. R. Nambiar and Ch. Narayanamurthy, 1952) and Paasamalar (The Flower of Love, dir. A. Bhimsingh, 1961). The persona of the stars who acted as the brother and the sister were at times affected by the huge success of such films. An oft-quoted instance is the Tamil audience’s rejection of the film Ellam ­Unakkaga (released on 1 July 1961), in which the legendary Sivaji Ganesan and Savithri played the couple after their having played the iconic brother and sister in the highly popular Paasamalar, released thirty-five days before (Karnan 2007). More importantly, Karnan references the siblings in ­Paasamalar by having a sequence in which Dhanam brings a special sweet, athirasam, for Velu, and he admires her by acknowledging that even his wife does not know as much about his taste. Furthermore, the burying of the sister also marks Karnan’s dominant appropriation of the tropes of the Western for his storytelling, at least for the next five years until 1975,

170  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai although from the crypt of the buried sister, the spirit of melodrama keeps haunting his desire to break free from the centrality of the family to his narrative. Nonetheless, by rearticulating the classic binary of the Western as one between the honor of the sister/mother/family and the agents of feudal decadence, and by positing the avenging brother/son as mirroring the lonely Western hero but by subordinating his desires to the objective of his family members, Karnan’s films redraw the map of the Western. The loss of a family member – the younger sister in Kaalam Vellum, the father in Ganga and Jakkamma, the elder brother in Enga Pattan Sothu – and the consequent trauma of the protagonist become the crux of these narratives, which address the philosophical problems of murder, justice, and the isolation from family/community. Karnan’s appropriation of the genre, therefore, begs a detailed analysis here. In the first thirty minutes of its transition into a Western, Kaalam Vellum gives us an idea of the aesthetics of Karnan’s B movie Westerns. The Tropes of Karnan’s Westerns After Velu has taken refuge, the leader of the cowboys, Narasingham, sets up the initial trial by ordeal by having his henchmen, under the leadership of his lieutenant, Vairam, attack Velu in his palatial mansion. As Karnan busily engages with the well-choreographed fight sequence with his wideangle-driven mise-en-scène, briskly panning in rhythm with the action and showcasing it with relatively long takes (lasting fifteen seconds or more) of attacks and defence at regular intervals, the staged fight sequence by ­Narasingham reflexively draws attention to Karnan’s designing of the fight for his preferred camera angles with his favorite fight master/action director, Madhavan, who also plays the role of one of the fighters in the film. While Velu fights the several cowboys in the den of Narasingham bravely, we are introduced to the climactic special fighter: muscularly spectacular-looking Ramakrishnan, who had won the body-building title Mr. Madras for the year 1969 (Karnan 2007). The duel between Velu and Ramakrishnan is choreographed for long durations of close-range action in proximity to the camera, as opposed to the generally long-range action, which is bookended by close-ups akin to such sequences in Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Additionally, Karnan punctuates his Westerns as different by marking such attractions – for instance, Ramkrishnan’s display of his sculpted body in films like Kaalam Vellum, Ganga, and Jakkamma, where he is dressed as an American Indian with a bare chest and headgear with a feather, or the showcasing of the tall and muscular fighter from Egypt, Yusuf, in Kaalm Vellum, as taking place inside the studio floors, thereby utilizing the possibilities offered by its interior space to light up the physique of the men in detail even as they display them for both the audience inside the frame as well as outside, especially for the woman among them. The lone woman onlooker,

Tamil B Movie Westerns  171 during the above duel between Velu and Ramakrishnan, is the molested woman for whose honor Velu engaged in the fight with ­Narasigham’s men in the first place, but after the fight she is dramatically revealed to be the sister of the landlord from Veeranoor, Periyaraja, who is the root cause of Velu’s misery, but Velu absolves the distraught woman from her brother’s evil deeds. In the meanwhile, cross-dressing like an old woman, Paavaadai/Full Skirt (Nagesh) goes in search of his missing friend Velu and encounters ­Chinnaraja and two of his assistants who are also on a similar mission. When they try to extract information from Paavaadai, he breaks into a folk song and is unexpectedly accompanied by one of Chinnaraja’s assistants, who joins him with the line “Chithirai Thiruvizha … (the Chithirai Festival). …” This segment, which acts as the mise-en-abyme, sheds light on Karnan’s recycling of genres, melodrama as well as Western, in his films. The reference to the folkloric performance of song and dance during the pre-eminent Chithirai Festival in Madurai (Madurai Chithiraith 2014) foregrounds the playfulness of the performers and the undermining of the ­linearity/monotony of the narrative in the name of logic. Under the antagonist Cinnaraja’s watch, Paavaadai, who is Velu’s confidante apart from being a clerk/helper in the landlord’s household, is not only able to get away with his flimsy disguise but also encourages the landlord’s henchman to join him in his dance during a tense situation when Chinnaraja is on the lookout for the enemy who has killed his brother. This anomaly underscores Kaalam Vellum as dissimilar to the Western, which progressively gravitates towards a duel or a climactic shootout in the scorching heat of the American Southwest or the Italian South. Here, the performers take on many garbs as the narrative/genre itself is interpolated/contaminated with episodic sequences that do not escalate the tension as much as entertain and underscore a philosophical point. For instance, Chinnaraja, despite being an incarnation of evil, is a ludicrous clown (epitomized by the peculiar cap on his head) who cannot read, as with Paavadai’s disguise, the miraculous transformation of Velu from a humble farmer to an avenging cowboy. He is oblivious of the decadence and the decline of feudalism. Such reflexive myopia, which privileges audience’s understanding of and making sense out of a highly reflexive/­incoherent narrative rather than the realism of the backdrop or the authenticity of the make-up/costume, is also central to B movie aesthetics – for instance, many of Roger Corman’s films (Nashawaty 2013). The Aesthetics of Karnan’s B Movie Westerns Once Karnan steps outside the family, along with his protagonist, Velu, it is as if the gravity of moral values surrounding Tamil society loosens its grip on him. After Velu proves his abilities to be a part of the gang of cowboys, the curvaceous Rani (Vijayalalitha), who is the daughter of the leader

172  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai Narasingham, tries to entice him by entering his bedroom uninvited and announcing her presence by shooting at the jug of water. Rani, explicitly wearing her passions on her sleeve, like the B movie/overt metaphor of the splashing water from the jug, walks towards the bed, gazes at the shy and uncomfortable Velu’s body at close quarters, makes the bed for him, and inverts the pillow to reveal its cover with ornately embroidered semi-nude woman. She smiles invitingly, openly revealing her unconditional desire for him on their first exclusive meeting, which embarrasses Velu, who feels relieved when she leaves and immediately pulls the bed sheet away to sleep on the floor. Rani’s blatant expression of her sexual desire prefigures that of many of Karnan’s uninhibited women in his Westerns. He imbricates his action sequences with a series of provocatively dressed maidens like Rani, or skimpily clad women like Gauri (Raj Kokila in Ganga), a common feature of his Westerns, like the use of his wide-angle lens. He showcases their gyrating hips during the song sequences through close shots, or depicts them in semi-nude attire in the sensuous water stream at Tada, one of his regular shooting spots, about forty miles from Chennai on the border of the adjacent Andhra Pradesh state in Nellore district. The buxom women who populate Karnan’s films, like Vijayalalitha (Kaalam Vellum), Raj Kokila (Ganga, Enga ­Pattan Sothu, Ore Thanthai [Same Father, 1976]), and Raj Mallika (Enga Pattan Sothu and Jambu [1980]), are irreplaceable in the Tamil imaginary as far as their sensual portrayal in colorful and watery locales is concerned, as such a display of softcore sexuality vanished in the 1980s with the advent of VHS and the ubiquity of hardcore pornography. Even the practice of interspersing regular B movies, particularly from Kerala, with what is labelled as “bits/bit films” of hardcore sex would begin only after the mid-1970s (Palaniappa 2013). Karnan’s Westerns exemplify the true spirit of B movies, which generally rely on a lucid narrative of attractions and sensations affordable within their low-budget, unlike the highly reflexive art films that experiment with ambiguous endings and engage with the materiality of the medium. The films retool sex and violence but, more importantly, experiment with form and content, which is the reason why a classically groomed cinematographer, trained in some of the famous studios of Madras, would courageously opt for a B movie when it came to his debut as a director. Jaishankar, who acted in more than two hundred films in Tamil, with more than two-thirds of them as the hero of A movies, was already a very popular star when Karnan cast him as the lead actor in all of his Westerns in the 1970s (Karnan 2007).2 Moreover, because of his reputation/goodwill as a cinematographer, he could get legendary Tamil actors of the 1960s like Savithri (Jakkamma), Vijayakumari (Kaalam Vellum), and V. Nagaiah (Kaalam Vellum and Ganga) to act as his character artists. Thus the reputation of famous A movie stars were also at stake in Karnan’s decision to transport them to his B movie universe, but as Kaalam Vellum and his subsequent Westerns prove, his skill as a cinematographer stood him and his stars in good stead since

Tamil B Movie Westerns  173 almost all his Westerns made during the 1970s were highly popular, did well at the box office, and have attained a cult status since then. However, the scenes of women explicitly displaying their bodies and openly inviting the men they desired led to silence in the critical evaluation of Karnan’s films, despite their acceptance as original but vulgar action films (Manian 2007, 142–43), particularly because they were perceived as posing a threat to the conservative Tamil culture and its expectations of the ideal/chaste woman as someone who would not openly express her desires or, at most, would do so only indirectly, through letters or poems of her friends (Karnan 1999). More importantly, by deconstructing the classical binary of the angel and the spider woman (Kaplan 2008) and positing his heroine in the blurred terrain in between, Karnan further complicated any easy appraisal of the representation of gender or sexuality in his Westerns. As the narrative progresses, Rani is indiscreetly taking a bath in a lake, enjoying the sensuous feel of the water on her body, while the lecherous ­Chinnaraja smells her clothes on the shore and along with his assistants, eyes her and gestures them to pull her ashore. Taking advantage of her helplessness in getting out, they rush through the water and approach her as she is trying to duck her body under the water. When they are about to pull her out, there is an unexpected gunshot that jolts them and their Chinnaraja. As they look for its source, they discover Velu on a boss, ­ horse between two cliffs, which recalls the classical composition of many a ­Western, particularly that of Ford and his iconic framing of Monument Valley. As Velu rides down the hill on his horse, the canted angle draws attention to the slippery downhill slope through its diagonal composition. As Velu comes down to ground level, we see him riding through a puddle of water and the camera tilts up to frame Velu on the horse as he stops in front of Chinnaraja. Before the shocked Chinnaraja can respond, Velu cracks his whip and throws him on the ground. The next cut, as Velu pounces on him, transports us to the Salem Mines. This sequence exemplifies what Karnan has labelled “the continuity of convenience” (Karnan 1999). Rani is taking a bath amidst the greenery in a lake near the quarry at Tirusulam. To rescue her Velu comes down from the cliffs in the stone quarry, which is much farther away, and the fight sequence takes place in the Salem Mines. The sequence thus binds three diverse locales in three different light conditions: the first segment is overcast; the second one of Velu’s arrival is backlit and silhouetted; and the third at the Salem Mines has the sun at the top and announces its intention of being primarily a spectacle when the undressed sister of a powerful leader is bathing alone to invite trouble from the lustful Chinnaraja and the subsequent intervention of Velu in his new incarnation as a cowboy, setting up the space to conspicuously juxtapose sex with violence. The sensuous Rani remains in the water and enjoys watching the entire fight, and her reaction shots are intercut with occurrences in two vastly different locales. While such an editing technique is not uncommon in cinema, what makes this

174  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai montage in Kaalam Vellum unique is the ending of the sequence, which is punctuated by two diverse shots: Chinnaraja’s two lecherous assistants run for their lives from Velu, who has stripped them of their pants, in a greeneryfilled locale on the shore adjacent to the lake where Rani is taking a bath, while subsequently, Chinnaraja, in his underwear, runs away from Velu in the other direction towards the dry and rocky interiors of the Salem Mines. The above sequence became popular not only because of the voluptuous Vijayalalitha but also because of the evocative stone quarry in Tirusulam, about fourteen miles from Karnan’s production house in the city. Its proximity enabled Karnan to pay homage to the Westerns he saw with his cinematographer friends like P. N. Sundaram in theaters like the New Elphinstone, as its rock formations and cliffs recalled the ones in Monument Valley and Sicily (Karnan 1999). These stone quarries, however, once the black stones have been extracted and their resources exhausted, turn into pits and the surrounding area looks like quaint hills with picturesque cliffs, though topographically they were earlier all at the same ground level. Once the quarrying is abandoned, these huge pits transform into lakes when inundated with rainwater, like the one in which Rani bathes in the above sequence. Since the quarrying of natural resources like black stone, which is in great demand among builders, takes place at a frenetic pace, these rock formations are ephemeral, and it is Karnan’s ingenuity that could convert a transient locale into a landscape etched in the Tamil imagination forever. Such possibilities of harnessing and making the optimum use of the easily available resources, readjusting to the reality of cinema as an industrial art driven by contingencies, are facilitated in the first place by the B movie aesthetic of disavowing perfection with regard to continuity and seamless editing and accepting the feasible and the reflexively practical. Accordingly, instead of using editing to smoothen and hide the problems in continuity, the B movie montage in the above sequence highlights the disjunctions in continuity to underscore the organizing of shots according to the convenience/constraints of budget, schedules, and the relative maximizing of spectacle in terms of action and locales. Kaalam Vellum, as an exemplar of the popular aesthetics of the Global South, reinvents the folkloric tradition of using painted screens for backdrops on a larger scale for cinema, rather than creating a seemingly real universe through the aesthetic of seamless editing for its informed audiences. The filmmaker/audience hierarchy is undermined as the audience is invited to laugh at the artifice, in the traditions of Tamil folklore, and reflexively be aware of the process even as viewers focus on the narrative. Moreover, Rani and water that frame the above sequence, even as they symbolize the transience of beauty and desire, also blur the binaries of the private and the public. Her brother’s den surrounded by unkempt cowboys seems less private to Rani than the public lake where she seems to be at home. Nitya Vasudevan compellingly argues for the “mobility” of the dancers in the bars in India as complicating the “divisions of commerce from pleasure, performance from sexuality, and

Tamil B Movie Westerns  175 politics from the private-intimate” (2013, 184). Similarly Vijayalalitha, a very popular dancer known for her cabarets prior to Kaalam Vellum, plays the female lead through the second half as Rani and complicates the divide between the vamp and the heroine by dismantling the rigid borders between the private and the public. Her intimate but explicit behavior enables her politics against men, as Velu cannot find a home away from home because her desire for sex, like that of his sister’s longing for marriage, disquiets and propels him to seek and clash with the villains. Rani, therefore, is a selfindulgent but transgressive agent. Karnan’s penchant for the “continuity of convenience” is evident in Enga Pattan Sothu, too: a remarkable fight sequence between a cop and the cowboy outlaw that begins against the backdrop of the picturesque Narmada River, which runs through a gorge surrounding the Marble Rocks in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), continues through the exquisite locales of the Old Palace in Mehrangarh Fort and Mandore Gardens in Jodhpur (Rajashthan), and culminates at the fabulous Hogenakkal Waterfalls in Dharmapuri District (Tamilnadu). The cowboy hero fights across a vast and rugged but beautiful terrain, spread across three different states, as his action is framed by the blue waters of the Narmada and the very pristine Hogenakkal Waterfalls. The element of the water thus marks these Westerns as different from their American and European counterparts as streams, ponds, lakes, waterfalls, and backwaters frequently intrude into the exterior space occupied by the cowboy and complicate his civilizing mission, as there are no exterior deserts to be transformed into gardens. The uncivilized is pervasive, both in the village and elsewhere in the hilly exteriors, as epitomized by Chinnaraja’s ubiquitous presence, just as the omniscience of the civilized is emblematized by Velu. Such blurring of distinct and insulated boundaries between good and evil, earth and the water, mainly with women as the root cause, point to Karnan’s investment in deconstructing the male-centric, barren universe of the Western. Kaalam Vellum’s narrative is thus structured by juxtaposing a series of splendid spectacles – the horse chase in the labyrinthine locale of the Salem Mines, the jeep chase in the rocky terrain of Bommayapalayam in Pondicherry that segues to the Sholavaram race tracks where the jeeps jump across, to its climactic moment in the craggy landscape of the Pallavaram Hill in Tirusulam, and the motorboat chase in the backwaters of Kerala besides the seductive dances of Rani and Vijayashri – with the main plot of Velu’s pursuit of the villains Periyaraja and Chinnaraja. True to its folkloristic spirit, the cowboy Velu turns into a Robin Hood by distributing the landlord’s looted wealth and hoarded grains to the farmers, and even performs an Errol Flynn-like sword fight in his cowboy costumes during the climax, when he fulfills the vow of killing Periyaraja and Chinnaraja by dramatically targeting them with his trademark Vel/spear, but not before losing his wife to Chinnaraja’s gunshot and thwarting the advances of Rani. More importantly, the sequence where Velu and Chinnaraja’s men fight on top of

176  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai and swinging from the areca/betel nut trees near Alwaye in Kerala punctuates Karnan’s homage to the martial-art film specialists the Shaw Brothers, in particular their film Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969), thus undermining the centrism of Hollywood (Ford/Flynn) through the icons of the South (Leone/Morricone, Southern Italy) and the B movie aesthetics of the South (Shaw Bros., Hong Kong), heralding Kaalam Vellum as the harbinger of the aesthetics of a Global South B movie. Christopher Frayling, in his insightful analysis, points to the wealth of historical details in Leone’s films when compared to ahistorical Hollywood, which instead focuses on meticulous production design (139–216). Karnan’s Westerns reject both, as they are preoccupied with the interrogation of values like justice and equality, which are contained and erased by history and the allure of beauty in a mythical space. For instance, Karnan uses the scenic Nagari Hills in the adjacent Andhra Pradesh to showcase Velu’s target practice as his initiation as a cowboy and his prowess as a gunslinger later, when he escapes from a cop. The picturesque hills and the rocky terrain surrounding Nagari, which recall many of the canonical Westerns, are repurposed as picture postcards to juxtapose Velu’s magical transformation in a mythic space. Eventually, after fulfilling the culturally specific ritual of pouring milk over the seedling at his sister’s grave, signifying the successful fulfillment of his vow, Velu surrenders in a grand finale. Shot on the outskirts of ­Chennai in the quarry at Tirusulam, which recalls the typical Western landscape of a road surrounded by a hilly terrain, Velu appears in his poncho and cowboy hat and rides down on his horse to surrender to the police officer (V. Nagaiah) who is waiting with his jeep. The backdrop of the hill is populated by the villagers and farmers who raise their voice in support of Velu when he is about to be arrested/cuffed. Velu turns around and asks them to be quiet since he is a criminal in the eyes of the law, comforts his distraught mother, and leaves with the officer who, though acknowledging Velu’s crime, promises the people around he will arrange for his early release by mentioning his benevolent activities to the higher authorities. Velu’s surrender and his leaving in the police jeep as the multitude of people keep watching him also point to Kaalam Vellum’s conscious recycling of the elements of the Western only to subvert them. Velu is not an eternal loner who is seeking the answer for the question, like Ethan Edwards in Ford’s The Searchers (1956): “What makes a man to wander?/What makes a man to roam?/What makes a man leave bed and board/And turn his back on home?/Ride away, ride away, ride away” (lyrics: Stan Jones; music: Max Steiner). Edwards also had a family but it was secondary to his egocentric being as a cowboy, whereas for Velu, the cowboy was one of the roles he donned to take revenge and get justice in a feudal society where it was not otherwise possible to be a normal householder and impinge on and overturn such hierarchical structures based on class/caste. He wandered consciously on a mission, seeking and rendering justice in a society where landlords remain above law and feudalism and law connive to annihilate the less-privileged and people on the fringes, particularly women.

Tamil B Movie Westerns  177 Once his task was over, he surrendered himself to the law, which he hoped would render justice to him and his family, as indicated by the final credit, “Poi Varugiraen (So Long),” which fades in as Velu leaves, surrounded by his friends, family, and community on both sides of the frame. Karnan’s investment in genre thus is not driven by its purity but by the possibilities it offers to tell a story. His initial displacement of the melodrama by the Western, and then its subversion through a series of spectacles and the final containment of the willing hero, literally cuffed inside a jeep, underscores the aesthetics of his B movie Westerns as endorsing/legitimizing the defilement of a male-centric genre and profaning its aspirations for generic, national, or regional purity. Such an astute intervention of a highly successful Tamil B movie Western was bound to have its effect.

Figure 10.1  Cowboy Velu arrives at the stone quarry to surrender during the climax.

Kaalam Vellum’s Legacy Karnan’s subsequent film, Ganga, was also a Western like Kaalam Vellum, combining elements of melodrama. However, in Ganga the plot revolved around the death of the father, and consequently, on his widowed mother’s command, the protagonist Ganga takes revenge against the four villains, the erstwhile friends of his father who had killed him. Ganga digs four holes and fulfills his vow through the second half of the film, and after completing his mission meets his mother at his father’s grave. She embraces him and his girlfriend, Gowri, in the final shot of the film, thus affirming the family

178  Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai and signifying the containment of the wandering that marked his persona throughout the film. Visually, Ganga is framed by two significant chase sequences, one in the early part of the film, which recalls Ford’s The Stagecoach (1939), when Gauri is abducted by the local goons and the cowboy Ganga, riding on his horse, retrieves her by bravely chasing away the villains in a bizarre stagecoach drawn by four horses. The other, more spectacular climactic chase sequence, between Ganga and the chief villain (S. A. Ashokan) on chariots, recalls Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) as well as the jeep chase in Kaalam Vellum, as it is staged on the Sholavaram race track with the lake behind it. The minimal design of the stagecoach as well as the chariots, and Karnan’s incomparable energy and skill in chasing the speeding horses on his car with a camera in his hand, are reflexive of B movie aesthetics. Karnan’s next film, Jakkamma, reworks Ganga’s theme of avenging the father’s death, but this time the avenging cowboy comes from outside and in the end, after the mission is achieved, leaves with his sweetheart from the village, signifying his domestication. However, Jakkamma’s uniqueness lies in making the protagonist, Jakkamma (Savithri), who bravely takes on the cowboy villains, an epic mother who recalls not only Sita of the R ­ amayana in suffering alone with her two kids but also the Draupadi of the ­Mahabharatha, vowing not to tie her hair till her husband’s death is avenged. Juxtaposing such a mythical character with a gun in her hand to ward off the villains marks Jakkamma as a truly subversive film that challenges the edifice of patriarchy. Enga Pattan Sothu, made three years after Jakkamma, marks the end of Karnan’s productive engagement with B movie Westerns, as melodrama becomes dominant in this cop-and-avenger narrative where the hero wants to settle scores with the killers of his elder brother. Enga P ­ attan Sothu, the only film shot by Karnan on Eastman negative, was expensive when compared to his earlier three black and white Westerns. It is punctuated by its aesthetic and the shorter length of within thirteen thousand seven hundred feet to avoid additional duty because of its length as a B movie (Karnan 1999).3 ­Nonetheless, it marks the end of an eventful phase of the iconic Tamil ­Westerns cinematographed, directed, and produced by “Camera Karnan.” Notes 1. See Karnan (1963; 78–80), an adventurous cameraman who always wanted to push the limits. He recounts the several accidents he had as a cameraman just three years into his career, including being thrown out of a car, along with the camera. 2. For details on Jaishankar’s generous collaboration with technicians who turned producers, see Sivakumar (2006; 343). Because of the frequent release of his films on Fridays, Jaishankar was called the “Friday Hero.” 3. Before the onset of the digital era, since the raw stock (mostly Kodak, Agfa (Geva), Orwo, and Fuji film) had to be imported, the Indian government tried to control its use by rationing it and levying additional duty on its excessive use. The levy did not affect the A movies in Tamil during the 1970s.

Tamil B Movie Westerns  179 References Anandan, Film News. 2004. Sadhanaigal Padaitha Tamilthiraippada Varalaru. ­Chennai: Sivagami: Ch. 28. np. Arurdass, Kalai Vithagar. 2007. “M. Karnan.” Narpathu Thirappada Iyakkunargalum Naanum/Forty film directors and me. Chennai: Vikatan: 189–93. Babu, P. A. 2014. Karnan’s Associate Director. Author interview, July 23. Chennai. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. “The Films.” Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 139–279. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2008. Women in Film Noir. London: BFI. Karnan, Camera. 1963. “Oli Ulagil Naan/In the world of light.” Pesum Padam. July 1963: 72–80. Karnan, M. 1999. “For the Young Cinematographers.” Karnan’s Lecture. January 22, his office, Trustpuram, Chennai. ———. 2006. Acceptance Speech. Raja Sandow Award for Excellence in Art ­(Cinematography). February 23, Madras University Centenary Hall, Chennai. ———. 2007. Author interview, July 10. Southern India Cinematographers Association’s office, Chennai. “Madurai Chithiraith Thiruvizha.” 27 May, 2014. Vikatan.com. Accessed Aug. 21, 2014. http://www.vikatan.com/new/article.php?module=magazine&aid=94861. Manian, Aranthai. 2007. “M. Karnan.” Tamil Cinemavin Oli Oviyargal/Tamil cinema’s painters with light. Chennai: Vikatan. 141–44. Nashawaty, Chris. 2013. Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie. New York: Abrams. Palaniappa, M. 2013. Sound Designer and Dubbing Supervisor. Author interview 20 May. Chennai. Sivakumar. 2006. “Natpukku Oru Jai.” Ithu Rajapattai Alla. Chennai: Alliance: 459–66. Vasudevan, Nitya. 2013. “‘Public Women’ and the ‘Obscene Body’: An Exploration of Abolition Debates in India.” Saskia Wieringa and Horacio Sivori, eds. The Sexual History of the Global South: Sexual Politics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. London, New York: Zed Books: 168–86.

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Part IV

South American, Mexican, and Borderlands Westerns

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11 An Imperfect Genre Rethinking Politics in Latin American Westerns Chelsea Wessels

This chapter argues 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, I examine the relevance of the Western in the global 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 if so, can we think about the Western in Latin America without treating it as a marginal variant of the American1 Western? In order to consider these questions, I will examine two Westerns that approach the genre from very different angles: El Ultimo Malón (Argentina) from 1917 and Antonio das Mortes (Brazil) from 1969. Both of these films are deeply political but are wildly divergent in representing issues at the core of the Western such as national identity, conquest, and violence. Constructing the Other: National Identity and Generic Contexts in Early Cinema The Western has long been associated with the emergence of a particular concept of America, with Jim Kitses proclaiming “the Western is America” and André Bazin calling it “the American film par excellence” (Kitses 2000, 89; Bazin 2005, 140). From the iconography of the American frontier to the themes of expansion and violence, the genre has been consistently connected to representations of American identity and ideology. To trouble the common assertion that the Western is American – in its origins, its historical development, and even in its iconography – I will turn first to early cinema to examine the Western before its conventions had been solidified and coded as an expression of an American mythos. Considering El Ultimo Malón (The Last Indian Raid) as an early example of the genre destabilizes the notion of the Western as an inherently American genre: a Western as opposed to a Western. By seeing how these themes manifest and develop in reaction to particular national contexts, we can identify points that might be traced throughout continued generic developments in an effort to avoid a comparative analysis. For example, in looking at El Ultimo Malón, I will

184  Chelsea Wessels consider two major issues the generic conventions of the Western often respond to: the positioning of the other in relation to national identity and concerns of expansion and settlement. While many early global Westerns often focused on stories drawn from North America, early Argentinean cinema provides an example of the treatment of a nation’s own indigenous people as the binary other against which a national identity is represented. In the 17th century, tribes of indigenous people, such as the Mocoví, Toba, Abipone, and Guarani, lived among the networks of Jesuit mission towns. After the expulsion of the Jesuits by King Charles III, the indigenous people found themselves forced to live in poverty and exclusion as European colonizers took their land. This is a story not unlike that of the Native Americans of North America, and in El Ultimo Malón, we can see evidence of the othering used in Westerns to both subjugate other national identities and provide attempts at using a divided colonial history to promote a coherent white national identity. The film was made in 1917 by Dr. Alcides Greca, a lawyer, short-story author, and political leader, allegedly because one of his early household servants was killed in the 1904 Mocoví uprising, which is the focus of El Ultimo Malón’s second half. Shot on location in the Santa Fe province, the actual site of the Mocoví rebellion on April 21, 1904, the film even ­features some of the people involved, in an attempt at authenticity. Roberto Di ­Chiara called it a great rarity in Argentinean cinema because it represents the first time coloring was attempted on a local film (Finkielman 2004, 22). Broken into two parts, the opening of the film is a historical representation that details both the project of the film and scenes showing the daily life of the Mocoví. We see them hunting birds (guacamayas, tuynagos, and ostriches) as well as what appears to be a small alligator. Scenes of village life show them drinking alcohol, dancing, and having a parade in honor of the patron saint Javier. The second half is a mostly fictionalized representation of the events leading to the 1904 rebellion, focusing on a love triangle between the corrupt leader, Bernardo López (who submits to the gringos in order to maintain a comfortable life), his half-brother, Jesús Salvador López, the leader of the rebellion, and Bernado’s companion and Jesús’s love, Rosa Paiquí. While there are a number of interesting features in the film, what I would like to focus on here is the way the film utilizes the other of the Mocoví in order to discuss the way that othering can be used as a way to construct or represent national identity. The other becomes a powerful agent in creating national identities as both a clear point of contrast and a threat to cohesiveness. In El Ultimo Malón, the Mocoví fulfill both these roles as, despite Greca’s seemingly sympathetic view, they are consistently presented in a binary position with the white colonizers and as a threatening force to civilization. The power relations on display in early Westerns are working to specifically respond to issues in national identity. These early Westerns then become “contact zones,” which Mary Louise Pratt defines as “social spaces

An Imperfect Genre  185 where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like ­colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4). Here, the contact zones arise from issues of national identity raised by expansion from European and American settlers into occupied territories. Early Westerns often represent this conflict by focusing on the power ­relations between two clearly defined sides: the indigenous other as a primitive national identity and the white settlers as representative of the future nation. These “asymmetrical relations,” where indigenous people are usually represented as subordinate to the white settlers, promote the eventual premise of a cohesive white national identity. However, despite the imbalance in the power relations, the position of the other is critical in constructing national identity. In discussing ­Thunderheart’s representation of a Native America, Robert Burgoyne draws on Annette Hamilton’s term “national imaginary” to discuss the way “Native Americans have emerged in contemporary films as agents of a powerful counternarrative of nation, bearers of an alternative historical and national consciousness molded and shaped by centuries of incessant war” (13). Creating a national imaginary requires not only positive images of a cohesive identity but also “the circulation of negative images or stereotypes of national others against whom the national self is defined” (Burgoyne 2010, 39). Thus the national imaginary, or the creation of a cohesive national identity, emphasizes othering as a way of defining cultural identity. This is similar to Richard Abel’s argument in The Red Rooster Scare, in that through establishing clear binaries between the white settler and the Indian, or the American Western and European Westerns, the Western came to be a source of identification in terms of American national identity. These cultural identities are constantly shifting, as Burgoyne’s analysis of Thunderheart illustrates, and it is particularly crucial to examine them at points when they are threatened. By turning to early Argentinian cinema, we can see how the binary between the indigenous Indian tribes and the European settlers is utilized to present a national imaginary for Argentina. The view of the Mocoví, and the power relations inherent in the film, are established immediately in the prologue: “Civilization and the Indian.” The first intertitle uses quotations around “civilization” to describe the contact of the Mocoví with white settlers and quickly labels them as a threat, as the uprising menaced the blossoming white civilization of Santa Fe. After a brief cut to Greca illustrating where San Javier is on a large map, the next few shots and titles focus on newspaper coverage of the “sad” events. Based on the introduction of the Mocoví as threatening to civilization, one can assume the sympathy lies with the white settlers who were at risk in the rebellion. Attention then turns to establishing Greca as the “author” of the historical reconstruction the viewer is about to see. Credibility and authenticity become the focus through titles identifying Greca as someone born in San Javier, as a government representative, and through a shot of

186  Chelsea Wessels him behind his desk beginning to write the “script” for the film. As we switch to Greca’s words on the page, the Mocoví become a “strong and heroic” tribe, which works to establish his sympathetic viewpoint. As he debates the script with several other white men of power in the next few shots, one of them believes the “last Indian attack is still to come.” This ominous intertitle is cut with shots of the men smiling and posing with the “script.” In this way, the opening establishes several points about the tone and view of the film. First, it completely eliminates the voice and image of the Mocoví from the beginning of the film by focusing on “historical documents” such as images of newspapers and the information in the intertitles, which are clearly written and conveyed from a white perspective, leaving the Mocoví as an undefined, threatening force. Second, Greca is established as not only a voice of authority but also one of sympathy, through the shot of him writing about the heroism of the tribe. Finally, we see the white male clearly placed in the position of the author through both the information about Greca given to affirm his credibility and the shots of the three men discussing the script. Despite the initial indications of a sympathetic representation, by “Act IV: The Regression” it becomes clear the Mocoví are a direct threat to the white settlers, and the film firmly takes up a supportive view of any action taken against the Mocoví as deserved in order to protect the future of the nation, a future represented by white settlers. In the early scenes of this act, the focus is on the regression of the Mocoví as they return to a primitive state in stark contrast to civilization. First, they are shown stealing cattle and horses from landowners, killing anyone who gets in their way. A particularly dark scene follows a group of desperate Mocoví in search of “mare meat” as they stalk and take down a horse in order to eat it. On discovering a farmer, shown to be alone and unarmed, dead in his field, with his cattle and horses stolen, the film cuts to the white landowners complaining to their local government. The difference between the seated landowners discussing their concerns and the Mocoví’s violent actions across the plains further emphasizes the demarcation between civilization and the Mocoví regression. What is interesting here is that as the film progresses, the Mocoví and whites are pushed further and further apart but the emotional focus of the film remains on the love affair between Salvador and Rosa. Indeed, as the preparations for the uprising begin, we are shown very little of the action and instead focus on the plight of Rosa who, after disobeying ­Bernardo and dancing with Salvador at a celebration, has been kidnapped by ­Bernardo’s henchmen and taken to the islands, where Salvador can’t find her. Although Salvador is identified as the leader of the rebellion, in the later scenes he is conspicuously absent and the focus is on Rosa waiting for him to come and rescue her. Ultimately, this love story serves to further the themes of national identity I am discussing, particularly at the end. After the failure of the rebellion, shown briefly in the scores of Mocoví bodies littering the streets of San Javier, Salvador rides off to find

An Imperfect Genre  187 and rescue Rosa. After a dramatic fight with the guards, the two ride off towards Gran Chaco, which is identified as the place any surviving Mocoví can escape. The ending of the film shows the two riding off into the wild with the title emphasizing the “restless Indian” who couldn’t stand civilization but took the “sweet legacy” of the kiss with him. As Rosa and Salvador find shelter and she bandages his wounds, the film offers a sense of a happy ending for the Mocoví: outside civilization, they will happily exist on their own terms. The emphasis on Rosa and Salvador as founding members of an alternative, but not equal, nation here affirms the national identity of Argentina as white by showing the Mocoví as separate and incompatible with civilization, clearly represented by the orderly and powerful white settlers of Santa Fe. This not only confirms and propagates the other as a threat to national identity through the violence of the rebellion but also provides a kind of counternarrative by establishing the Mocoví as an alternative nation or self. A cohesive national imaginary or identity can’t exist without the Mocoví as a point of opposition, and the representations presented in El Ultimo Malón illustrate the way in which the binaries associated with the Western genre flourished in alternative situations in congruent ways. Place and genre coalesce in considerations of national identity, which is the primary thrust of the common linkage between the Western and ­America. However, the constructions of national identity through binary relationships, liminal spaces, and the other are hardly unique to American history. First, the frontier becomes abstracted and liminal when detached from the American West and can provide a space for identity construction throughout other national cinemas. As Abel, Burgoyne, and others have shown, the other of Native Americans, and their position as part of a binary to white civilization, works to construct a particular idea of a national narrative and cohesive identity. El Ultimo Malón demonstrates a similar positioning of a native other and white settlers in order to promote a civilized and white nation through a national imaginary that circulates and promotes counter-images so as to delineate separate strands of identity within a nation. The position of the other in this way relates to the common theme of expansion, again generally associated with an American origin because of the way expansion often creates a threat to national identity. In order to preserve and develop a cohesive identity, then, these binary relationships are established and their images can be circulated through the Western as a way to support a national imaginary. As Burgoyne suggests with Thunderheart, the position of the other can also serve to create and promote a counternarrative to the dominant ideology. Even in the ending of El Ultimo Malón, there is the suggestion the Mocoví build their own identity once they are separated from white civilization, and while the film doesn’t deal with how that might affect the national narrative in later iterations, it offers a clear suggestion of the way in which the dominant and other are both expedient in constructing identity.

188  Chelsea Wessels Genre and Third Cinema: The Politics of Antonio das Mortes In turning to Brazil in the 1960s, the use of the Western becomes critical again as a way of responding to disparities in power relations, but unlike the conservative politics of El Ultimo Malón, this time the genre is used as a critique from within the oppressive state, made to speak for the oppressed rather than made by the oppressor. 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. As Courtney Fellion argues: The genre is thus a mode of representation that is reflexive of ­official, recorded histories. In depicting history as socially constructed, ­imagined, and non-linear, the Western genre, then, is a useful vehicle for representing both mainstream but also marginal histories, including the radical and contradictive narratives of Third Cinema. Third Cinema reenacts marginal and nonlinear histories as a means of ­ ­demonstrating cultural and historical multiplicity (2013, 45). The global Western is often used as a form of political critique and NLAC is a deeply political film movement. Turning to Antonio das Mortes, I will examine the ways in which the film uses the Western to grapple with both the politics of the local state as well as that state’s position within the larger geopolitical order to function as a political allegory for neo-imperialism. In looking at the Western in this context, I argue the transculturation of the dominant genre in New Latin American Cinema renders it nearly unrecognizable when viewed through Western scholarship’s analytical frameworks. Nevertheless, the process of “selecting and inventing” from dominant cultures, as Pratt says, offers a way of viewing both the Western and New Latin American Cinema in a specific political and historical moment (1992, 229). Here, the use of the Western 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? To be very brief, 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 of 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. The Western is traditionally hailed as a popular genre while Third Cinema is constructed in opposition to dominant

An Imperfect Genre  189 systems, particularly Hollywood, in order to reclaim film’s revolutionary potential. Before turning to Antonio das Mortes, I would like to briefly explore three written works of Third Cinema in order to show how these manifestos create a political context for using the Western in Latin America. The term Third Cinema comes from Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s essay “Towards a Third Cinema,” first published in 1969. Third Cinema rejects the practices of, first, Hollywood and second, European art cinemas in terms of both production and consumption. Films are not the artistic vision of the director or made as part of a bourgeois studio system, and they are screened outside traditional viewing spaces, creating a risk for viewers that seek them out as there were often harsh consequences of being caught watching these films. Julio García Espinosa, in “For an Imperfect Cinema,” echoes Solanas and Getino’s call for filmmaking that rejects the dominance of Hollywood aesthetics. For García Espinosa, film should move away from the technically perfect cinema of Hollywood towards an imperfect cinema, where the revolutionary message of resisting the cultural elite is valued over quality or technique. García Espinosa’s idea of imperfect cinema rejects placing any constrictions on the type of cinema; it can be documentary, fiction, or any genre. And, he argues, the films can also be enjoyable (1997, 81). These imperfect films, then, generate the potential for colonial critique through their rejection of the technical and thematic aspects associated with Hollywood as well as an awareness of how even their production is a reflection of an imperfect society, still ruled by class divisions. Glauber Rocha, who directed Antonio das Mortes, further argues Latin American cinema can be distinguished by its violence, which he characterizes as key to “an esthetic of hunger.”2 For Rocha, hunger and misery must be represented in order for the oppressed to recognize their own experience. This means differentiating hunger and suffering from being primitive and focusing on the ways violence, as a manifestation of hunger, is revolutionary above all else. The esthetic of violence, Rocha contends, “is the initial moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the colonized. Only when confronted with violence does the colonizer understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he exploits” (1997, 60). Visually, this can look like the blinding brightness of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1963), where the overexposure becomes an assault on the viewer’s senses. However, it can also manifest thematically, as we will see in Antonio das Mortes. Third Cinema, more broadly, coalesces around questioning and resisting dominant power structures imposed through neo-imperialism. 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, imperial expansion, 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 imperial advancement and capitalist nationalism,

190  Chelsea Wessels might seem antithetical to ideas of Third Cinema, but by repositioning it within these critical frameworks rather than conventional, comparative, Western ­scholarly readings, I will argue 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 Cangaceiro, 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, 1964), where the titular character appears as well. The events of Antonio das Mortes pick up after Antonio has killed Corisco, “the last cangaceiro”3 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, including the revelation Dr. Matos is having an affair with the Colonel’s wife (who ends up killing him to save herself), 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, including an extended sequence in which the professor and Laura, the Colonel’s wife, passionately embrace while rolling over Dr. Matos’s body. 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 Antonio das Mortes is, essentially, a conservative film (1969, 47). 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” (1973, 202). The issue with this, for Kavanagh, is that

An Imperfect Genre  191 once a film is labelled 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 (1973, 202). 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 …” (Kavanagh 1973, 205). Kavanagh thus argues 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 the Latin American Westerns under consideration here, the critique of the state in allegorical form is directed at a government that cannot be directly addressed, often because of strict censorship. Sarah Sarzynski places Brazilian nordesterns such as Antonio das Mortes in a comparative context with “Cold War Westerns” to examine the way these films can be read alongside representations of state in Hollywood and Italian Westerns of the 1960s. Sarzynski argues that in the Hollywood ­Western, the modern state often arrives at the end of the film as a ­positive force, “restoring order and justice” through the (re)establishment of the community/law after destruction (2009, 87). The Spaghetti Westerns, then, function as a critique of this by showing the corruption and violence experienced by the state as a result of greedy, capitalist drives. In terms of the Brazilian nordestern, Sarzynski claims that “the modern state is simply absent” (2009, 88). This absence is what creates violence, and this violence is extreme on all sides: the cangaceiros, the landowners, cangaceiro killers such as Antonio das Mortes, and the disillusioned poor who constitute the

192  Chelsea Wessels masses. For Sarzynski, the position of the state is closely aligned with representations of civilization in the Western, which then situate the wilderness in opposition as a place of freedom. However, the sertão of the nordestern is not a place of possibilities in this sense but rather “non-civilized, dangerous space” where even the “powerful are not portrayed as free” (Sarzynski 2009, 87). In the nordestern, there is no escape from violence in either civilization or the wild, as the violence is everywhere and affects everyone. The issue with Sarzynski’s reading is that she relies on connecting ­European, Hollywood, and Brazilian Westerns in a way that largely ignores key differences from the frameworks of NLAC and Third Cinema. I would argue instead that what is important about reading Antonio das Mortes as a Western is the way Rocha destabilizes generic tropes through adapting them to the Brazilian context. 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. Here, the people are found in the community, which is not limited to the spatial binary of wilderness/settlement, not “civilization,” as Sarzynski argues, which is largely a destructive force. This focus on Third Cinema politics plays out in the way Antonio das Mortes challenges notions of the hero and villain in the Western. Sarzynski again traces a comparative reading here, in which the Hollywood lone-hero construction is subverted through the often unsavory protagonists of Italian Westerns, where the hero is flawed “because of the corrupt capitalist society in which he exists” (2009, 97). In the nordestern, the cangaceiro figure is often the flawed hero who has resorted to violence as the only way to respond to the consequences of a problematic government. However, this view of the hero is challenged by Antonio das Mortes, where despite the titular character playing a prominent role in the film, Antonio doesn’t seem to be the hero of the narrative in either a Hollywood or (Italian) critical sense of the figure. First, Antonio is not a cangaceiro but rather the cangaceiro killer, and his motivation for getting involved with the Colonel is that he feels honor-bound to make sure there are no more cangaceiros in the region. Eventually, after the slaughter of Coirana’s followers, Antonio changes his mind and begins to fight against the Colonel and his new hired guns. However, this change of heart is not depicted as the singular hero’s journey from hired gunman to fighter for justice. Instead, Antonio’s shift is less about moving away from the injustices of the government or landowners. Rather, it can be seen as a movement towards the collective, where the bringing together of the people to act is the primary goal. One of the key ideas of Third Cinema is that of a collective: a collective ­ arratives that filmmaking process, films made for a collective people, and n promote a collective, rather than an individual hero. For Jorge ­Sanjinés, “revolutionary cinema cannot be anything but collective in its most complete

An Imperfect Genre  193 phase, since the revolution is collective” (1989, 39). 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 Antonio das Mortes offers a departure from the Western genre in its Hollywood iteration. In this case, the subject is constituted entirely 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 (1989, 59). This idea of the collective plays out on several levels in the film, beginning with the narrative, which moves among 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 Professor is set up as a didactic figure, depositing key facts into his students that they repeat over and over again. 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. The final shootout of the film is also very much a play on a classic ­Western genre moment, seen in the Spaghetti Western or Hollywood Western: ­emphasis on gun shots, men falling out of windows as they are shot, and outnumbered men defeating the more powerful enemy – perhaps a little too easily, as an example of the way Rocha plays with genre conventions. Again, however, elements of history and politics combine with the Western tropes to develop the film within a Third Cinema framework. First, the three sides of the battle are clearly established along the lines of the historical characters set up at the beginning of the film. Antonio, the jagunço, references he is fighting for God, and is shown at the end of the fight standing with Santa, the spiritual leader. He has clearly become aligned with the old ways

194  Chelsea Wessels of religion and the cangaceiros. On the other side of the spectrum is Mata Vaca and the Colonel, who are motivated solely by capitalistic gain, which has completely corrupted them. Meanwhile, Antonio tells the Professor he should be fighting for his “ideas,” and the Professor, as the only person shown remaining after the fight ends, seems to represent a possible way forward after the extremes of religion and politics have destroyed everything. Of course, given that none of these positions has been shown to be without fault, the film avoids creating a solution or offering closure, keeping the ending in line with the openness of Third Cinema. And ultimately, Antonio has violently brought together some of the disparate characters introduced at the beginning, particularly Santa and the Professor, to begin to form a collective against the corruption of Mata Vaca and the Colonel, rather than existing separately. 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. While these kinds of struggles are often seen in Westerns, here, the issue of class is more clearly marked as the source of the struggle. 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 his use of 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, as Sarzynski does, de-emphasizes these specifically local political elements. Reading the film through Third Cinema, however, offers a way to recover the revolutionary potential of the Western in a global context. The Global Western At the beginning of this chapter, 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 Sarzynski, as well as ­Callenbach’s analysis of Antonio das Mortes, is that using the popular genre of the ­Western could lead to these films ultimately ending up taking on the ideologies they set out to critique, which is demonstrated in the conservative politics of El Ultimo Malón. Stanley Corkin, in his analysis of Cold War Westerns, argues films drawing on the Western run the risk of being

An Imperfect Genre  195 “recontained by its dominant conservative ideologies,” even if the filmmaker intends otherwise (2004, 12). However, Corkin’s argument rests on the assumption 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 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 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 (1973, 213). This tendency is revealed in the responses of many critics to the mysticism of Antonio das Mortes. If it can’t be neatly categorized or explained, then it becomes problematic. However, the real issue with these kinds of readings is 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 global Westerns reveal is the importance of allowing generic frameworks to be adjusted for the specific historical and political contexts in which they appear. Despite the colonial ideology promoted by El Ultimo Malón, the film demonstrates the early Western’s political importance in global contexts. And 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 the use of the Western is, in fact, not about providing a critique of America but instead a move towards appealing to audiences in order to incite collective action. 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. Notes 1. In using ‘America’ as opposed to ‘United States,’ I am following Gerd ­Gemünden’s argument that America “has to be seen as an intertext – that is, as a common denominator for a variety of discourses and textual references dealing with the New World.” Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998, 20).

196  Chelsea Wessels 2. This phrase is often translated as an “aesthetic of violence,” as Rocha uses the two interchangeably to emphasize the relation between hunger and violence. 3. “Cangaceiro” refers to northeastern peasants turned bandits, who rebelled against powerful landlords in the area and were known for their specific style of dress (usually in leather) and weaponry, which included guns and special knives called “peixeiras.”

References Abel, Richard. 1999. The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900– 1910. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Bazin, André. 2005. What is Cinema? 2 vols. London: University of California Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2010. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Revised ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Callenbach, Ernest. 1969. “Comparative Anatomy of Folk-Myth Films: Robin Hood and Antonio das Mortes.” Film Quarterly, 23.2 (Winter 1969–1970): 42–47. Corkin, Stanley. 2004. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and US History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. 2001. Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts, and Frameworks. New York: Continuum. Fellion, Courtney. 2013. “Third Cinema Goes West: Common Ground for Film and Literary Theory in Postregional Discourse.” Western American Literature 48.1 and 2: 41–55. Finkielman, Jorge. 2004. The Film Industry in Argentina: an Illustrated Cultural History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Gabriel, Teshome H. 1989. “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.” Questions of Third Cinema. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds. London: BFI, 53–64. García Espinosa, Julio. 1997. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations. ­ Michael T. Martin, ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP. 71–82. Gemünden, Gerd. 1998. Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Kavanagh, Thomas M. 1973. “Imperialism and the Revolutionary Cinema: Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes.” Journal of Modern Literature, 3.2: 201–213. Kitses, Jim. 2000. “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western.” Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, and Mark Jancovitch, eds. The Film Studies Reader. London: Arnold, 89–94. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. ­London and New York: Routledge. Rocha, Glauber. 1997. “An Esthetic of Hunger.” New Latin American Cinema, ­Volume One: Theories, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations. Michael T. Martin, ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 59–61. Sanjinés, Jorge and Ukamau Group. 1989. Theory & Practice of a Cinema With the People. Willimantic: Curbstone. Sarzynski, Sarah. 2009. “The Popular, The Political, and the Ugly: Brazilian nordesterns in a Comparative Cold War Context, 1960–1975.” Rethinking Third

An Imperfect Genre  197 Cinema: The Role of Anti-colonial Media and Aesthetics in Postmodernity. Frieda Ekotto and Adeline Koh, eds. Berlin: LIT, 81–105. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. 1997. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations. Michael T. Martin, ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 33–58.

Films referenced The Adventures of Robin Hood. 1938. Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, directors. Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, performers. Warner Bros. Antonio Das Mortes/O Dragão Da Maldade Contra O Santo Guerreiro. 1969. Glauber Rocha, director. Maurício Do Valle and Lorival Pariz, performers. Embrafilme. Black God, White Devil/Deus E O Diabo Na Terra Do Sol. 1964. Glauber Rocha, director. Maurício Do Valle and Geraldo Del Rey, performers. Copacabana Filmes. O Cangaceiro. 1953. Lima Barreto, director. Alberto Ruschel and Marisa Prado, performers. Vera Cruz Studios. Thunderheart. 1992. Michael Apted, director. Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, performers. TriStar Pictures. El Ultimo Malón/The Last Indian Raid. 1917. Alcides Greca, director. Greca Films. Vidas Secas. 1963. Nelson Pereira Dos Santos, director. Átila Iório and Maria Ribeiro, performers. Luiz Carlos Barreto Produções Cinematográficas and Sino Filmes.

12 Landscaping the Western Ciro Guerra’s The Wind Journeys (2009) Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez

This is the story of a journey. A journey towards the beginning, towards the one thing that merged our white, native and black roots into something unique. Unique, like the music that was born. For centuries we’ve asked ourselves: What keeps us apart? Now is time to ask what brings us together. Together with Ignacio and Fermín, two wanderers in search of something they need, but can’t understand. Together with them in the discovery of a new world, of new adventures, of a new soul. Everything seen with the splendorous background of a Land, our Land, which still remains unknown even to us. And at the end, the beginning. And another journey. —Ciro Guerra I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land. —John Ford How many borders do we have to cross before we can get home? —Theo Angelopoulos What makes a man to travel? What makes a man to roam? —Folksong from The Searchers

The Wind Journeys1 is a film that departs from the traditional elements of the American Western and suggests a visual reading in which the permanence of the image in the viewer is one of its fundamental qualities. Although it is true the desert or arid valley, the river, the railroad, the cowboys, the Indians, and the outlaws with their conflicts frame the histories2 of this cinematographic genre, director Ciro Guerra uses the diverse landscape of northern Colombia and its legends and ethnic wealth to narrate the journey of a man who is going to fulfill a promise. While the foreground shows cracks of arid soil, accompanied by the sound of the wind and mournful voices, the film initially asserts and establishes a poetic leitmotiv as a transgression of the genre that will be explored in this essay. In addition to examining the varied landscape and its impact on the plot, this essay will clarify the film’s relationship to the Western genre and how Ciro Guerra subverts its

Landscaping the Western  199 common elements to suggest allusions, reflections, and a dialogue with his Colombian culture. The essay focuses on the landscape throughout Ignacio and Fermín’s journey, their encounter with cowboys and Indians, which blur the limits between civilization and savagery, and the accordion as a duel, weapon, legend, and instrument of nostalgia.

Figure 12.1  The land’s dryness frames Ignacio’s initial departure and gives the viewer an image of death as a pictorial symbol and as an interdependent companion to his journey.

The Western is a story that takes place close to or in the frontier (Cawelti 1999, 20), where the landscape is mountainous and vast (Barsam 2007, 35) or is practically replaced by the emphasis of interior scenes in bars and canteens (Warshow 1999, 656–60). The landscape characterized the ­Western and the gender derives from it (Verhoeff 2006,188). Moreover, Howard M. Jones lists five key components in the description of the ­Western ­landscape: “astonishment, plenitude, vastness, incongruity and melancholy” (qtd. in French 2005, 64). Also, it is common practice to see, as noted by W.J.T. Mitchell referring to the Dakota and Nebraska landscape in Hollywood Westerns, “the endless pursuits on horseback, the flight into the badlands, the canyons and gulches, or into the high country of pinyon and ponderosa pine, or the highest country of naked peaks beyond the timberline” (2002, 268). Additionally, Western films display descriptive images of the romanticism such as “the image of the cowboy on his horse, [and] the background of the landscape that surrounds him” (Verhoeff 2006, 153). Furthermore, as Philip French points out: “Scenes of dying and the rituals of burial on the plains or in frontier cemeteries abound and constitute some of the most poignant sequences in the genre” (2005, 74). According to John G. Cawelti, three types of main characters are present in the Western: “townspeople or agents of civilization, the savages or outlaws who threaten [them], and the heroes who are above all ‘men

200  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez in the middle,’ possessing many qualities and skills of the savages but ­fundamentally committed to the townspeople” (1999, 29). These stories have ­generated legends and mythic characters associated with order and chaos and have emphasized the powerful presence of the Western landscape, illustrated by the painters and photographers who accompanied the first ­Western expeditions.3 Through its image, the land has played a prevailing role in the ­Western. The landscape itself, the arid nature of ­Monument ­Valley or Valley of the Rocks, with its “huge red monoliths of volcanic stone shooting up out of rubble-piles, shaped like open hands or towered skylines or phallic spires” (Slotkin 303), immortalized John Ford and is associated with John Wayne. “Like Frederick Turner, Ford believed that the harsh but beautiful ­Western landscape helped shape American character” (Sickels 2008, 142). The ­landscape’s description is the stereotype of a man who is imposing, rude, brave, faces all obstacles, broad, and nostalgic. The Indians, too, are represented by their landscapes. They are characterized as enigmatic, ­reluctant, crude, savage beings, pallid, and circumspect. These characteristics embody the masculinity personified in the landscape formations, such as tall mountains, the totem-pole formation, and the two buttes that Monument Valley portrays. In like m ­ anner, essential elements of the Western, such as ­“cattle-drives, a s­ avage barroom brawl, an open-air hoedown, a climatic showdown, a philosophical old-timer” (French 2005, 181) are associated with the characters ­mentioned above. Since Edwin Porters’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first significant Western, although filmed in New Jersey, exhibited the effectiveness of traditional elements like the dresses, horses, pistols, cavalcades, etc., Cawelti comments that the Western costume, for instance, reflect character and theme introducing the good guy with well-pressed clothes and white tengallon hat whereas the villain is dressed sloppily or in black (1999, 27). ­Furthermore, the good guy “rides a white horse that is his closest companion; he uses bullets and words with equal care. … The villain, on the other hand, rides a dark horse and is doomed to die” (French 2005, 30). In general, the locations of the Western depict the image of isolated towns surrounded by a vast landscape of desert or prairie and connected by rail road or trails (Cawelti 1999, 24). Once the generalities of the Western have been clarified, we will proceed to discuss how Guerra appropriates the genre, adapts it to conditions proper to the region, and revitalizes it, we could say, with the use of new elements where the landscape functions as a counterpoint and supporter of the story. Different from the towns of the Westerns, the locations chosen by Guerra are real, emphasizing even more the authenticity and poetics of the ­Colombian landscape and its contrasts. As Cristina Gallego, one of the film’s producers, affirms: Our journey began in Rio de Oro (Cesar), the director’s hometown. For an entire month we traveled 5,000 kilometers of an unknown

Landscaping the Western  201

Figure 12.2 Ignacio and Fermín blend in with the vast landscape and look like two minute dots that form part of it.

Colombia. I must say that road guides do not specify when roads are asphalted or when they’re just simple and narrow paths, interrupted by a river that can only be crossed on a ferry, which only works until 6 p.m. We went to Tamalameque, El Banco, La Ciénaga, El Brazo de Loba, Hatillo de Loba, (unknown and isolated villages within C ­ olombian geography). … We went along the Magdalena River in order to find the village where the story begins. It’s a village that seems to be still living in 1968. From there we went to Mompox, Valledupar on the way to La Guajira, to arrive at Punta Gallinas (the northern limit of Colombia). (Guerra, 2009) The dialogue with the Western is evident. The film takes place in desolate towns, hard-to-access paths, a varied geography, and small villages with limited interaction with the rest of the civilized world. In this way a dialogue with northern Colombia is established by emphasizing not only what has already been mentioned but also the year 1968 and the small town of Valledupar. On that subject, Guerra affirms: “It is an important date for humanity and for the vallenato,4 since it marks the end of the period of juglares and the beginning of a new age when rhythm becomes massive, centered on stars, concerts, albums. Moreover, in 1968 the Department of Cesar was founded” (Jaccard 2009). The journey of Ignacio and Fermín begins in Río de Oro (Cesar), a landscape similar to Monument Valley. The land’s dryness frames Ignacio’s initial departure and gives the viewer an image of death as a pictorial symbol and an interdependent companion to his journey. In the initial scenes, for instance, one can see a portion of cracked and sterile land framing the mortuary nature of the scene: two men carrying a coffin; profiles of a few cowboys digging, Ignacio’s silhouette observing the tomb; a sunrise. In fact, Guerra frames his sequential composition according to three of Ford’s visual elements: “the

202  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez protagonist, nature, and the grave” (Grundmann 2008, 192–3). One way Guerra subverts these traditional elements of scenes of dying and cemeteries is through slowness, which allows the viewer the time to contemplate the melancholic echo of the silent landscape. Furthermore, the beginning of the film shows a tough, wary man on his donkey, l­eaving behind a town of narrow streets and white walls. It is important to note ­Ignacio’s hat, for instance, bears a shape and colors different from the common cowboy hat though crafted from the same material. Additionally, ­Ignacio’s riding a donkey instead of a horse and journeying with Fermín, a young man on foot, drastically changes the connotation of the typical hero. Rather than carrying pistols and holsters, Ignacio carries a traditional ­mochila from northern Colombia and an accordion, used not only as a weapon for musical duels but also as an instrument that accompanies physical duels, in which two men kill to defend their honor. In this initial scene, the dialogue with the viewer is through sound without words, and the composition of the image emphasizes the rugged and ochre texture in contrast with blue skies, dusty paths, and the shadow of a child reflected on a white wall. The interior landscape also plays an important role in the Western and in the film. Guerra has been influenced by chiaroscuro lighting, a tradition begun by David Belasco and developed further by Wilfred Buckland, who used “low-key lighting,” and finally “Rembrandt lighting” (Paulus 2008, 132).5 In fact, Guerra recreates two scenes in which the use of direct and mildly suffused light evidently insinuates a lyric tone radically in contrast with the epic nature of the exterior scene. In the first of these two scenes, we observe in chiaroscuro a horned accordion hanging from a wall that creates a quality akin to the tone of an oil painting. This delicate composition serves to present the film’s main object as resembling the skulls of cows, which are commonly part of the interior space in the Western and represent the ­“wilderness life” 6 (Cawelty, 28). Additionally, the horned accordion skull highlights the reference to death and to the legend this story tells; these references will be discussed later in the essay. In the second scene, a woman’s blurry silhouette peering out through the window, observing Ignacio’s departure on his donkey, evokes a sense of chiaroscuro and a mood of sadness of romantic longing.7 What seems to give validity to these scenes as transgressions of the Western is Ignacio’s departure, symbolically framed by the window’s bars, the use of light to accentuate the instrument, and the shadow to conceal the identity of whoever remains in the interior. In this way, Guerra gives a sense of intimacy and nostalgia to the interior landscape, which is also transferred to the main characters during Ignacio’s extensive journey, illustrated by his slowness, the lack of dialogue in several scenes, and the recurring image of a vast land. There is a radical change in the landscape once the town, dust, and dry land are left behind. Ignacio and Fermín arrive at a small port with a canoe along with their donkey. This is one of the movie’s most extensive plane sequences and among the most visually powerful.8 Guerra uses Rembrandt-like lighting

Landscaping the Western  203 characteristics at a market’s exterior and, without a cut, slowly traverses the small plaza with a river framing the distance. The initial chiaroscuro, given by a corridor’s walkway, gradually diminishes as the sound of voices increases until fixating on a clear image of the two travelers walking among a crowd gathered in front of merchandise. Similarly, the protagonists’ weary interaction begins to change. The dialogues are no longer so sporadic and Ignacio, in front of his master’s wrecked house, tells Fermín he must return the accordion to his owner by going all the way to the Guajira in order to fulfill his promise. As they embark on a path of springs, medium-sized trees, and mountains in the distance, Fermín confesses he doesn’t have a father and Ignacio reveals he has many children he has never met. ­Ignacio is going to give his accordion to the owner and ­Fermín will not return until he becomes a great accordionist. The open spaces that in the Westerns connote danger and menace (Pippin 2009: 229) take on a further meaning in Guerra’s film. The sense of belonging to the land is a central force from which both Ignacio and Fermín derive their strength and solitude. After passing by another town of houses with white walls and empty cement streets, the landscape changes once more. They enter a vast valley with small bushes and a river. While speaking of going to Taroa, Fermín follows the river’s course and Ignacio seems to blend into the vegetation. If the river in Westerns9 serves as a setting where cattle drink, a place where horses cool off, or an obstacle to surpass, in this scene it acquires an allegoric significance of the voyage not only as a passing of time and a re-encounter with the past but as a harmonious flow with the land. But before this, they set off to Sierra del Perijá to visit Ignacio’s brother, Nine, who can fix the accordion. On this journey, the landscape is of mountains slightly covered by a mist lingering over lush vegetation. Ignacio and Fermín blend in with the landscape and look like two minute dots that form part of it, a recurrent image in the Western but one Guerra recreates while preparing the viewer for an even more transcendental and solemn experience. Hence the following interior landscape accentuates the partially lit alchemist workshop where Nine repairs the accordion. The chiaroscuro reveals a glimpse of his abundant beard, round eye glasses, his agile hands over the instrument, and empty bottles on the shelves. Once the march resumes, the cold landscape of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, home to four indigenous tribes, appears in the distance.10 “This contrast between open land and the town, between the illusion of freedom and the necessity of compromise, between a relaxed association with nature and a tense accommodation to society, lies at the roots of the genre” (French 2005, 65). In fact, Nine is an isolated character who lives in a modest cottage on the hilltop, accepting Ignacio’s and Fermín’s conditions of life in an apparent tranquility associated with the surrounding landscape. The ascent through stretched paths eases the communication between Fermín and the mamos, indigenous priests, to seek help since Ignacio is now severely ill after being beaten by a group of marimberos from the Guajira

204  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez who snatched the accordion. He is recovering at an improvised canteen. An encounter with what is savage comes in the form of three Wayuu11 chiefs arriving in two trucks, escorted by several men, with the desire to have a party in a small garage. Here the savage is shown by excessive liquor, rooster fights, harsh faces barely hidden under a black hat’s brim, or dark eyeglasses worn by some. Although it could be said these men are Indians due to their dialect,12 the townspeople or cowboy outfits they wear represent a hybridization in race and customs. In this scene, we see the villain dressed sloppily or in black. However, Guerra transgresses the function of those traditional elements mentioned by Cawelti, embracing a local context yet not exclusively dwelling in a regional sense. Fermín is once again tested, as he fistfights with an older cowboy to recover the accordion that was taken from Ignacio. Fermín leaves with the accordion once he has it and takes Ignacio through a landscape of broad prairies and mountains covered by mist. As they walk, they have a pacific encounter with a group of indigenous Kogi. These men wear white wide pants, a shirt, a white pointy hat, and carry mochilas on their backs. It is important to note Guerra assigns the white colors to the people supposed to be the bad guys, as Cawelti mentioned.

Figure 12.3 The Indian is the possessor of a cosmic order in a space constructed harmoniously with the melancholic eco of the silent landscape that Ignacio deeply respects.

The “savage” is now arguable, considering that after we see Ignacio when he is very sick, a priest reports: “Your father is not dead. But he doesn’t want to live. He wants no more of life. He wants to die.” Immediately thereafter, the viewer observes a vast landscape where the majestic Sierra Nevada shimmers, contrasting with the blue sky, the mist, and the mountain’s rocks. In this way, Guerra continues to establish dialogue with the Western, alongside an ongoing dialogue with popular manifestations typical to the region he is from. The Western, especially John Ford’s, conquers the Indians using weapons, given they are represented as a force of evil in a hostile territory, to

Landscaping the Western  205 subsequently establish order (Pippin 2009: 227–28). In The Wind Journeys, the Indian is the possessor of a cosmic order in a space constructed harmoniously with nature13 and one Ignacio and Fermín deeply respect. There is no intent to forcefully take over or an eagerness to impose their will on the territory but a strong admiration of the landscape’s grandeur and the wisdom carried by the characters living in it. The journey continues, and just like at the beginning, one sees dry, cracked ground, flatlands, desert. Ignacio and Fermín once more appear as two small dots in the midst of the vast desert. Another encounter with ­Indians then occurs in the middle of a white landscape by the ocean. In Manaure ­(Guajira), famous for its abundance of salt, the Indians once again help Ignacio amid a rich sunset of scarlet colors. Once he has been cured, they continue along a landscape of ocean and desert. As they both walk along the shore on their way to Taroa, the viewers see the ocean and mountains. The contrasts represented by the ocean and desert, mountains and valley are beautifully juxtaposed with the foreground image of a small, seemingly abandoned village, with ruined, straw ranches, fallen fences, desert sand, and the constant wind. In fact, as Jones had mentioned, the five components of the Western landscape are clearly depicted along with the characters. Guerra underlines the coexistence between a man who lives in the ­Caribbean part of Colombia and the landscape, which sustains him: They speak with certain discernment and reflect on things; they are mindful of the details and come up with stories that they tell through songs. The Caribbean influence means that people live closer to nature, feel deeply towards their land and know the names of the trees that grow close to them, as well as what they cure. That’s a kind of relationship that people from the city don’t experience. Their joy is a way of hiding their deep melancholy, because the Caribbean man is melancholic and thoughtful. (Guerra, 2009) It can be affirmed, then, that the accordion condenses that saudade Guerra mentions and at the same time serves as an instrument of duel, defence, and legend. Before crossing the border to arrive at la Guajira, Ignacio and ­Fermín camp under a star-filled sky. The night’s darkness and a lit campfire create a melancholic atmosphere that emphasizes the sounds of the accordion. In the distance, one can hear folksongs, cattle, and cowboys in the vast savanna. Food and drink are shared when camping with cowboys. The accordion symbolizes a duel. Like a small army, men in three canoes arrive escorting a man who, in the middle of a wooden bridge, will be having a duel with another man. Ignacio is then forced by one of the duelists to play the accordion while the two men fight to death with machetes.14 This scene subverts the meaning of the traditional weapon in the Western, transferring its meaning to the instrument. Similarly the revolver’s cultural and historical

206  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez

Figure 12.4 Rather than carrying pistols and holsters, Ignacio carries an accordion as an instrument that accompanies physical duels.

meaning, part of an extended tradition of “chivalry and masculine honor, and its latter offshoot, the code of the duel” (Cawelti 1999, 39) is transferred in The Wind Journeys to the machete. Ignacio doesn’t play an active role in this honor code but rather maintains his importance by playing the accordion. Shadows and blood falling on the wooden bridge suggest violence, whereas the town, in silence, observes how one defeats the other and the how the defeated falls in the water as the mournful music continues to play. The greyish sky, the tall meadow, and the swamp frame the sequences in which Ignacio can be seen as “the older image of chivalrous adventure” (Cawelti 1999, 40). Guerra’s skillful treatment of the brutality in this scene avoids any graphic details of the murder. The importance of the duel has two other modalities. The duel takes place outdoors, in a shed near a river. The sound of drums is heard, not from Indians but from young black and mestizo cowboys, playing them under the lead of a master-priest. Since they are located under the shadow of several trees, only few piercing rays of sun strike the musicians’ sweaty skins while also highlighting the drum’s skin. Fermín decides to show his drumming skills with the clear objective of winning the duel and being r­ ecognized by the master-priest as skillfull percussionist. After an exhausting i­ mprovisation with the drums, Fermín wins the duel and is faced with the astonishment of the other musicians and Ignacio. The master says: “Now it is time to be ­baptized with the blood of the lizard.” Fermín is baptized after demonstrating his talent, disposition, and necessary skills to “shoot his weapon.” In the shed scene, the duelist’s skill is revealed through the virtuous manner in which he plays the accordion and improvises versed coplas. The way he plays the accordion – swiftly, deftly – is similar to the way in which a cowboy takes out his handgun without lifting his sight to the opponent. El Meyo, a character represented by a claw hanging around his neck, is the cowboy who challenges everyone to fight against him. Apparently he is invincible, but Ignacio realizes the claw in his collar has obscure powers associated with the

Landscaping the Western  207 devil. Ignacio accepts the challenge and reports sorcery to everybody. Confident of his power, Ignacio accepts the challenge and reports sorcery. The accordion duel follows, where sorcery and several rhythms of the traditional vallenato music emphasize Ignacio’s interpretative qualities as hero and a representative of order. Although defeated, Meyo tries to murder him with a machete that fortunately stabs the accordion instead of Ignacio. Perhaps these sequences are the most critically acclaimed in the few existing reviews, considering they refer specifically to the music and to the accordion as the film’s main character.15 The accordion is a fundamental artifact that provokes the journey of Ignacio and Fermín and serves as the means by which the legendary ­Francisco el Hombre,16 with its variations, is suggested to unite the characters in a mythic environment framed by the landscape’s powerful presence. Thus in the peak of a mountain overlooking the valley and surrounded by food and a campfire, Nine has the following dialogue with Fermín: Nine: Tú

conoces la historia de ese acordeón? (Do you know the story of this accordion?) Fermín: Dicen que está embrujado. (They say it’s bewitched].) Nine: No. No está embrujado. La historia de ese acordeón, ahí donde tú lo ves, es que Guerra, el maestro de Ignacio, se lo ganó al diablo en una piquería. Y el diablo por venganza le puso la maldición: que todo aquél que lo toque vivirá convertido en un juglar. Tocando y cantando de aquí y pa’llá sin sentar cabeza hasta que se muera. Ignacio se casó y juró que nunca más lo iba a tocar. Pero velo ahí, está jodido. Dicen que el único que le puede quitar esa maldición es el maestro Guerra. (No. Not bewitched. The story of that accordion is that Guerra, Ignacio’s master, won it in a duel with the devil. The devil, to get his revenge, put a curse on it. Whoever plays it is doomed to be a troubadour. Wandering, playing and singing, till the day they die. Ignacio got married and swore he’d stop playing. But now look at him. It is said that the only one who can undo the curse is Master Guerra.) Nine: Tú lo tocaste? No joda. (Did you play it? Did you play it?) Nine: Tan grande y creyendo en esas pendejadas! (Still believe that shit? At your age!) I mentioned again the landscape to emphasize how Guerra combines Nature, Satan, man, and machine in the wide, open spaces as filmmakers did in the West, as mentioned by Murphy (1990, 153). Furthermore, as Pippin points out: “Legends and mythic accounts are about events in the remote past of decisive significance for the present, and they assume that the course of these events is the result of actions undertaken by heroes of superhuman abilities. The tone is one of elevated seriousness, so the form of such mythic storytelling is usually epic” (2010, 19). Thus, going back to Murphy’s and P ­ ippin’s citations, the accordion has a satanic connotation whereas the drums are

208  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez associated with elements in nature. In this way, Francisco el hombre’s myth and the fact the accordion is bewitched emphasize Maestro Guerra’s supernatural powers while justifying the character’s journey: one of them to fulfill his promise and re-encounter his past, and the other to continue the journey back home with the supernatural ability of playing the drums. This explains the mythic presence in The Wind Journeys, which Guerra shows throughout the film but especially in the scenes I have mentioned and which are part of the daily life of the people of the Caribbean coast. Nonetheless, Guerra adds the element of humor to the myth at the end of the dialogue. This aspect rather confuses Fermín and makes Ignacio skeptical as he continues his march and observes people climbing palm trees. Ignacio explains to ­Fermín: “These are ignorant superstitious people. They believe that if they kill a certain bird today, they will become drummers overnight. They are hunting the guatapaná, the drummer bird.” Ignacio makes obvious irony of the situation and at the same time he contradicts himself due to the fact he is going to return the devil’s accordion to his master. Upon arriving to Taroa, their final destination, the image of a woman dressed in blue, knitting while sitting on a rocking chair at the ranch’s threshold, portrays another example of the “savage.” She is Maestro G ­ uerra’s wife, to whom Ignacio must return the accordion, but as another type of superstition, she explains: WOMAN. The

master was sure you have come. He asked us not to bury him until you come, even if it takes years. He left you a message [El maestro sabía que usted vendría. Él nos pidió que no lo enterráramos hasta que usted llegara aunque tomara años. Él le dejó un mensaje]. (Guerra)

Once again Rembrandt-like lighting emphasizes the interior landscape. With no dialogue, messages are communicated through the eyes, and for the first time we see a tender gesture from Ignacio towards one of Maestro Guerra’s children who are accompanying his wife. They all observe as he reads the message, and the gloomy quality of the interior emphasizes, like at the beginning of the movie, the atmosphere of a mournful encounter. Later Ignacio starts to play the accordion by the coffin, and in this way the vigil acquires a nostalgic connotation accentuated by the minor notes. The glances continue, Fermín cries. One can see, returning again to the initial epigraphs, that Ignacio and Fermín left their homes with a specific purpose, crossed several borders to reach their objectives, encountered cowboys and Indians, confronted several dangers, all with a permanent change in the magnificent landscape’s heterogeneity. The Wind Journeys recreates the Western crystalized in images and sounds: Ignacio bareback-riding his donkey and Fermín walking in the midst of the vast landscape with the variations mentioned, or the sound of

Landscaping the Western  209 the wind and the accordion in the borders of desolate towns. Additionally, Guerra rescues the Kogi’s knowledge, confronting the concept of savage and civilized, and recreates the artifacts that form this genre’s iconography to tell the story of the accordion as an instrument that fuses legend, rhythms, Indian, European, and African roots. Likewise, Guerra gives the river a philosophical meaning tied to the idea of the journey, to the flow of nature, a concept, needless to say, very much rooted in the indigenous cultures with which Ignacio and Fermín have contact. Guerra begins and ends the movie with a funeral and finds his poetic expression in the widely used Rembrandt lighting and long shots of landscape, suggesting a dialogue with the Western genre and creating images of the land with the resonating sound of nature surrounding the characters. As part of the landscape, one can see the empty rocking chair, the ranch’s façade, the mountains, the credits, an arid landscape, the sun’s shadows moving over the dry and flat land, while Fermín, lonely, walks back in the middle of the vast prairie. There is a cut and the final credits continue. Only the sound of the wind is heard.

Notes 1. Winner Un Certain Regard Award of the City of Rome, Cannes Film Festival Winner Best Latin American Film, Santa Barbara International Film Festival Winner Best Colombian Film, Cartagena International Film Festival Winner Golden Pre-Columbian Circle Award for Best Film & Best Director, Bogotá, Film Festival. 2. The most prevalent plots are probably the gunfighter trying to find a way to quit, which is in tension with the town’s need for his violent skills, or the general travails of ex-gunfighters who have simply become irrelevant; the empireranch story, where a kind of feudal lord holds power that is threatened by the coming of civilization and the dissolution of the next generation; episodes in the Indian wars, especially journeys across hostile territory; captivity narratives; free-range ranchers trying to stop homesteaders and farmers from putting up fences and establishing claims to land; revenge quests; and wagon-train movies, colonizers out to stake claims further west (Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam ­Peckinpah, and Frank Gruber, quoted by Robert Pippin 2009: 224). 3. See, among others: George M. Wheeler’s Photographic Survey of the American West, 1871–1873 With 50 Landscape Photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan and William Bell. New York: Dover Publications: 1983; William H. and William N. Goetzmann. The West of the Imagination. Second edition. Norman: ­University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Also Philip French mentions some artists from the Abstract Expressionist School such as Adolph Gottlieb and Jackson Pollock (2005, 62–65 and 68–69). 4. Colombia’s vallenato started as a type of romantic cowboy music that provided a commentary on the lives of ranchers and campesinos (peasants) cut off from the urban centers. It was played primarily in the countryside until it received radio commercialization in the 1940s. Since both vallenato and cumbia use similar

210  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez instruments, the easiest way to distinguish vallenato is by the use of the accordion. The basic vallenato ensemble is composed of three instruments: the drum or box, which gives rhythmic support, the guacharaca (reeder), which also gives rhythmic support, and the accordion that is in charge of melody or counter melody and harmonic support. It is interesting to see that in this three instruments, you also see the influence of the three races (white, black, and native Colombian): the accordion came from Europe, the drum from Africa, and the guacharaca from native Colombian territories. In this sense, vallenato and the music of the American West are both a combination of styles and rhythms of the Native Americans, European Americans, and/or African Americans. Guerra shares this important characteristic of the Western. 5. Tom Paulus refers that “Rembrandt Lighting” was coined by Cecil B. DeMille as a rhetorical strategy typical of “movies as art”. Also John Ford used low-key lighting to suggest internal emotions in the characters. In The Wind Journeys some initial and final sequences have this characteristic, as will be explain. 6. See Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Cow’s Skull on Red in Myth of the West 1931–36. Oil on canvas. 36 x 40 inches. The Museum of Western Art, Denver. (170). 7. Charles Clarke suggests silhouettes for romantic scenes and also recommends the use of cast shadows to design pictorial compositions. John Ford’s Willie Winkie (1937) is one example (Keating 2010, 148). The Colombian filmmaker marvelously employs this techniques in the scene mentioned. 8. Cawelti comments the drama and beauty discovered through the work of painters and photographers was intensified by the use of the actual Western landscape for later filmmakers (1999, 79–80). 9. In her article, Mary Pinard explains: “A central emblem of life, flux, and nature, the river in films of the American West emerges as an expressive text with which directors enrich and complicate their filmic visions” (2006, 127). 10. The four existing indigenous tribes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are the remnants of a sophisticated pre-Hispanic civilization known as the ­Tayrona. When the first Spaniards set foot in Colombia in the 16th century, they found a civilization that practiced sustainable farming through crop rotation and vertical ecology, built terraced drainage systems that minimized erosion, and produced exceptional gold and pottery work. But the conquistadores drove the tribes high up into the mountain, where they tried to protect their culture through isolation. The Kogi were able to maintain the most traditional culture while the Wiwa and Arhuaco experienced different levels of acculturation. The Kankuamo, who had all but disappeared, are now working to recover their language and culture. ­Estimates for the total number of native people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range between 35,000 and 51,000. See more at http://www.sacredland. org/sierra-nevada-de-santa-marta. 11. The Wayuu are known as the people of the sun, sand, and wind. They are located in the arid Guajira Peninsula in northern Colombia and northwest Venezuela. 12. Eduardo Alfonso Caro explains: “The different dialects that we hear in Los viajes correspond to the dialects that people actually speak in those regions of Colombia, that is, variations of the Spanish spoken on the Atlantic Coast plus indigenous dialects such as Bantu, Wayuunaiki, and Ikun. Indeed, Guerra seems to be aware of the importance of not disguising these dialects in any way at all as they are the most basic socio-cultural expression of the mestizos, indigenous, and Afro Colombian communities being represented in the film” (258).

Landscaping the Western  211 13. Within the indigenous communities, every action and behavior is informed by what they call the “Law of Origin,” an ecological philosophy that governs their relationship to nature, animals, weather, bodies of water, and the cycles of the planets and stars. The spiritual practices and ethical beliefs of the Tayrona revolve around their conception of aluna, which is the belief that all reality is created by thought, and every object or being has both a physical reality and a spiritual essence, all originating in thought. The tribes’ highly trained ritual priests – the mamas – communicate in the aluna dimension through ritual and meditation. In their communion with the aluna world, the mamas focus on maintaining the ecological and spiritual equilibrium of the mountain. See more at http://www.sacredland.org/sierra-nevada-de-santa-marta. 14. “What do you mean by ‘no,’ you son of a bitch? Come on!” [Cómo que no hijueputa? Venga!!] 15. The Colombian director adapts a universal myth to his local context to suggest a poetic dialogue with the landscape and the accordion. In this respect, ­Nicolás ­Mendoza affirms the accordion is “la materialización caribeña del mito de Orfeo. … ­ artin Fierro, El enfrentamiento con el diablo se repite en todas las culturas, M Paganini, Daniel Johnston. … Ignacio Carrillo, el héroe de la película, carga con el acordeón del diablo, el que alguna vez fue de Francisco el Hombre, nuestro Orfeo colombiano” (Mendoza 2010). (The accordion embodies Orfeo’s myth in the ­ ­ artin Fierro, Paganini, Caribbean. … The fight against the devil is in all cultures, M Daniel Johnston. … Ignacio Carrillo, the hero, carries the devil’s accordion that once belonged to Francisco el Hombre, the Colombian Orfeo). 16. Gabriel García Márquez paid tribute to him in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The figure of the troubadour Francisco El Hombre, who one night has a fateful encounter with the devil, is based on the type of man Maestro Guerra portrays in the film. A reference to this legend is in the documentary The Devil’s Accordion (Stephan Schwietert, 2000).

References Barsam, Richard. 2007. Looking At Movies: An Introduction to Film. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Caro Meléndez, Eduardo Alfonso. 2010. “Los viajes del viento by Ciro Guerra.” Chasqui 39.2: 257–60. Cawelti, John G. 1999. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP. French, Philip. Westerns. 2005. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited. Grundmann, Roy. 2008. “Populist Motifs in John Ford’s Films.” John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work. Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. ­Connolly, eds. London: McFarland: 187–204. Guerra, Ciro. 2009, dir. Los viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys). Film Movement. Ciudad Lunar Producciones. http://www.filmmovement.com/downloads/press/ The%20Wind%20Journeys%20FM%20Press%20Kit(2).pdf. Jaccard, Nathan. 2009. Semana. “Los viajes del viento, una locura completa.” Accessed Jul. 18, 2014. http://www.semana.com. Keating, Patrick. 2010. Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir. New York: Columbia University Press.

212  Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez Mendoza, Nicolas. 2010. “Odisea Caribe.” Revista Arcadia. Accessed Jul. 19, 2014. http://www.revistaarcadia.com. Mitchell, W.J.T, ed. 2002. Landscape and Power. Chicago: Chicago UP. Murphy, Kathleen. 1990. “Restating the West.” Myth of the West. Chris Bruce, ­Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington: 153–167. Paulus, Tom. 2008. “‘If You Can Call It an Art. …’: Pictorial Style in John Ford’s Universal Westerns (1917–1918).” John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work. Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly, eds. London: M ­ cFarland: 131–41. Pinar, Mary. 2006. “Haunted by Waters: The River in American Films of the West.” The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre. Salt Lake City: Utah UP:127–40. Pippin, Robert B. 2010. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. “What is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford’s The S­ earchers.” Critical Inquiry (35) No. 2: 223–53. Sickels, Robert C. 2008. “Beyond the Blessings of Civilization: John Ford’s S­ tagecoach and the Myth of the Western Frontier.” John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work. Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly, eds. North Carolina: McFarland: 142–152. Verhoeff, Nanna. 2006. The West in the Early Cinema: After the Beginning. ­Amsterdam Amsterdam University Press. Warshow, Robert. 1999. “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner.” Film Theory and ­Criticism. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. New York: Oxford UP: 654–67.

13 Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California Crossing Borders and Dislocating the Western Tradition Carolina Rueda

The Western helps people to get away from the complexities of modern life and back to the “restful absolutes” of the past. The Western story offers us a way to return to the soil, a chance to redefine our roots. —Peter Lyon The prefix post traces a contact zone of exchange, mutation, and imbrication that actively encourages us to question, to revisit and reread the major language in the light of transnational and transcultural global processes altering the ways by which the Western has so often been nation-centered, narrowly regional, and self perpetuating. —Neil Campbell

The Western has been considered one of the most solid and stable of ­Hollywood genres. It has influenced the style of multiple films from many countries and Mexico is no exception. In fact, the closeness between the United States and Mexico and the similarities in their landscapes, especially in the case of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and northern Mexico, explains the influence of this American genre south of the border. The classical Western genre, according to Frank Gruber, is dominated by seven identifiable plots: “The Calvary and Indian story; the Union Pacific or Pony Express story; the Homesteaders or Squatters theme; the Cattle Empire story; the Lawman story; the Revenge story; and the Outlaw story” (Cawelti 1971, 34–5). In this genre, the presence of a moving border towards the West, physical or imaginary, engages with themes of domination, expansion, economic ambition, progress, and industrialization in America. However, many films that employ the traditional configurations of plot and landscape of the classical Western push the limits of the genre, showing its ability to digest a variety of source materials, narratives, and points of view. Anthony Mann, for example, “was apparently planning a new western, King – in fact a version of King Lear, and one can see how the tyrannical father figure and the rival brothers chime with the Oedipal preoccupations of Mann’s completed westerns” (Saunders 2001, 6). Carlos Bolado’s Mexican film Bajo ­California, el límite del tiempo (Under California, the Time Limit, 1998) shows the influence of the American Western tradition in terms of the physicality of the land, mythology, and allegorical perception of history. In this

214  Carolina Rueda film, however, the trope of the moving border is relocated from the traditional themes of domination or economic ambition to the protagonist’s personal quest to overcome his burden of guilt for a crime he may have committed. In this sense, the film is a deglamorized vision of the American formula, more in tune with Jack Nachbar’s conception of the Western as a genre in which strong conservative ideology eventually dissipated as tensions and contradictions grew in American society around the late 1960s and 1970s. Bajo California fits into this category of Western films that feature complex, troubled, and many times distressed heroes. Bolado’s engagement with the Western genre is clear from the opening scene. Bajo California starts with an image in silhouette of Damián, the main character of the film, wearing a cowboy hat in an image straight out of the classical Western. Soon after, we see him driving a pickup truck along a highway while listening to a tape that was recorded by his wife, in which she tells him she loves him. In this initial scene, as Damián enters the Mexican territory, it is evident the film conforms to certain visual characteristics of the classical Western genre. Damián is very masculine, in his early forties. His face is angular and, as mentioned earlier, he is wearing a cowboy hat. Through the window of his vehicle it is possible to see the arid landscape in which cactuses appear on the horizon. Long shots that dissolve into one another emphasize the vastness of this land, a moving frontier that seems endless and uniformed. Moving beyond the idiom of the classical Western, the camera pans to show an old map that describes the journey Damián will take along the Baja California peninsula. Through this map the viewer can visualize all the imaginary borders this Mexican American man will cross, a journey that moves from touristic sites to the profundity of the peninsula’s desert, just as the film itself will cross borders within the Western genre, many times disrupting and dislocating the classical tradition. The film tells the story of Damián Ojeda Arce, a well-known Mexican American sculptor who leaves his home in California to make a pilgrimage along the sand-ravaged coastline of the Baja California peninsula. He hopes to find his late grandmother’s gravesite, as well as living members of his mother’s side of the family, by the name of Arce, in his ancestral Mexico homeland. It is also of great importance for Damián to visit the preColumbian murals known to have been made by the Cochimíes, an ancient indigenous family line who once lived on this peninsula, specifically in the Sierra de San Francisco area. His journey is motivated by the need to reconcile with his past and to expiate the feelings of guilt that torment him for a crime he thinks he may have committed. Through a combination of realistic and dream-like flashbacks, Bolado relates the hit-and-run accident in which, two months earlier, Damián may have killed a pregnant woman while driving his truck down the highway. His intense guilt haunts him as he thinks of his wife at home in California, who is also pregnant. In the words of Damián Alcazar, the actor who represents the man in the film with the same name, this is “a journey to the essence of human kind; an encounter with his

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  215 roots and with the desire to live” (El País 2000). Bolado’s hero travels down the Baja California peninsula, burdened with his own thoughts and memories, while confronting the ghosts of history, missionaries, and indigenous people once inhabiting the area. A series of sculpture shrines that he creates along his path become an important part of his reconciliation process. When he arrives at the Sierra de San Francisco area, he befriends a distant relative from the Arce family who becomes the vehicle of his redemption. This encounter, an accident that almost takes his life, and his reflections upon the Baja California land and the ancient cave paintings, change the course of the events in the film. At the end it is possible for Damián to return to his home in California feeling renewed and at peace with his wife and newborn child. Bajo California as Post-Western and Psychological Western The post-Western is an important category to be considered when studying Bajo California. Although Damián’s journey starts in the United States, soon he crosses the U.S./Mexico border and enters a different culture and a territory with images and symbols that, in part, resemble but also vary drastically from those of the classical Western tradition. The British film critic Philip French first spoke of the post-Western in his book Westerns (1973) and later, in 2003, Neil Campbell published Post-Westerns. Cinema, Region, West in which he thoroughly described this category. Campbell speaks of the post-Western not as a new concept that challenges the traditional genre but in terms of the genre’s “reinvention, survivance, its ‘living-on,’ in other forms” (2013, 2). Historically, the post-Western emerged after World War II as a filmic manifestation of a world view that did not fully identify with the traditional Western, whose tropes were now treated with skepticism. Specifically, Campbell describes the post-Western as “a shifting beyond the conditioned responses to frontier, nation-building, and expansionist ­Manifest Destiny mythologies” in America (2013, 6). From this perspective, static borders and fixed geopolitical perceptions, myths, landscapes, and traditional representations of subjects and cultural artifacts are rethought, re-examined, and even challenged. John Cawelti includes within this category those films that were “made in other countries [and that] redefined and expanded the meaning of the west itself as mythic terrain or territory” (1971, 101). Referring to the films Dead Man and Smoke Signals, Susan Kollin defined the post-Western as “a film that acknowledges Hollywood’s legacy … but that resists this hegemony in an effort to seek another form of storytelling” (qtd. in N. Campbell 2013, 7). In general, critics have argued the Western genre is not dead and it lives today in many forms, borrowing from earlier traditions, crossing its own definitional boundaries, and becoming mobile and dynamic. It is significant, for example, how Tarantino echoes Sergio Leone in Kill Bill and Sergio Corbucci in Django Unchained,

216  Carolina Rueda or how the Cohen Brothers inscribe the genre in The Big Lebowsky. It is easy to notice in Bajo California many of the aforementioned characteristics described by several critics as the film introduces the Baja California ­peninsula, as well as artifacts, visions, and cultural symbolism that relate to a culture largely different from that of the United States. The expansion of the idea of the West as a mythical terrain is certainly seen in this film. Bajo California also shows distinctive characteristics of the psychological Western category as understood by a series of film theorists and critics. William Indick explains the American Western emerged in the 20th century when the mythical concept of the Wild West, as a 19th century free and open land,1 was still a given in the American popular imagination. “Just as the antediluvian age was the mythological setting for the Greeks and Romans, and the Dark Ages were the mythological setting for the ­Northern Europeans, the Western film scenario became the setting for American ­ mythology” (2008, 1). Although today the Western has lost its status as the key paradigm of national myth, the idea of an open frontier is still significant since the genre’s archetypal themes are associated with important cultural, economic, political, spiritual, and psychological issues in many cultures. In principle, “[t]he primary function of any mythological system is to provide a people with meaningful and emotional intellectual links to its own past” (Slotkin qtd. in Indick 2008, 6). One of the predominant topics in Bajo California is the hero’s desire to connect with his past in the mythical land of his ancestors. For Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the Baja C ­ alifornia peninsula is often perceived as a mythical or legendary open space. Unlike contemporary America, the idea of a Mexican frontier is still possible today, given that Mexico is a country that coexists with its indigenous past in such a vivid way. The concept of myth that grew around the West in America is comparable to the romanticized idea Damián has of the south of the border, frontier-like territory, where he believes his redemption is possible. ­Moreover, Damián’s idea resonates with the distinctly Biblical feel of the golden age Westerns (1946–1962). As Indick explains regarding this period: “The barren desert landscape … the perpetual struggle for survival, the absence of civilization … the lack of governmentally enforced system of law and order … endow the Western frontier with an archaic atmosphere reminiscent of Biblical times” (2008, 14). Finding his origins is Damián’s primary healing mechanism. This is why his journey is infused not by the conquest of the land but by the reconnection with his lost identity. He pursues what in the film is referred to as a manda: a promise or vow made to a saint and sometimes directly to God. The idea behind this practice is that, if the person does as promised, he or she should be granted what was requested.2 As Fabio Chee describes B ­ olado’s hero’s journey: “Damián seeks to inscribe himself into the canvas of a history of both settlers and migrants and to re-code the visual representation of his bordered ‘Chicano origin’” (2014, 58). In this film the idea of conquest is transformed into a psychological matter. The character feels he has

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  217 lost his self and has become a half-man; he identifies himself as a Mexican ­ merican living mostly as an American who abandoned his Mexican roots. A This, in his mind, makes him a weak and incomplete subject. He also feels he has become a half man for having abandoned the injured or dead pregnant woman in the middle of the road. He strongly believes the completeness of his self in part depends on finding his roots through the Arce family. While seeking his maternal origin (his name is Damián Ojeda Arce) before arriving at Baja California, he had already investigated the family tree as far back as possible. He found out the name Arce, which was passed down through several generations, had originated with a man named Buenaventura Arce, one of the first settlers of the Baja peninsula. Once in Mexico, while traveling towards the Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings accompanied by a distant relative, he describes to this man their shared family tree, what branch of the Arce family he belongs to, and in what way they both are related to each other. At this point, it is possible to notice a subtle change in Damian’s behavior. Walking in the company of his kinsman who, from now on, will be referred to as Arce, Damián seems enthusiastic and proactive, as if he has reconnected with an important part of himself. This is the beginning of the hero’s psychological and affective victory. The theme of conquest turns inward in this Mexican Western. If it were possible to speak of conquest in Bolado’s film, this idea would be strictly associated with the main character’s journey into his interior self. As Damian walks along the ocean, after having seen the remaining bones of a giant whale that, for him, represent a mythical past, he will reclaim this space by creating a sculpture with the whale’s bones. Once finished, he positions himself in the middle of the sculpture and performs a ritual that, in his mind, connects him deeply to the land of his ancestors. This is how Bolado’s hero expresses his desire: Damián: This is where you and I meet, grandma. In your land, that, in a way is also mine. I don’t have a family. Perhaps these men with the name of Arce are my relatives. … My mother used to say that one can’t live without knowing where one is from. … I had never felt this so clearly. One’s past is all of one’s deceased.3 Through this installation, as well as other territorial marks constructed along his path – a spiral made of sea shells, a cactus made from broken pieces of metal, a turtle made of grass-like plants, a ring made of sand and stone, and his hand traced right next to the natives’ cave paintings – Damián tries to leave a mark suggestive of his desire to create a meaningful and emotional link with his own Mexican mythical past. It is clear Damián is the type of psychological Western hero who is “driven by motives and values that are somewhat anachronistic” (Cawelti 1971, 93). He is a conflicted survivor, a self-reflective man with no superhuman qualities, not at all a solid man without fissures.

218  Carolina Rueda

Figure 13.1  This spiral made of seashells is Damián’s second sculpture on the seashore.

Characters: The Hero Throughout the 1940s and 1950s there was a growing appetite in the United States for movies with multidimensional characters and narratives in concert with the changing political climate. At this time, the simple moral basis of the “model western”4 hero evolved, acquiring dramatic complexity, as seen in films such as Pursued (1947), “where Robert Mitchum played a mentally disturbed cowboy torn by inner doubts caused by his status as an adopted child,” or in The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), in which Glenn Ford is a tormented storekeeper “who is haunted by childhood memories of failing to avenge the murder of his lawman father” (French 2005, 31). The attempt to modify the Western film conventions allowed the genre to mature and to focus more on complex characters and less on a Manichean view of good and evil. If the hero is a more complex individual, sometimes tormented by deep inner conflicts, the genre opens up into new possibilities. As Philip French suggests: the western has come … to challenge the very concept of heroism – not necessarily to destroy it, but to bring its traditional nature into question. Perhaps the most marked characteristic of the genre since the early 1950s has been its increasing emphasis not upon victory and success but upon losing – the suggestion that to remain true to oneself will almost invariably result in defeat (2005, 33).

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  219 This more skeptical view of heroism is seen, for instance, in many of Sam Peckinpah’s heroes. Many times in his films, the hero’s suffering is a fundamental part of his emotional development. In Junior Bonner, for example, the characters who could be seen as losers, instead of ending up dead ride off victorious into the sunset, whereas in The Wild Bunch, the character named Deke is haunted and tortured by figures from the past. The ending of Bajo California echoes these Peckinpah Westerns when, at the close of the film, we see the hero head home, still reflective, with his partial accomplishment. In this Mexican Western, the psychological portrait of the hero is more important than his success. In this sense, Damián does not resemble the archetypical American Western hero that Frederick Jackson Turner described as having “restless energy, practical independence, exuberance, and individualism” (Saunders 2001, 6). For a Mexican audience that belongs to a society in which glory and success are not the most pressing concerns, a story in which the hero is a sufferer who finds some kind of resolution to his conflict could be even more appealing than the triumphalism of the classical American Western hero. Among American Westerns, Peckinpah’s films could be the closest reference point to Bolado’s in terms of the intricate psychology of the characters and also in the way both these directors communicate their vision through rich texture and expressive camerawork. Peckinpah has an identifiable trademark: “the intercutting between slow motion and normal time [which has the] effect of exposing us to more information than we could absorb through conventional editing while retaining the immediacy of actual events” ­(Saunders 2001, 87).5 Similarly, Bolado edits scenes to dramatize the main character’s psychological ambiguities. Early in the film, Damian’s truck breaks down. Not being able to fix it, he decides to burn it, an action that also signifies letting go of his past. Subsequently, he will continue his journey by foot as he immerses himself in the heart of the Baja California desert. The burning of the vehicle is an extremely dramatic moment in which fire and smoke fill the screen. The use of extreme closeups of the character’s face is reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s famous shots in which the subject seems to be breaking the fourth wall. This moment in the film resembles those scenes in Peckinpah’s Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch or The ­Losers, in which the action is intensified to capture the build up and the release of a particular moment. As Paul Seydor observes, referring to P ­ eckinpah: “In moments of great trauma, or physical and emotional excitement, time paradoxically contracts and expands, as when a bullet flying through a passenger train becomes the longest split second of one’s life” (1999, 354). For Peckinpah, slow motion is a cinematic device used to extend the life of the subject momentarily as he clings on to the last second of life he has left. In Bolado’s film this effect translates brilliantly, expanding the perception of the viewer, who becomes aware of Damián’s anxiety and his contradictory emotions: his need to abandon the past and, at the same time, the need to cling to the moments of joy this past represents. Bolado builds an aesthetic and psychological slow-motion effect, enhanced by the enthralling soundtrack, which, without a doubt, references the musical

220  Carolina Rueda piece “Il Grande Massacro” by Enio Morricone composed for Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. In consequence, the viewer experiences a spectacle of beauty and tension that characterizes Bajo California in many instances. Characters: The Women Speaking in general about the role of women in Western films, Indick points out: There are few Westerns without women, though their roles may be small. Oftentimes there are only one or two women in the entire cast, and their parts are relegated to a couple of functional scenes. However, the roles that women play in Westerns are integral to the development of the hero’s character. To a certain extent, it could be said that a ­Western is not a Western unless there is a female character for the hero to interact with, as it is the hero’s treatment of this woman, even more so than his actions … that define his character (2008, 61). Speaking specifically about the female characters in traditional Western films, one will usually find two kinds of women: the righteous wife who many times is also a schoolteacher and the owner of a saloon, as well as the women who work in this place, who are considered community property. This categorization has its origin in the late Victorian world in which, as Lord Robert BadenPowell notes in his book Rovering to Success (1922), “there are women and there are dolls” (Baden-Powell 1992, 121). One characteristic that connects Bolado’s film with the classical Western film tradition is the portrayal of certain female characters. As in most traditional Westerns, the places Damián traverses and the people he meets belong to a very masculine realm. Although Damián travels looking for his mother’s side of the family, he assumes the Arce clan is composed of men and there have been several generations of men with the name Arce. In general, Damián imagines Baja California as a masculine territory. And this is precisely what happens. When he arrives at a small village, which resembles many of the archetypical ghost towns seen in American Westerns, he is greeted by a group of men of mature age. The men appear in the foreground, evidencing the power they have over the women in their lives. In contrast, a quiet group of women of different ages appears lined up in the background, resembling voiceless statues, almost caricatures of the submissive mother, daughter, and housewife. This arrangement in the frame suggests the town wives’ secondary role. The women stand quietly, dressed in black, showing estrangement from the outsider. The implied misogyny is not addressed nor highlighted in the film but the symbolism is rather clear. By designing this scene in such a way and in this particular space that so resembles the setting of classical Westerns, Bolado underlines the predominance of men, particularly middle-aged men, in the universe of the genre.

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  221

Figure 13.2  A series of silent and immobile women appear in the background as Damián converses.

There is a radical difference between the women from the countryside in this film and the two women who are important to Damián: his pregnant wife, who is at home in California, and the pregnant woman he may have killed while driving on a highway close to the Mexican/U.S. border. Both these women occupy the character’s thoughts and appear repeatedly in the form of flashbacks or hallucinations that represent both positive memories and guilt. The body of the injured woman appears as a reminder of his unbearable sense of guilt. As Fabio Chee notes, hers is a body “whose ghostly presence thereafter became exacerbated in Damián’s daily life. … A ghost – like a Llorona6 – that essentially came to find him to drag him back towards the origin only to show him that it was fading like the cave paintings of ancient indigenous tribes” (2014, 55). Bolado’s film presents a feminine replete with mythic resonance. As in many classical Westerns, the hero’s quest is one of honor and redemption in which the hero must descend into darkness. Damián’s expiation process resembles what Indick describes in the following note: Like Orpheus’s journey, it is a dark passage into the netherworld, an encounter with the primal wilderness and its savage inhabitants: the shadow. … [T]he hero now finds himself tarnished with the mark of Cain – his hands stained with the sin of blood. He must now find

222  Carolina Rueda redemption for his dark deeds through integration with a symbol of light and peace: the goddess figure. (Indick 2008, 60) In Bolado’s film there are no savages. However, he finds a savage figure within himself as he recalls the injured or dead woman lying by the road. Opposite to this, the goddess figure is his pregnant wife; she is the female subject who represents hope. Although she is only seen from a figurative perspective – the only part of her body that is usually seen on screen is her inflated stomach while she lies down or drifts over water – the recurrent appearance of her pregnant body represents the light capable of reducing Damián’s deep anxiety and sorrow. As in many classical Westerns: She represents all of the aspects of the anima: sensitivity, compassion, nurturance, and compromise. Together [with Damián] they compose a psychologically balanced and androgynous entity – a couple who complete each other. When this correspondent physical presence is not there, the hero character is left unbalanced and incomplete. There is a restlessness and uneasiness about this character, who is bereft of the normal scale of human emotions. (Indick 2008, 66) Symbolically, Damian’s wife’s echoes the feminine characters seen in films from the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Jane Seymour in Dr. Quinn, ­Medicine Woman (1993–1998)7 and Cate Blanchet in The Missing (2003). This woman appears as a spectral figure, but she is at the heart of Damián’s possible redemption. Characters: The Indians In some ways, Bolado’s film resembles many of the classical American ­Westerns in which there is a strong presence of indigenous tribes who lived free before the arrival of European settlers. In Bolado’s film, the presence of indigenous people is scarce and what we see are the mestizo inhabitants of the land. However, everything in this area – the desert, the fossils, the mountains, the cave paintings – refers to the ghostly presence of the Guaycura, the Cochimies, and other indigenous tribes. In this sense, Damián’s journey is a sort of palimpsest through which, in his need for expiation, he ends up retracing the steps of those indigenous tribes who inhabited this territory before the arrival of the Spaniards. Although Damián’s purpose for the journey is spiritual and emotional, as he travels by foot through extensive portions of land the viewer can get a sense of the physical characteristics of many of the Baja California areas that were invaded, conquered, and renamed by Spanish conquistadors and colonists.

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  223 For Damián, the ghostly presence of the indigenous people is of great importance. At one point Arce expresses out loud what Damián has felt since the beginning of the journey: Arce: The soil is the soil and cannot be abandoned so easily. … This is where our diseased lay, and thus, one can’t just leave. Those who travel to the “other side” [referring to the United States] soon come back. Who knows what makes them come back, the land or the dead. … The Guaycura, the Cochimies, the Pericúes, are all gone.8 In fact, Damián knows more than Arce about the history of the peninsula and informs him about the Native peoples’ disappearance, which occurred approximately two hundred years ago after having inhabited this area for thousands of years. The following dialogue takes place in which Damián explains to Arce the evangelization by Jesuit missionaries: Arce: That’s why they ceased to exist? (the Indians) Damián: Yes, Arce, they could not stand them. They

were brave, and always protested against the Christian church. According to the Jesuits, as punishment for the natives’ rebellious behavior, God sent three terrible epidemics from which many of the Indians died. Through time the few survivors disappeared.9

By reconstructing the Arce family tree, by introducing the name of Harry Crosby – the historian who studied and documented the lives of the early Californios who lived in this area before and during the colonial period – and by showing the cave paintings of Sierra de San Francisco, many important historical facts regarding Baja California become an integral part of Bolado’s narrative. When Damián visits the Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings accompanied by Arce, he hopes to understand and embrace the territory’s mythical past. The paintings are a reminder of the presence of Indians and the fading of the paintings represents their extermination, the passage of time, and the alteration of Mexico due to modernization.10 The relationship between newcomers and indigenous people, which is a central preoccupation in traditional Westerns, in Bolado’s film can only be addressed symbolically. The director shows the way in which the hero becomes possessed by the spirit of the long gone indigenous tribes, in the form of the hallucinatory presence of a Native American chief who breaks the film’s fourth wall by looking and speaking directly at the camera in his native language, which, in the film, does not get translated into Spanish. In this way, the audience senses the supernatural force of this hypnotizing fi ­ gure who belongs to a long gone past. For Damián, these encounters do not imply a sense of superiority. To the contrary, he becomes humble in the presence of this type of symbolic knowledgeable other. In this sense, his relationship with Indians differs from a common trope in traditional Westerns in which, as George N. Fenin and William K. Everson point out, the Indian is “a figure to be confronted and defeated in the name of civilization, dramatically a terrifying all purpose enemy” (1962, 79).

224  Carolina Rueda

Figure 13.3  A man’s face breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the viewer in an indigenous language.

Landscape, Symbolism, and Modernity John Saunders, when describing a particular moment from the film Shane (1953), says: We find ourselves looking over the shoulder of a rider, half in silhouette, as he comes down from the mountains into the frame. From the earliest days landscape has been one of the most expressive codes available to the genre, and the association to high mountains with lofty feelings and moral elevation perspective work both to suggest the subservience of the merely human to some larger, more permanent order (2001, 15). The landscape in Western films is a fundamental trope. In fact, many times Westerns are admired exclusively for the landscape they show, which is a spectacle in itself. In the same way the captivating American landscape has inspired filmmakers, painters, and photographers, the northern Mexico desert “is not only beautiful and awe-inspiring but possessed of strange surrealist qualities” (French 2005, 62). Baja California possesses a mixture of desert land, steep cliffs, and highlands that echo Werner Herzog’s impressive wilderness and mountain shots from films such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, in which nature is overwhelming and humans appear as minuscule creatures

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  225 lost in the middle of a sublime grandiosity. In Bajo California, the viewer also sees and experiences the “burning sand, the oppressive sky, the fractured enigmatic shards of civilization which litter the desolate terrain” (Jones 1965, 397) depicted in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome or H ­ ellman’s The Shooting. Anthony Mann’s lush prairies and Boetticher’s arid Southwest landscapes especially come to mind when analyzing the Western-like environment of the Baja California desert that Bolado depicts in this film. In fact, this environment encompasses the five significant components that define the classic Western landscape: “astonishment, plenitude, vastness, incongruity and melancholy” (Jones 1965, 379). Fossils of animals and dangerous reptiles are of great importance to the argument of Bajo California. The desert and the local fauna of the land traveled by Damián become increasingly dangerous, as seen in classical Westerns in which this is a recurrent trope: the owl, the fish, the rabbit, the mountain lion, the snake, and the tarantula in John Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara and ­ enerally the poisonous scorpions and ants in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. G speaking, the presence of local fauna in Westerns, at times extremely dangerous, underlines the vulnerability of certain characters who find themselves facing a wild and merciless land. In Bolado’s film, fossils of rattlesnakes and other poisonous serpents are repeatedly shown, suggesting this remote area of Mexico resists being tamed. As Damián walks towards the Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings accompanied by Arce, a poisonous serpent bites him in the arm, almost killing him. As he recovers, hallucinations plunge him into his troublesome past. In this part of the film, a powerful psychedelic collage of images – the snake, the cave paintings, the roads travelled, and Damián’s wife’s pregnant stomach – encapsulates Damián’s journey. Towards the end of the film, Arce gives Damián a dagger made out of the deadly serpent’s skin, topped with an eagle’s head. This amulet represents the hero’s partial conquest of his inner wilderness. Carrying the amulet, he climbs to the top of a mountain from which it is possible to see both the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific Ocean. This is another moment in the journey in which Damián seems to have overcome his guilt. This particular scene can be interpreted as a triumph over nature, an important trope in traditional Western films. In this way the hero’s own psychological afflictions merge with the forces of nature that earlier stood in the way of his internal recovery. If, in classical Westerns, the triumph over nature many times involves the defeating of savage enemies, in Bajo California what is savage are the hero’s torturous remembrances. The physiognomy of the Baja California peninsula is a determining factor for the psychological and affective transformation of the main character in Bolado’s film. As W.J.T Mitchell proposes: “Whatever the power of landscape might be … it is surely the medium in which we live, and move, and have our being and where we are destined, ultimately, to return” (2001, xii). The film depicts Baja California as an almost uninhabited, uncivilized territory, distant from the influence of contemporary modern Mexico. For this very reason, this space is suited for imagining all sorts of stories that speak of ideas

226  Carolina Rueda akin to the conquest of the West. For Pilar Bellver Sáez, the Baja California desert is a geographic other, “a space that historically has been at the margin of the Nation, and that for its physical and geographic characteristics … is also situated on the limits of civilization and progress”11 (2012, 4). At the end of the 20th century, Bolado takes us into this real – and also imagined – ­universe inhabited by otherness and ripe for freeing the imagination. Speaking of F ­ ederico C ­ ampbell’s Transpeninsular,12 a film that is set in the Baja California desert, Bellver Sáez indicates that “as an heterotrophic space, the peninsular desert emerge as a concrete geographical reality that strongly attracts the­ characters … even in the current globalization context”13 (2012, 4). The disconnection of this geographical area from the rest of Mexico and the United States makes it, on the one hand, a backwards territory and on the other hand, an intriguing spot for exploration. It has been said by many that Baja California is a very strange place for Mexicans in general “It is … the dark side of the Mexican moon … the unknown part seems to exist, it is possible to be felt. What happens is that here one feels the isolation, the distance from the rest of the country …”14 (Moreno 2000). For Damián, the land functions as a self-testing ground. In a way, he is one of the “thousand faces,” as Joseph Campbell describes the Western heroes, who turn away from civilization to seek redemption in the wilderness. For this purpose the open plains, desert, and mountains of Baja California comfort him more than the urban space in California that he calls home. The landscape itself takes the form of the feminine side of the hero’s personality and partially fills his emptiness. As the characters in John Ford’s The Searchers and My Darling Clementine, Damián is constantly seen walking alone, sensing the power of the wilderness “as a solitary animal, a lone uncivilized wanderer, a ‘lonesome cowboy,’ at home only with the land” (Indick 2008, 16). The film shows the viewer the isolation of the Baja California territory even when Damián travels by car on the federal highway (carretera federal) that crosses the peninsula from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas. This road was constructed in the 1970s to improve communications between the north and the south of the peninsula and the rest of the country. However, in Bolado’s film this highway does not appear as a valorized symbol of modernity but as an impertinent object interrupting the immensity of this natural space. In this sense, Baja California is a geographical other, located at the margin of Mexico’s political and economic development. As in the conquest of the frontier in the classical Western, Baja is a space physically and subjectively distant from the known and the settled, an outside space that behaves as a specular reflection of reality. Before his journey, Damián had only imagined this heterotopic15 and transgressive space that is the land of his ancestors – transgressive in the sense that it is at once an approximation of a utopic location and a symbol of a reality altered or not fully comprehensible. It is useful to compare Baja California’s relationship with Mexico and the West’s to America’s expansion. Both of these remote territories function as a third space that resists appropriation, modernization, and progress.

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  227

Figure 13.4  Damián returns home while the colors of the Baja California desert and mountains are intensified at sunset.

The Enlightenment idea of progress referred, among many other visions, to a utopic desire to create a controlled “garden.” This desire legitimated the expansion of capitalist ideas in the New World. American Westerns have portrayed the desire to transform “unproductive” nature in many different ways: to modify the desert into a cultivated garden, to establish civilized settlements in remote territories, among other undertakings associated with the ideas of civilization and progress. With respect to the Baja California peninsula, the plan of the early missionaries was to conquer the land, tame the Indians, teach them the Catholic religion, take their land, and “civilize” the entire population. However, this inhospitable and deserted territory was no more than an immense rock; that’s what the uninhabited peninsula was. That’s why the missionaries left for ever. … There were no Indians to teach the Spanish language. There was no need for churches. Nothing. A desert, a Martian site, … it could be said that half of the Missions were no more than a chimera.16 (F. Campbell 2000, 93) In the film, Damián explains to Arce that this was the reason why the missionary congregations, physically and emotionally defeated, felt obligated to abandon the area. The landscape and the people resist these Enlightenment projects, questioning the ideology of the classical Western.

228  Carolina Rueda Final Thoughts Critics have argued Bajo California, more than a Western, is a road movie. This could be true in many ways. As mentioned earlier, the film opens with Damián driving his pickup truck down a California highway, and later he is seen travelling alone through the Baja California peninsula on Mexico’s carretera federal. Maps of his journey are shown several times, as well as many road signs that indicate his location. This part of the film resonates, for example, with the road adventure of Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny as he travels alone across the United States in this 2003 American independent art-house road movie. Notwithstanding, the characteristics of this hero’s journey, as described in this article, show the strong influence of the Western genre in Bolado’s film. This is especially true if we accept the many changes and transformations the traditional genre has undergone. One of the most significant examples of these mutations was the film Easy Rider (1969), in which America’s counter-culture from the 1960s was represented. This film, in which two men ride not horses but motorcycles across the United States was conceived by Peter Fonda as a modern Western in which the landscape, as in classical Westerns, was still one of the most important elements in the narrative. Speaking of more contemporary films, Deborah Carmichael has pointed out: “Today, this tradition of binary battles – good versus evil, populists versus profiteers, and man versus nature – may have been largely assimilated and transformed into action adventures with car chases replacing mounted posses and earthlings opposing intergalactic interlopers” (2006, 1). Bajo California shows traits from three of the major phases of the Western genre: classical, psychological, and post-Western. First, the territory shown in the film allows for the haunting presence of pre-modern America and echoes the desert-like American landscape in which many classical Westerns were set. For example, as Damián walks into the desert, after burning and abandoning his broken-down vehicle, he becomes a type of lone ranger – a character seen in many classical Westerns – that the camera shows from afar as a minuscule particle in the midst of an immense territory. Second, the film is focused entirely on Damián’s discovery of his mythical past to recover from his deep psychological distress. Finally, the mixture of styles in the mise en scène of Bajo California and the alteration, in many ways, of the classical Western, places this film in the post-Western category. As the rancher Tom Dunson in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) gets reworked as Singleton, the affluent English farmer in Laughterhouse (1984; also titled Singleton’s Pluck), Bolado turns urban Damián Ojeda into a puzzled cowboy south of the border, allowing the film to address topics associated with ­Mexican American identity, Mexican society, and other complex issues provoked by the closeness between Mexico and the United Stated. With respect to this category, it is also worth mentioning other examples of post-Westerns such as the Indian film Bandit Queen (1964), directed by Shekhar Kapur, in

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  229 which the influence of the American Western is both obvious and intriguing. In this film in which a girl from an Indian village becomes a bandit, the audience is exposed to Indian local folklore while observing a cinematic style and aesthetics that reference directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Satyajit Ray. More extreme is the case of the film Outland (1981), a sci-fi transposition of High Noon (1952), and Tears of the Black Tiger (2000). As Philip French states: “The film brings together the western, the all-stops-out ­Bollywood action movie, and the popular Thai movie genre of fifty years ago known as Raberd poa, Khaow pao kratom, which apparently translates as ‘Bomb the mountains, burn the huts.’ … In this film in which ‘cars and horses coexisted, there’s no distinction between the present and the mythical past’” (2005, 190).17 Bajo California is, in essence, a post-Western that references many American Westerns in an intertextual way, adding texture to the story without compromising its result. In American classical Westerns, Mexicans were many times labeled as “less capable … and less worthy overall than Native Americans who are, in turn, considered less capable and less worthy than Anglos” (Paredes qtd. in Wilmsen 2006, 184). To the same extent, Carl Wilmsen states Mexican Americans have many times been “either denigrated as poor or indifferent land managers, or, more commonly in cinema, are represented as not having any working relationship whatsoever with the land” (2006, 185). From this perspective, in reference to the triangulation Anglos/Native Americans/ Mexican Americans, it could be said that through the character of Damián, Bolado might have partially contributed to maintaining the stereotypical image by highlighting the character’s lack of understanding of the land, his fear of the surroundings, and at times his incapability of defending himself. However, Arce, Damián’s distant relative, is presented as a skillful man who is deeply connected with the land. He is presented as knowledgeable and dynamic, not lazy and confined to his village as many American Westerns portrayed Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Arce’s knowledge resemble a series of characters from Westerns from the 1980s and 1990s such as The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) and Mi familia (1995), in which Hispanics show inherited “farming skills [and] love for the land” (Wilmsen 2006, 196) and in which the relationship to nature is fundamental to their lives. Through the history of Westerns in America, the stereotypical image of H ­ ispanic characters has not been an exception to the rule. As in the revisionist Western Hombre (1967), Mexicans usually were either banditos, members of outlaw gangs, or robbers. In this sense, through the character of Arce, Bolado’s film is able to vindicate, if only partially, the image of ­Mexicans in Westerns. As time passes, the Western genre keeps mutating. Today, allusions to the classical formula of the genre and its variations are still seen in contem­ rokeback porary films from America and other countries. Films such as B Mountain (2005) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007) demonstrate that instead of disappearing, the Western genre has shifted into forms of representation

230  Carolina Rueda more suited for contemporary times. Bolado’s film suggests a contemporary border experience in which a modern California city is the setting of the hero’s present life and mythical Baja California is the place where he can lessen his feelings of guilt, reconnect with his past, and rest from the distress of contemporary urban life. Rather than focusing on magnificent conquests and triumphalism, the film questions these suppositions, focusing instead on the partial success of one individual. In this way Bajo California recasts the Western genre in a mode that is creative, disruptive, and often transgressive.

Notes 1. In his book The Psychology of the Western, Indick refers to the times between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. 2. María Herrera-Sobek explains this concept: “With the exception of a request or manda made directly to God, the saint of whom the person is requesting una manda acts as an ambassador of good will to God. This sacred ritual most likely emanated from a combination of Indigenous and Catholic practices as the two religions blended together following the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in the fifteenth century” (2012, 764). 3. My translation into Spanish: Aquí nos encontramos tú y yo abuela. Aquí en tu tierra que de alguna forma también es mía. Yo no tengo familia. Tal vez estos Arce son mis parientes. … Mi madre me decía que uno no puede vivir sin saber de donde es uno. … Nunca lo había sentido tan claramente, el pasado son todos nuestros muertos. 4. Philip French calls “model westerns” those films that contain a set of archetypes and expectations of the general viewer. 5. Saunders explains that in The Wild Bunch (1969), for example, “The use of flashbacks is governed by similar considerations, filling us in on necessary plot information but also illustrating the psychological processes of the characters. … Indeed, the way in which the past is always there, inescapably present, is part of the oppressive feeling of the film” (2001, 87). 6. La Llorona is a spectral image from Mexican folklore. According to oral tradition, La Llorona refers to a ghost image of the despairing soul of a woman who either killed or lost her children. As the woman looks for her children, she hunts and scares the living with her startling cries. There are many variants to this legend but the basic premise is usually the same. 7. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was an American Western television series in which Jane Seymour plays a physician who leaves Boston looking for adventure in the West, finally settling in Colorado Springs. The series ran for six seasons (1993 to1998) and aired in over one hundred countries. 8. My translation into Spanish: La tierra es la tierra y no se puede dejar tan facilmente. … Aquí están nuestros muertos y uno no se puede ir así no más porque, si algunos se van pa’l otro lado, ahí mismto regresan cuando les va mal. Quién sabe que los hará regresar, la tierra, o los muertos, como a ti. … Los indios Guaycura, los Cochimies, los Pericúes, esos ya se acabaron. 9. My translation into Spanish: ARCE. Por eso se acabaron. DAMIÁN. Sí, Arce, no los soportaron, eran bravos, siempre se revelaron contra la iglesia crisitana.

Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California  231 En castigo a su rebeldía, Dios, según dijeron los Jesuitas, les mandó tres terribles epidemias en las que muchos murieron. Los pocos que quedaron fueron desapareciendo. 10. The presence of the cave paintings is of great importance, even if they are only quickly referenced in the film. A great part of the interest Bolado had in making this film comes from his investigation of the cave art Harry Crosby recorded in his book The Cave Paintings of Baja California: Discovering the Great Murals of an Unknown People (1975). 11. My translation into Spanish: “un espacio que históricamente ha quedado al margen de la nación y que por sus características físicas y geográficas se sitúa también en los límites de la civilización y del progreso” (4). 1 2. Transpeninsular is one of Federico Campbell’s most recognized novels. In it, Esteban, an older journalist who has recently separated from his wife, abandons Mexico City to go back to his place of origin: the Baja California peninsula. The story alternates between the description of Esteban’s journey through this territory and the journey of another journalist by the name of Jordán, who lived and committed suicide somewhere in this desert. As Esteban follows the steps of Jordán, trying to find the reason for his death, his travels turn into an exploration of his own life, the reasons for his return to Baja, and the reason for his own disenchantment. The landscape of Baja California is fundamental to the poetics of the novel. 13. My translation into Spanish: “como espacio heterotrópico el desierto peninsular emerge como una realidad geográfica concreta que atrae poderosamente a los personajes … incluso en el actual contexto de globalización” (4). 14. My translation into Spanish: “Es … el lado oscuro de la luna Mexicana … la parte desconocida parece ser, parece sentirse. Lo que pasa es que tienes la sensación de asilamiento, de lejanía con el resto del país. …” (Moreno 2000). 15. “Heterotopia” is a concept with which Michel Foucault described non-­ hegemonic spaces in which otherness is present. These spaces can simultaneously be physical and mental. 16. My translation into Spanish: “una inmensa roca, eso era la peninsula des­ habitada. Por eso se marcharon para siempre los misioneros. … Ni indígenas que castellanizar. Ni parroquias que construir. Nada. Un desierto, un paisaje ­Marciano, … podía decirse que la mitad de las misiones no eran más que una quimera” (F. Campbell 2000, 93). 17. More examples of these kinds of transpositions are described extensively in Philip French’s book Westerns (2005).

References Altman, Rick. 1999. Film/Genre. London, BFI Publishing. Baden-Powell, Robert. 1992. Rovering to Success. A Guide to Young Manhood. S­ tevens Publishing. Bellver Sáez, Pilar. 2012. “Transpeninsular de Federico Campbell: El desierto de Baja California y la crisis de la (pos)modernidad en el México del nuevo milenio.” Hipertexto 15: 3–18. Bolado, Carlos, dir. 1998. Bajo California: el límite del tiempo. Mexico. Campbell, Federico. 2000. Transpeninsular. Mexico: Joaquín Mortíz.

232  Carolina Rueda Campbell, Neil. 2013. Post-Westerns. Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Carmichael, Deborah A., ed. 2006. The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns, Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre. Salt Lake City: Utah UP, 1–18. Cawelti, John G. 1971. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP. Chee, Fabio. 2014. “Visual Origins: Chicana/o Representations in Film and Narrative.” Dis. U of California, Irvine. Accessed May. 11, 2014. El País. 2000. “Carlos Bolado retrata el ‘otro México’ en su primera película.” June 21. Accessed Jun. 10, 2014. Dika, Vera. 2003. Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. Cambridge UP. Fenin, George N. and William K. Everson. 1962. The Western: From Silent to C ­ inema. New York: Bonanza Books. Fernández, Alvaro A. 2012. “El road movie en México: Hacia el cronotopo del viaje.” (Re)discovering America: Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America. Wilfried Raussert and Graciela Martínez-Zalce, eds. Tempe: Bilingual Press. 188–197. French, Phillip. 2005. Westerns. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited. Indick, William. 2008. The Psychology of the Western. Jefferson NC: McFarland. Herrera, María Sobek, ed. 2012. Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC–CLIO. Jones, Howard M. 1965. O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years. London: Chatto & Windus. Klein, Kerwin L. 1996. “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, Or Being and Becoming Postwestern.” Pacific Historical Review 65: 196–210. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2001. Landscape and Power. Chicago: Chicago UP. Moreno, Judith. 2000. “Al otro lado de la luna mexicana” (interview with Federico Campbell). June 18. Accessed Apr. 27, 2014. Rocha, Glauber, dir. 1964. Deus e o diabo na terra do sol. Brazil. Saunders, John. 2001. The Western Genre. From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey. New York: Wallflower. Seydor, Paul. 1999. Peckinpah: The Western Films. A Reconsideration. Champaign: Illinois UP. Wilmsen, Carl. 2006. “Cinematic Conquest: Breaking the Mexican American ­Connection to the Land in the Movies.” The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns, Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre. Deborah A. Carmichael, ed. Salt Lake City: Utah UP. 182–211. Print.

14 Disinterring the Western in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men Brent Strang

The Western haunts world cinema, but nowhere so much as in its nation of origin. Contemporary audiences well recognize the ghostly effect of the classical Western when they see its old codes resurrected. But the effect is further underscored when recast in modern-day settings in films like Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1954) and The Misfits (John Huston, 1960) or Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996) and Down in the Valley (David Jacobson, 2005). Philip French and Neil Campbell both refer to such films as post-Westerns.1 Since no genre has endured as many cycles of death and resurrection, revisionism has become the Western’s specialized mode of expression. But the Hollywood Western’s prolonged internment between the mid-1970s and early 1990s has afforded enough historical distance that its revival emerges as more or less entirely revisionist. From our present vantage in late modernity, the classical Western appears to bear a cluster of meanings, partly outgrown and partly vestigial, within the nation’s cultural imaginary. The post-Western’s aesthetic form is especially equipped for a postmortem of Western cultural history as it has been passed on through a series of cinematic representations. Inflected with the postmodern condition, these Westerns don’t re-envision the West but the Western itself. The two post-Westerns here under review critique the Western genre as a historically burdened and problematic way of seeing. They imply this cultural form still has some hold on American subjectivity. As Campbell writes: “Through layers of representational humus, post-Westerns assert an archaeological probing into foundations forgotten, repressed, or built over” (Campbell 2013, 25). The classical Western is this metaphorical humus, which is why Campbell claims all postwar Westerns as somehow posthumous, punning a term introduced by Jacques Rancière.2 I’ve elsewhere branded a series of post-1990s films that critique rigid and decaying representations of masculinity as postmortem Westerns to highlight the influence of the 1970s-1980s internment on the genre’s afterlife.3 Progressing in this vein, I call The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) disinterred Westerns because of their explicitly self-conscious relation to the buried classical Western text of yore. Whereas the plot of the former hinges upon the disinterment of a corpse and its reburial across the border

234  Brent Strang in Mexico, the latter is about a sheriff haunted by the heroic myths of his lawmen ancestors, which presently fail him in battling the implacable and unseen evil that attends advanced capitalism in late modernity. Both border Westerns, they aesthetically and formally express the inability of these ancestral subjectivities to cope with the contemporary effects of transnationalism and neoliberalism. These ancestral subjectivities are channeled through the classical ­Western’s iconographies, tropes, gender-performative scripts, and authoritative point of view. The classical Western springs from a particular historical moment spanning the postwar period to the beginning of the genre’s so-called demise in the early 1960s. I admit this claim on the classical Western is contentious for many critics, as is the very idea of a classical Western.4 Notwithstanding their valid genre criticism, my view is based on how popular culture is disposed to think about the Western as a simplified condensation of meanings, as decades gradually distance viewers and filmmakers from this period. The 1950s is not only when the Western’s production peaked5 but also when the nation’s ideological consensus reached its height,6 when racial liberalism at home effectively masked an imperialistic foreign policy abroad, when gender was largely defined by adopting strict codes born of “essential” traits,7 and when traditional institutions still preserved some faith in a morally sound ethos. Hence, for the purposes of this discussion, the classical ­Western is conceived as American cinema’s last bastion of consensual belief – an authoritative text with pervasive sway over national and gendered subject formation. The disinterred Western counterposes this text of consensual belief with present-day cultural malaise stemming from ideological dissensus, moral cynicism, self-consciousness of gender performativity, and systemic racial and economic oppression. Raising the specter of the classical Western’s dead tropes and obsolete values through long, wide takes of open vistas inscribes a palimpsest onto contemporary milieus that trace the historical rupture between then and now. In the purely cinematographic register, this palimpsest vividly illustrates Jacques Rancière’s thwarted fable. Rancière argues in Film Fables that an author’s fable is suddenly thwarted, dispelled, or impeded by the material thingliness within the image. Cinema is fundamentally riven with these two contradictory tendencies, telling stories and recording reality. The former creates the illusion of a beginning, a middle, and an end to life’s circumstances through Aristotelian mimesis, while the latter conveys the inscrutable presence of pure forms, light, and shadow. Rancière sees this opposition between mythos and opsis in perpetual tension, suspending cinematic representation in a state of aesthetic play. I argue the disinterred Western is a unique form of thwarted fable. Picture how a man on horseback against a horizon sharply signifies the mythical frontier, whereupon helicopters enter the frame and ruin the portrait’s mythic idyll. In the case of the Disinterred Western, the sense of aesthetic play is not limited to the disjunction of mythos and opsis in the image but

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  235 raised to a meta-historical engagement with the genre as a whole. And so the fable side of the equation exceeds its storytelling function, foregrounding the classical ­Western text itself as a fable. The result is a generative dissensus between the ­forward-looking liberal progressivism of then with the post-structural anti-foundationalism of today. The two sides of this rupture also highlight a point of transition between two hegemonic racial ideologies. Following Jodi Melamed, I ­analyze how these films historicize racial and economic oppression as they have endured and differentially developed through racial ­liberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism. Finally, as border Westerns, The Three Burials of Melquiades and No Country for Old Men reflect contemporary discourse about the U.S.-­Mexico border, race, immigration, and the spectacle of Mexico as it is refracted through the hegemonic prism of the white U.S. imaginary. Yet these old ways of seeing and being in the world are perpetually frustrated within the transnational, militarized border region of contemporary southwest Texas. The frontier of old is revamped as a window onto the Global South through the frame of Mexico. The encounter is as savage and bloody as ever but is no longer reducible to a standoff between hero and villain or domestic and foreign bodies. Protagonists are instead caught up in a swarm of material effects issuing from transnational flows of people and capital, state interests, and juridico-discursive infrastructures. The deployment of the classical Western prism within this setting is a technique of aesthetically and narratively thwarting the film’s form into shards of fractured visibilities. Such is the disinterred Western’s way of showing it cannot really see the other, the genre’s colonial heritage being so bound up in a three-fold knot of nation-masculinity-violence. Nestling the Western Corpse-Bride in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Old Blind Man: You’d better throw it way. It’s rotten. Pete: I’d like to keep the hide. You got any salt I could use to cure it? Old Blind Man: No, son, I barely got enough salt to put on the dinner

table. … I got a jug of anti-freeze. Would that work? The opening scene is synecdochical for the film. A pair of white, middleaged males roams the Texas Trans-Pecos in their topless jeep. One sights something with his binoculars and asks the other, “Wanna shoot a ­coyote?” “Hell, yes,” he replies, then takes aim and fires his high-powered rifle. Inspecting their kill, they come upon what the coyote was nibbling on. It’s the remains of an undocumented Mexican migrant, ­Melquiades, who was shot and left for dead days earlier. Each term in the metonymic chain white males-hunt-coyote-Mexican corpse is a metaphorical s­ ubstitution for elements that comprise the film’s underlying message. The men wear army

236  Brent Strang

Figure 14.1 Pete fills Melquiades’s corpse with a jug of anti-freeze to stave off its decomposition.

fatigues, signaling a cowboy-cum-military masculinity, whose accoutrements (binoculars, long-range scope, and four-wheeler) have long replaced yesteryear’s lone cowboy on horseback with six-shooter. They continue the Westerner’s old job – clearing the frontier of ­menace – but now with a technological superiority that puts an atrocious distance between hunter and hunted. The fated coyote represents the Native ­American, seen by the white man as a trickster figure, either savage or wise but never as itself. And the corpse, finally, is the classical Western fable: long dead, presently disinterred, and reeking from its past transgressions of sexism, jingoistic triumphalism, and racist representations of Natives, African Americans, and, not least, Mexicans. The scene’s metonymy also emphasizes the central trope of in/visibility. The white subject spies and shoots its prey, exhibiting mastery through the technologized gaze, only to be surprised by the repressed reality that lies beneath. Thus the problem of seeing rightly is announced as a key aesthetic ­ illing strategy. Consider how the film’s non-linear structure breaks up the k of Melquiades into four shorter segments, each spaced throughout the first forty minutes. The formal pattern and editing make a subtle argument about U.S.-Mexican border relations. The first segment is a brief shot of ­Melquiades’s corpse being dragged by a uniformed person into a shallow grave. The second follows border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) on duty when he is surprised by the sound of gunshots in the distance. He scrambles for his rifle, then aims and shoots at something the viewer never sees. In the third segment, he runs to see whom he has shot and the scene ­ elquiades cuts before he fully realizes his mistake. And in the final segment M is tending his goats when he spots a coyote stalking his herd and shoots at it. Since this scene is disconnected from its causal precursor by over ten minutes, it seems completely random when he is shot in the chest by a bullet from nowhere.

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  237 The editing argues injustice spirals outward from a blind, systematic brutality that transcends spatial and temporal coherence. When Mike Norton first shoots into offscreen space, his eye line is not matched to any image. The next shot leaps in space and time to Melquiades’s official burial by the county. Viewers are left hanging in an unsutured diegetic space while the bullet continues its offscreen trajectory during the intermittent scenes. By contrast, when Melquiades fires at the coyote, the viewer is sutured into a coherent diegetic space through a shot reverse-shot, which makes it all the more unsettling when the bullet strikes Melquiades off screen. The spatial and temporal disjunction of these two segments signify radically separate spheres where a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality wreaks devastation on the unsuspecting other. As pugnacious and abusive as Mike Norton is, the film does not frame him as the singular figure of evil. Rather, his attitudes and behavior are the performative effects of the intensification of border security in post-9/11 United States. The Patriot Act and legislation of its ilk opened the floodgate to a deluge of material-discursive effects. Waves of terrorist paranoia and anti-immigration sentiment flowed to the outlying tributaries of the border regions, coalescing finally in the bodies and everyday practices of local law enforcement and border patrol. In an early scene showing the seizure and detention of a flock of migrants, Norton uses unnecessary force to tackle a man who attempts to flee and later breaks the nose of a woman who intervenes. When his superior, Captain Gomez (Michael Rodriguez), chastises him for going “way overboard,” Norton protests. Gomez responds coolly: “I want you to think about what kinda trouble I can get in, you keep beatin’ these people up. I don’ like trouble, boy. Don’ like it at all.” What is arguably worse than an overtly racist approval of Norton’s actions is that the commanding officer censures them, not in the name of justice and human decency but merely to avoid trouble. It signifies his complicity in a more systemic racism endemic to neoliberal multiculturalism. Jodi Melamed has expounded on this systemic racism that has metastasized in the postwar period under the aegis of racial liberalism and its ­historical development into neoliberal multiculturalism. Melamed argues the pyrrhic victory of racial liberalism and later neoliberal multiculturalism was to ostensibly decouple the historic binds of racial injustice from economic injustice within public discourse. In officially condemning blatant racism by phenotype, the postwar U.S. promoted a racially inclusive liberal nationalism that effectively redefined race as culture. Accordingly, “any racial/cultural deviations from an ideal national culture connote negative deviations – in other words, grounds for ‘legitimate’ exclusion of some from the wealth and freedoms presumed to be commonly available to all ­Americans” (Melamed 2006, 7). Norton’s superior abides by a state-­ recognized antiracism that has long since evacuated authentic concern for the other’s physical and economic well-being, yet continues to maintain all the politically correct rhetorical gestures that satisfy public scrutiny.

238  Brent Strang What’s most contemptible about Gomez, then, is his utmost need to maintain status as a well-oiled cog within the bureaucratic system of racial and economic oppression. When he learns three migrants escaped the roundup, he quips, “Well somebody’s gotta pick strawberries.” As a chief enforcer on the front line, he routinely observes the contradictions of U.S. state policy when Homeland securitization coincides with neoliberal economic interests. After 9/11 the U.S.-Mexico border had been further deemed a terrorist threat. Yet as Jason Ackelson shows, “NAFTA and globalization themselves have created a transnational economic structure that serves the interests of large multinational firms such as agribusinesses, [which favors] the existence of illegal immigration because labor is generally more valuable when it is cheap and undocumented” (2005, 167). It’s no matter that thirty migrants were arrested and three broke loose. Either way they serve the interests of capital. If they’re not bound to serve as non-dissenting, non-unionizing strawberry pickers, then they’re likely to be detained for some unknown period in a privately regulated facility, serving as cash crops in the booming border-industrial complex.8 The migrants serve multiple functions in this network. Their undocumented, raced bodies are insidiously mined for surplus value while they simultaneously construct the image of the other that helps “specify the conditions of insecurity” (Ackelson 2005, 168). Whereas Norton and the border patrol are cast as thick cogs in this network of oppression, the film’s form makes a more nuanced critique of the postcolonial gaze of its hero, Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones). Pete’s subjectivity strongly commands the film’s narration. It is only through his flashbacks that we come to identify with Melquiades. Pete remembers when Melquiades first arrived on his doorstep and he gave him a job. The flashbacks take on a romantic tenor, picturing the two corralling steer together in long shots bathed in warm hues of natural light accompanied by nondiegetic guitar strings. In one such flashback, Melquiades makes Pete promise, if he should die, that he gets buried in his Mexican hometown and not in Texas “beneath all these fucking billboards.” The scene not only signals the insecurity of life for undocumented migrants but also the increasingly one-way flow of migration across the border. Melquiades hasn’t been home in five years and he’s not likely to cross the border again, given the everescalating security. Though the film is in the habit of looking back to a time when all seemed wholesome, Pete’s flashbacks betray a fabricated goldenness when compared to scenes of the present day. The town’s truck-stop restaurant, police station, and morgue are shot with high-contrast film stock, and fluorescent lighting enhances the cold, blue tones in their mise en scène. In these spaces Pete tries unsuccessfully to convince Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) to investigate Melquiades’s murder, and the tonalities of the images reflect the recalcitrance and indifference of the legal system. When Perkins becomes dismayed that the Sheriff ordered Melquiades’s burial without notifying him, the Sheriff coolly retorts: “I didn’t have to notify you about a goddamn thing. He was

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  239 a wetback.” As with Captain Gomez, the racism here is not directed against Melquiades’s color but his illegal status. Belmont’s tone implies Melquiades is excluded from the normative cultural ideal sanctioned under the national security state so the unceremonious burial is justified. Pete’s rage is enflamed by the sense that there’s little he can do. The injustice is distributed across a chain of network effects from micro to macro. Pete needs a single villain, as does the classical Western fable, to chisel order out of confusion. The film grants him one in Norton, who Pete learns is the killer. As he stakes out the Nortons’ modular home from inside his truck, he surveys the scene with disdain. Some kids shout profanities while displaying their lack of athleticism. An eccentric neighbor carries her fat dog across the yard to its leash tied to the fence. Across the street, a billboard reads “Liberty Means Freedom from Higher Interest Rates.” Liberty and freedom, shibboleths that used to signify in the classical Western, are textualized here in the shallow connotations of neoliberal discourse. The diamond-mesh grating in Pete’s rear view is doubled by the wire fence framing his view of Norton’s house, signaling obstruction, of justice as well as of migrant flow across the frontier. Pete kidnaps Norton at gunpoint and forces him to disinter M ­ elquiades. They saddle the horses and start towards Mexico so Pete can fulfill his pledge while teaching Mike Norton a lesson. As they ride out, they’re framed in a long shot against the southern horizon. The Mexican landscape functions as the mythical escape valve for America’s malaise. The second half of the film proceeds linearly as a frontier journey that succeeds the romanticism of Pete’s flashbacks. The classical Western thus resurrected is also infused with the racial liberalism of its historical moment. In the U.S.’s postwar transition from white supremacy and colonial capitalism to racial liberalism and transnational capitalism, Jodi Melamed cites Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma as a watershed document: Myrdal sets the stage for a new, heroic form of liberal whiteness in An American Dilemma by defining ‘the Negro problem’ as a ‘moral dilemma,’ ‘a problem in the heart of the American,’ meaning white Americans. The study then portrays the white American who can solve this moral and psychological dilemma – who undergoes a heroic moral conversion and assents to the fundamental equality of African Americans – to be a privileged identity (Melamed 2006, 7). Such racial liberalism is embodied in classical Western heroes like those played by Jimmy Stewart in Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950) and J­ effrey Hunter in both The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) and Sergeant Rutledge (Ford, 1960). Similarly, for Pete Perkins his personal path to redemption is grounded in avenging a racial injustice. But his quest to assert ­Melquiades’s fundamental equality by giving him a dignified burial and driving his

240  Brent Strang assailant to repent is an elaborate secondary revision spun through the classical Western fabula. His primary psychic process is a flight from the shadow of late modernity. These contradictory impulses manifest in the image as a rift between mythos and opsis, effectively exposing Pete’s quixotic journey as a ­Rancièrian thwarted fable. The scene that best illustrates this rift takes place in a small Mexican village. As Mike recovers from a snake bite, Pete unwinds in the Cantina Liebre awaiting a long-distance connection to his sometime girlfriend Rachel (Melissa Leo). He has a bit of a shine on, partly because he’s been sipping tequila and partly because, at this stage in his journey – exhausted, engrossed in kidnapping, and overly acquainted with ­Melquiades’s advanced decomposition – he’s beginning to lose his mind. Oddly, his composure has never looked more serene. The advanced setting sun issues streaks of purple and orange; a Mexican girl keys Chopin on a creaky, out-of-tune piano; a dubbed 1950s-era sci-fi film plays on a small black-and-white television screen; and strung through the cantina, pulling all the discordance together, is a darling string of Christmas lights. The soundscape oscillates between the ambient sounds of the cantina and warped noises passing through Pete’s mind that sound like radio channels fading in and out. The viewer’s confidence in the protagonist’s sanity is by now sufficiently unhinged. There is something uncanny in this scene that viewers can admire along with Pete as they engage in free, indirect discourse with his state of mind. Sitting on his stool, over his left shoulder are the rudimentary objects of the cantina and over his right, a wide-open Mexican vista. Smiling bemusedly to himself, it’s as though the clocks have been turned back fifty years and he was home again – or at last – in his own Western movie. The scene’s discordant elements are channeled through Pete’s point of view like some preconscious kaleidoscope, a jumble of imperfections romanticized into his own perfect scene. Yet the scene’s sundry protuberances draw attention to themselves and the two iconographies compete. The view over one shoulder promises the romantic Western fable, and over the other, materially denies its possibility. The scene steers a different course when the phone call comes through from Rachel and Pete asks her to come to Mexico and marry him. ­Several scenes ago she disingenuously said she loved only him, but Pete seems to have taken her at her word. She reminds him she’s married and hangs up. He lurches out of the cantina, around a corner, and into a little tin shed. He slowly unwraps the coverings from his only friend, the long-rotten ­Melquiades. The stomach-churning fetor, to which others frequently bear witness, in no way registers on Pete’s face. He only mutters, “You look like hell, son,” and proceeds to comb its hair with a horse brush, pulling it clean off the corpse’s head with a dull, scrapping sound. Defeated, he slumps back against the shed wall and the scene ends. Pete foregoes heterosexual coupling for nestling with a male corpse bride. With his postcolonial gaze so rooted in the benevolent paternalism of racial liberalism, Pete remains blind to the brute materiality before him. He

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  241 cannot smell the rot but only sees his friend, who has by now become conflated with his project of liberal white redemption. The raced victim is thus his alibi, bestowing his life a purpose through fabular logic. Raised from the classical Western humus, Melquiades’s corpse is this fable. Thrice buried, twice resurrected, cured with a box of salt, and pumped full of anti-freeze, it aptly conveys the genre’s stigma as well as its increasingly funereal tone in each cycle of resurrection. Pete enjoins us to court the fable despite its peeling flesh, expressing the deep-seated cultural desire to make sense of late modernity by contriving a beginning, middle, and end to the randomness and sprawling mundanity of everyday life. Thus how this film chooses to end its story is especially significant. Pete and Mike wander the Mexican landscape looking for Melquiades’s hometown of Jimenez. Gradually we learn there is no such place, but Pete refuses to believe it. He obstinately surveys the terrain against the little map ­Melquiades had drawn for him. Finally, they come across some old ruins that Pete is convinced is Jimenez. He holds a photo of Melquiades out towards Norton as proof, without noticing the photo is turned to the side, indicating Pete’s canted point of view. Norton, so beaten and exhausted by now, responds with unexpected empathy: “Yeah. This is it. You found it, Pete.” It becomes clear to viewers that Melquiades was always aware that he was the locus of romantic projection for his Anglo friend. And so he played the trickster beyond the grave with a “joke on the unwitting gringo,” as Camilla Fojas puts it (2009, 195). They finally bury Melquiades and Pete lets the repentant Mike go free, leaving him the better horse. As Pete rides into the distance, Mike calls out after him, “You gonna be alright?” but gets no answer. The iconography of this closing long shot, picturing the hero vanishing into the horizon with the pupil calling after him, is drawn straight from Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and referenced in a string of Westerns including Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985) and Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) Shane may well be the paragon fable, distilling the bare essentials of the classical Western, as Will Wright, Robert Warshow, and André Bazin have each demonstrated. By citing it here, the film forces us to reflect on the unreality of the fabular ending. This long shot of the horizon does not signify the open possibility of the old frontier but rather the radical foreclosure of free migration. Pete cannot return to America, and unless he decides to surrender his imaginary identification with premodern Mexico, he can only ever seek refuge in its few remaining regions. Chasing Ghosts across the Hard Caliche in No Country for Old Men As with Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, No Country for Old Men opens with a synecdochical series of long shots in the Texas Trans-Pecos. The year is 1980. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) narrates in voiceover

242  Brent Strang that he descends from a line of lawmen, the third after his dad and granddad before him: “Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe. … You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated in these times.” The words are juxtaposed against picturesque still images of the landscape, empty of human habitation. Viewers may be drawn to fill in the picture by imagining cowboys and Indians riding across the vistas, images sourced from their memories of classical Westerns, no doubt. The voiceover simultaneously evokes nostalgia for older times and discouragement by the present, the latter of which is reinforced in the sheriff’s timbre. Any imaginings of the great plainsmen of old are therefore imbued with a ghostly effect, heroes of the past without successors. The opening scene establishes the spirit of demythologization through ghosting the presence of the Western. When, a few scenes later, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) tracks an antelope through the same landscape, the adjustments in cinematography and sound further the demythologizing effect. The film stock appears to be bleachbypassed, muting the colors and emphasizing the parched look of the landscape. The camera tracks at a low height, level with Moss’s boots as they crunch along the powdery, sun-baked terrain. The scene directly contrasts the saturated hues of Technicolor Westerns like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949) and Shane, the action of which tended to be filmed at a certain remove and accompanied with grandiose scores. In retrospect the sound and grit of the frontier seem sanitized from the mechanisms of action, producing an idyllic look. By contrast, No Country for Old Men’s emphasis on the material elements and absence of musical score and soundtrack enhance verisimilitude. The special focus here on the boots crunching the dirt intimates the stratum of the past buried beneath – the layer of the old fable whose color and grandeur have since been crusted over by harsh terrain. In casting, the Coens agreed they needed someone who looks like a cowboy to play Llewelyn Moss. Josh Brolin was ideal because he had worked on a ranch in his younger years and knew well the rugged and taciturn West Texan mien the part required. While hunting antelope in the backcountry, Llewelyn happens on the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad: five dead ­Mexicans, a truckload of heroin, and a satchel with two million dollars. He takes the satchel, unaware it is rigged with a transponder, and is soon tracked by the man hired to retrieve the money, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). With a view to a better life for him and his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald), Llewelyn returns home and tells her she has to hurry and pack up and move to Odessa while he settles some things. Anything she leaves in their trailer she “ain’t gonna see again.” When she makes a fuss that her life has been upturned, he grumbles back, “Baby, things happen. I can’t take ‘em back.” Carla Jean, obliging him against her intuition, and Llewelyn, doing what a man’s gotta do in spite of his wife’s protests, together rehearse the traditional gender roles of old Westerns, separate as they are, each in their respective sexed domains.

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  243 The plot proceeds as a taut game of cat and mouse between Chigurh and Llewelyn, with the sheriff picking up their trail usually one or two steps behind. The chase scenes take place mostly at night, in low-lit hotel rooms and quiet streets with sodium lamps casting pools of reddish-orange. The gloomy lighting, the meticulous focus on each man’s clever planning and procedure, and the tightly edited back and forth of their chase resemble a neo-noir thriller. But as is typical in Coen brothers’ films, there is a patchwork of genres involved; there are traces of the police procedural, of serial-killer horror, and even of comedy. Neil Campbell touches on this propensity for generic mash-up in the contemporary Western such as we see in ­Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003–4) and Django Unchained (2012). F ­ ollowing Jim Collins’s concept of genericity, Campbell claims “access to visual culture and the mass circulation of cinematic images through television, dvd, and other digital forms contributed to the ‘simultaneity’ of generic consumption, with viewers absorbing forms in more complex, simultaneous ways” (2013, 21). In No Country for Old Men, this generic discordance is something like Rancière’s notion of aesthetic play, where a genre announces itself only to have its conventions and expectations thwarted by its juxtaposition with another. Consider, for example, the Western iconography of Llewelyn Moss in the Chihuahuan Desert. As he follows blood trails to the flood plain where the shoot-out took place, the framing expands to long shots. He approaches the slain Mexicans cautiously, with his rifle out and safety off. Keeping his target in sight, he watches them motionless for a long time and is crystal clear about his surroundings in all directions. The long shot is vital to the ­Western, perhaps more than any other aesthetic technique, because it secures the autopoietic subject’s mastery through vision. One sees a friend or foe advancing from afar; shoot-outs happen openly, in the middle of the street; only cowards shoot their enemy in the back. Thus when the film transitions to the neo-noir setting and vision becomes fractured through broken glass, reflections in windows and rear-view mirrors, Llewelyn is out of his element. For all his competence as a frontier masculinity, Chigurh’s transnational business masculinity is more flexible, demonstrating a transgeneric competence, so to speak. Consequently, Llewelyn barely makes it out alive and flees to Mexico to recover from his wounds. In this regard, the casting, make-up, and wardrobe for Anton Chigurh are carefully crafted. He is darkly complected, and his foreign accent cannot be placed. Actor Javier Bardem said he worked to neutralize his strong S­ panish accent under the Coens’ direction (Frosty 2007). Regardless of whether Chigurh comes from Mexico, Central America, South America, or Europe, his accent evinces the efforts of one who has suppressed their own difference in pursuit of America’s normative cultural ideal. This ideal is not the saltof-the earth neighborliness of middle America, the type of people ­Chigurh routinely threatens and murders, sometimes even because of their acts of kindness. Rather it is the image of a transnational business masculinity,

244  Brent Strang which sociologist R.W. Connell argues is becoming hegemonic within contemporary globalization (2005, 244–66). Chigurh’s cold, technical rationality, his absence of personal responsibility to others, and his conditional loyalties even to corporations squarely fit the masculine subject formation of tomorrow’s successful businessperson.9 This film is set during the early onset of the neoliberal sea change, when a spate of new legislation started loosening restrictions on finance capital, deregulating the public sector, and opening up world markets to multinationals and global trade, to say nothing of increased militarization and border security. Chigurh’s is precisely the cultural ideal that thrives within neoliberal multiculturalism. His transnational business masculinity erases his racial difference while excusing his social belligerence. With his somber denim outfit, his 1970s hair-helmet, and his wicked-looking alligator-skin boots, Chigurh would not fit in with any lunch room of ordinary Americans, yet his core values and access to capital connect him to the ruling class. Llewelyn’s migration into Mexico is the first of two brief scenes staged at the border. Like most of the vignettes in this film that comment on transnationality and interracial relations, they are sardonic and brief. The first happens at night when Llewelyn staggers southward and encounters three white frat boys with beers in hand about to cross. Pale-faced and blood-soaked, he offers one of them five hundred dollars for his coat. They demand to see the money first. After the exchange, Llewelyn asks for a beer and one of them tries to see how much he can charge for it. Llewelyn then proceeds across while the Mexican border guard snoozes in his booth. Such scenes function as oblique references to the world’s racial and economic order as the backdrop to the first-world problems that consume our protagonists. Here we’re invited to reflect how much the mighty American dollar leverages in Mexico in 1980, as well as the free-flowing migration that white privilege exploits.10 When he comes back to re-enter the U.S., Llewelyn is confronted by a surly military-type INS official (Brandon Smith). Their exchange is a rapidfire back and forth: Official:

Who do you think gets through this gate into the United States of America? Moss: I don’t know … uh … American citizens? Official: Some American citizens. Who do you think decides? Moss: You do, I reckon. Official: That is correct. How do I decide? Moss: I don’t know. Official: I ask questions. An’ if I get sensible answers, people get to go to ‘Merica. An’ if I don’t get sensible answers, they don’t. Anything ‘bout that you don’t understand? Moss: No sir. Official: Now, I ask you again, how you come to be out here with no clothes?

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  245

Figure 14.2 An INS Official drills Llewelyn, who tries to re-enter the U.S. with no pants on.

In their article “Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and Resistance,” Amoore and Hall critique the role of political art in disrupting the routinization of everyday repetitive acts that construct the very possibility of a securable state. “The border’s sequences are ritualized, and the border can be understood as theatrical, in that it shares certain key qualities with ‘theatre’” (2010, 303). As theatre, border crossing stages the “spectacle of the ‘illegal alien’ that the law produces” as well as “the performance of control” and a “showy set of symbolic gestures” (2010, 303). Art’s political function, then, is to expose the ritual of border crossing as an actively constructed theatre, much in the way this scene does. The way the guard drills Moss may be familiar to viewers who have endured similar experiences, but the lack of other routine measures such as passport verification or WHTI-compliant documents, customs declaration forms, and routine inspection of goods seems extraordinary by today’s standards. Indeed, Moss’s presence at the checkpoint with nothing but cowboy boots and a bottom-flashing hospital gown is the scene’s wry commentary on the steep intensification of border security measures since the late 1970s.11 As the official continues his questioning, he asks Moss about his record of military service. Moss answers seriously and deferentially, realizing his affect and two tours in Vietnam are his only ways to authenticate the citizen ideal, lacking both an ID and the pocket to hold it. In border theatre, each person must iterate a normative performativity, or, as Sophie Nield puts it: “at the border you ‘play’ yourself, and hope that you are convincing” (qtd. in Amoore and Hall, 2010, 303). Similar to Three Burials of Melquiades, No Country for Old Men also critiques the blindness of white male subjectivities by misaligning their ­visualities through editing. It’s a compelling feature of this film that our three main protagonists – Moss, Chigurh, and Bell – whose lives are all inter-implicated for the duration of the story, never clearly see each other but continue to occupy the same space in a series of missed encounters. The

246  Brent Strang most obvious foregrounding of this trope is the couch in Moss’s home, on which Chigurh later sits after missing Moss and Bell later sits after missing Chigurh.12 This motif is central to the film’s critique, particularly with respect to the patchwork of genres in its formal style. Bell tries to intercede in the neo-noir game of cat and mouse and deliver Llewelyn a message from the light of day. “These people are dangerous. They won’t quit,” he warns Carla Jean, who reassures the sheriff that her man “can take all comers.” Indeed, Llewelyn thinks he can as he threatens Chigurh over the phone: “I’ve decided to make you a special project of mine. You ain’t have to come look for me at all.” And hence viewers are primed for a standoff or showdown between these two. But the film takes a different turn. The viewer does not get to see the cowboy fight his last stand, nor is Chigurh the one who kills him. Llewelyn is shot dead by a faction of Mexicans who are also involved in this mix, which the viewers may have forgotten. Deviating from the syntactics of the Western, which is Moss’s customary milieu, conventional space is splintered into a generic mosaic such that the Western cowboy is caught out looking one direction and doesn’t know what’s coming from the other. The commentary here is richly layered. The images of Mexico and ­Mexicans in this film are purposely recessive, which is to say they’re scattered to the margins of the diegesis. As such, they form a structural absence that deepens the illusory sense the white characters are going about their First World problems in a vacuum. If viewers are surprised, like Moss, by his death by the Mexicans, it’s because the viewers, like Moss, have forgotten how this whole ordeal began. Perhaps the five Mexicans and their spoiled drug deal were overlooked because they so aptly fit the stereotype Michel Cieutat scathingly critiques in his article “Le Mexicain vu par Hollywood: ou le péril basané”: “Iconographie extreme accentuée par d’autres traits déplaisants: le M ­ exicain est cruel et sadique” (2005, 97).13 Or perhaps they were overlooked because they were dead Mexicans. The film cheekily draws attention to this point. When Deputy Wendell (Garret Dilahunt) corrects himself in telling the sheriff the people in the fray “is Mexicans … was Mexicans,” the sheriff puts forward the riddle: “Now there’s a question: whether they stopped being, and when?” But the notion the Mexican is fated to be overlooked and reduced to the so-called swarthy peril is no better demonstrated than in the brief vignette with the well-dressed Mexican and Carla Jean’s grandmother. While she waits to board a bus, he swoops in to offer help with her bags. Taken off guard by his kindness, she peers at him through her coke-bottle spectacles: “It’s not often you see a Mexican in a suit.” Behind his obsequious smile, the well-dressed Mexican (Roland Uribe) betrays an air of menace but it’s not perceptible to the lady. And he knows it. So she unwittingly divulges Llewelyn’s whereabouts in El Paso. There are still other layers of critique in the way Moss’s bloody sendoff is edited out. The way the film abruptly dispenses with the hard-boiled thriller arc of the story and the burden of the plot is thrust on Ed Tom Bell. This prompts the question: What type of character is Bell and what

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  247 is the nature of the problem he has inherited that the film would shift its focus to him in this manner? He is, first of all, not a frontier masculinity like ­Llewelyn, which means he doesn’t have to compulsively prove himself or win. The manner in which the film cuts to Moss’s death not only comments upon the forgotten Mexicans but also stamps out generic forms of personal heroism as though their dysfunction were a foregone conclusion. The ­Western fable’s myth of regeneration through violence is not accorded the dignity of being seen, even in its failure. If audiences are frustrated with the filmmaker’s choice, it indicates the degree to which they are still enthralled by outworn fables and compulsive masculinities. Bell’s weathered countenance indicates one who would recognize the shortfalls of frontier masculinities, probably having witnessed their failure a time or two. Thus the film turns to Bell for a more sober reflection on the state of things, one stripped of classical Western heroism. In the classical Western, space isolates, distance demarcates, and vision identifies, and through these means, a singular villain is sculpted from the dense block of chaos and confusion. However, the conditions of the diegetic world in No Country for Old Men extend well beyond the figure of Anton Chigurh. His ghastly actions from scene to scene notwithstanding, the film’s formal patterning, with its generic potlatch, its motif of missed encounters, and its interstitial vignettes, strongly suggest Chigurh is only an effect within a wider chain that stretches beyond any one character’s apprehension. S­ imilar to Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, this film stages provisional standoffs of good vs bad, but the formal pattern in which they take place thwarts these events as fabular constructions of genre. In both films, it’s the background in which these events take place that tells the true story. Techniques of formal style and thwarted visibility spring this background to the fore as a problem of racial and economic injustice in globalized, neoliberal, late modernity. In terms of genre this is a near impossible thing to represent. Yet this may explain why so much of the dialogue in No Country for Old Men is laced with the apocalyptic, with the sense of an implacable darkness encroaching on the horizon. Surveying the crime scene in the backcountry – the “colossal goat fuck” as one man calls it – Wendell laments, “Well, it’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” to which Bell responds, “If it ain’t it’ll work ‘til a mess gets here.” Wendell cannot see the consternation on Bell’s face that the viewer does. His back is turned to spare Wendell the sight of an older man’s discouragement because this man is supposed to be a pillar of law enforcement in the region. Looking at this dark horizon, Bell glimpses his chances are flimsy at best, just as fables have no place in the real world, but the remnants of his hanging on are what this film is about. This hanging on signals how the fable persists to linger in some faint way, as intimated in the opening scene. The dismal state of things is surely because of “all the money and the drugs,” complains an El Paso sheriff to Bell. For his own part, Bell thinks, “Once you stop hearin’ sir and madam, the rest is soon to follow.” If good manners

248  Brent Strang are a sign of our institutions’ success at instilling a sound ethos, then clearly these institutions have been compromised with a different ethos, one in which money and the marketplace are the foremost value. So it is that this film shows bloody money being exchanged to bystanders as a recurring motif. Moss pays five hundred dollars to a teenager for his coat, and a hundred dollars later to a band of mariachis to point the way to hospital. Each time the camera focuses closely on the money, crinkled and blood-soaked. The motif continues after Chigurh is unexpectedly hit by a car and suffers a compound fracture in his arm. Two young teenagers come by on their bicycles to help and Chigurh offers a bloody bill for one’s shirt to make a sling: “Take it,” says Chigurh, “and you didn’t see me. I was already gone.” “Yessir,” says the boy. The shot dissolves as the kids squabble: “You know part of that’s mine.” “You still got your damn shirt,” snaps the other. The next shot is the final scene with Ed Tom and Loretta at the breakfast table. The kid’s “Yessir” lingering on from the last scene has a haunting irony, insinuating the return of good manners but in support of precisely the wrong institution, a neoliberal ethic devoid of any morality. Indeed, a society where even kids swap money to cover up the trace of blood points to a systemic disorder. That Bell has come to believe that, in chasing Chigurh, he’s chasing “a ghost,” one he never once sees, who slips away so easily and leaves such confounding clues, is enough to convince him he’s outmatched. In the opening narration Bell confesses: “I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.” This explains his decision to retire and spend time with his wife, leaving Chigurh to roam free. News of the retirement disappoints Bell’s uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), who tells Bell a story about his great uncle Mac, also a lawman up in Hudspeth county. In 1909 Mac was shot on his porch by a group of Indians and left to bleed to death in front of his wife, Ella. “She buried him the next day. Digging in that hard caliche.” Ellis gets to the moral of the story: “What you got ain’t nothing new. This country’s hard on people.” The brutal anecdote flies in the face of what the Western has taught us about the past as simpler times. This film asserts there never was a time of Technicolor simplicity when good and evil were as clear as the color of one’s ­ ythology hat. The caliche was hard and sunbaked, then as now. Yet the m persists, even to the point of tormenting Bell’s dreams, which he goes on to share with his wife in the final scene. The camera remains in medium close-up on the dispirited Bell for a few beats as the soundtrack amplifies the ticking of the clock, and then the film cuts to credits. No Country for Old Men portrays a masculinity disillusioned by grand narratives, without God, or the frontier myth, or the Western fable to point the way. It pits one man’s confrontation with a systemic malaise as an impossible battle to fight. Though Bell can’t abide uncle Ellis’s injunction and the specters of the past, neither can he escape the torment of their choir of voices.

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  249 Conclusion: Crowning the Action with “THE END” When asked once in an interview what makes the Western so resilient, Clint Eastwood said: I guess it’s the simplicity of the times. Now everything’s so complicated, so mired down in bureaucracy that people can’t fathom a way of sorting it out. In the West, even though you could get killed, it seems more manageable, like a lone individual might be able to work things out in some way. In our society, the idea of one person making a difference one way or the other is remote (1998, 249). Though Eastwood sums it up quite simply, the depths of this phenomenon are plumbed by these two disinterred Westerns. Their modern-day setting in the Southwest border region comments on contemporary racial and economic oppression within the neoliberal order of things. In the course of this commentary, they locate the deeper root of the problem in the autopoeitic subject’s illusion of mastery and heroic sense of self. They show how the heroic subject is co-constituted through fabularizing their diegetic world. Through their deconstruction of genre, then, these films are critiquing the politics of narration – the narration of experience and history through the perennial fable. Accordingly, disinterred Westerns have a distinctive way of wrapping up their stories. On the subject of endings, Rancière makes a compelling distinction between the poet’s and the sage’s perspectives. The poet, he says, being less tolerant than the sage must hew action and tragedy out of life, with a measure of time that lends them grandeur and a set number of episodes. “Victory,” he says, “belongs to the one who can crown the action with the words THE END. … It is only right for the bad guys to be shot down, or else the Western, missing an end, would never have come into being in the first place” (77). This is how Pete Perkins concludes the fable of his mind. His project being fulfilled, he consummates his finale with grandeur: the iconic lone cowboy riding into the sunset. Though it looks like the poet’s ending, the irony of the long-shot icon discloses sage wisdom. Likewise, No Country for Old Men abandons the poet’s perspective for that of the sage. It cannot end its story in the conventional sense, as Aristotle would have it, bringing closure to the grandeur, measure, and tempo of the story, and inscribe something definitive from the arbitrary succession of life. Instead, Ed Tom Bell chooses to turn a blind eye to Chigurh and thus suffers the existential menace of open-endedness. Notes 1. In 1973, French branded these early films as post-Westerns along with Lonely Are the Brave (David Miller, 1962), Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963), and Coogan’s Bluff (Don Siegal, 1968). See Campbell’s Post-Westerns (2013), which explores

250  Brent Strang the subject at length, adding in other post-Westerns like Silver City (John ­Sayles, 2004) and Don’t Come Knocking (Wim Wenders, 2005). Other late post-­ Westerns not mentioned might include Thunderheart (Michael Apted, 1992), The Hi-Lo Country (Stephen Frears, 1998), All the Pretty Horses (Billy Bob Thornton, 2000). 2. Campbell takes up Deleuze’s meditation on the neo-Western as symptomatic of the time-image and the radical changes made to the pre-war (movement-image) classical Western. Rancière, however, disagrees that the break is so precisely post-war as Deleuze claims, arguing the break is more evident with Anthony Mann’s Westerns of the 1950s. In his Film Fables chapter on Mann, Rancière first uses the term “posthumous” (90). 3. See Strang’s “‘That there corpse is startin’ to turn!’” and “‘I’m not the fine man you take me for.’” 4. See Janet Staiger’s “The Purity Hypothesis,” which argues there has always been a propensity to hybridize across genres and classicism is a misconception (2003, 185–199). Likewise, Gallagher’s “Shoot-out at the Genre Corral” points out the fallacy of positioning a classical Western at the beginning of some linear evolution. He claims there has always been revisionism, which continually updated the program to meet the demands of contemporary audiences. 5. Douglas Pye claims the genre’s apex was reached in 1958, when fifty-four ‘A’ Westerns were made (1996, 10). 6. See sociologists Jack Citrin et al. “Is American Nationalism Changing.” The 20th century’s high points of ideological consensus and national cohesion in the form of liberal cosmopolitanism were, first, the 1950s and then the 1930s, followed by the 1990s and then the 1970s (lowest). 7. Sex-role theory and Parsonian structural functionalism, both of which were based in gendered dualisms and essentialism, were the dominant academic theories of the 1950s, but began to fall out of fashion later during the 1960s. 8. See Chacón and Davis, “Inventing an Invisible Enemy.” 9. In an unfilmed segment from McCarthy’s titular novel, Chigurh returns the money he retrieves to a white American in his high-rise office. His apparent motive is to seal a partnership with someone from a higher echelon of capital as well as to establish a colder, more mathematical set of ethics in his business relationships. 10. The peso had been relatively stable from 1954 to 1976 at the USD conversion rate of 1:12.5. Between 1976 and 1992, the peso steeply devalued to 1:3000. Since the introduction of the new peso (worth 1,000 of the old) in 1993, the peso has remained around 1:13. See Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates.” 11. Ackelson shows the intensification of post-9/11 border security was preceded by a gradual escalation beginning in the late 1970s, shortly before the year in which this film is set. Ackelson writes: “to combat cross-border flows, particularly narcotics and migrants, the U.S. drew on selected local initiatives in the late 1970s and 1980s to develop a wider, high-profile, high-intensity campaign which, by the early 1990s, sought to ‘seal’ or at least project the image it had sealed its international boundaries” (171). 12. It is not entirely accurate that each never sees the other. Moss does see Chigurh in a split-second flash from across a darkened street. He later tells Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) he saw Chigurh’s face and Wells responds, “Really? And yet you ain’t dead,” meaning he wasn’t supposed to see him, further emphasizing the missed encounter motif.

Disinterring the Western in Three Burials  251 13. Translated as: “Extreme iconography accentuated by other unpleasant traits: the Mexican is cruel and sadistic” (97). This iconography has been most perniciously reinforced over four decades in the Western genre, Cieutat argues, from Red River (Howard Hawks, 1949) and Border Incident (Anthony Mann, 1949) to Bandido (Richard Fleischer, 1958) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974).

References Ackelson, Jason. 2005. “Constructing Security on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Political Geography 24.2: 165–184. Amoore, Louise and Alexandra Hall. 2010. “Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and Resistance.” Cultural Geographies 17.3: 299–319. Bazin, André. 1955. “The Evolution of the Western.” The Western Reader, Kitses and Rickman, eds., 49–56. Cameron, Ian and Douglas Pye, eds. 1996. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 9–21. Campbell, Neil. 2013. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. University of Nebraska Press. Chacón, Justin Akers and Mike Davis. 2006. “Inventing an Invisible Enemy: ­September 11 and the War on Immigrants.” No One Is Illegal: Fighting R ­ acism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 216–225. Cieutat, Michel. 2005. “The Mexican as Seen by Hollywood, or the Brown Peril.” Positif 528: 96–98. Citrin, Jack, Ernst B. Haas, Christopher Muste, and Beth Reingold. 1994. “Is ­American Nationalism Changing? Implications for Foreign Policy.” International Studies Quarterly 38.1: 1–31. Accessed Dec. 19, 2009. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2600870. Collins, Jim. 1993. “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New S­ incerity.” Film Theory Goes to the Movies: Cultural Analysis of Contemporary Film. Jim ­Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins, eds. New York: Routledge, 242–264. Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 1983. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trans. London: Continuum. Fojas, Camilla. 2009. Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier. ­University of Texas Press. Eastwood, Clint. 1998. “A Fistful of Memories: Interview with Clint Eastwood.” Interview by Kenneth Turan. The Western Reader, Kitses and Rickman, 245–49. French, Philip. 1973. Westerns. London: Secker and Warburg. Frosty. 2007. “Javier Bardem Interview – NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.” 12 Nov. 2007. Collider.com. Accessed Oct. 2, 2014. http://collider.com/movie/article.asp/aid/6046/tcid/1. Gallagher, Tag. 2003. “Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western.” [1986]. Barry Keith Grant, ed., 262–276. Grant, Barry Keith, ed. 2003. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kelleher, Joe and Nicholas Ridout, eds. 2006. Contemporary Theatres in Europe. London: Routledge.

252  Brent Strang Kitses, Jim and Gregg Rickman, eds. 1998. The Western Reader. New York: L ­ imelight Editions. McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Melamed, Jodi. 2006. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: from Racial Liberalism to N ­ eoliberal Multiculturalism.” Social Text 24.4: 1–24. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers. Nield, Sophie. 2006. “On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-location and the Production of the Refugee.” Contemporary Theatres in Europe. Joe ­Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, eds. Officer, Lawrence H. 2014. “Exchange Rates Between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies.” MeasuringWorth.com. Accessed Sept. 24, 2014. http:// www.measuringworth.com/exchangeglobal/. Pye, Douglas. 1996. “The Collapse of Fantasy: Masculinity in the Westerns of Anthony Mann.” The Book of Westerns. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, eds.: 9–21. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Film Fables. Emiliano Battista, trans. New York: Berg. Staiger, Janet. 2003. “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History” [1997]. Barry Keith Grant, ed., 185–199. Strang, Brent. 2010. “‘I am not the fine man you take me for.’ The Postmortem ­Western from Unforgiven to No Country for Old Men.” Masters Thesis, U ­ niversity of B ­ ritish Columbia. Accessed Dec. 10, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23480. ———. 2009. “‘That there corpse is startin’ to turn!’: Three Burials and the P ­ ostmortem Western.” Cinephile: The University of British Columbia’s Film Journal. 5.2: 39–45. Warshow, Robert. 1998. “Movie Chronicle: The Western” (1954). The Western Reader, Kitses and Rickman, 35–48. Wright, Will. 1975. Six Guns and Society. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Contributors

James Burns is a Professor of History at Clemson University.  He is the author of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Ohio 2002), Cinema and Society in the British Empire: 1895–1940 (Palgrave/Macmillan 2013), and co-author of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge 2007/2013). Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Research Manager at the University of Derby, U.K. He has published widely in American Studies, including the books American Cultural Studies (with Alasdair Kean) and, as editor, American Youth Cultures, as well as co-editor of Issues on Americanisation and Culture, Land and Identity, and Photocinema. He has published articles and chapters on John Sayles, Terrence Malick, Robert Frank, J.B. Jackson, D.J. Waldie, Nicholas Ray, and many others. His major research project is an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the contemporary American West: The Cultures of the American New West (2000), The Rhizomatic West (2008), and Post-Westerns (2013). He edits the book series “Place, Memory, Affect” with Rowman Littlefield International, and is currently working on a new book, Affective Critical Regionality (due 2015). Milagros Expósito-Barea is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Media Studies, Advertising and Literature of the Faculty of Communication of the University of Seville. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Media Studies with a major in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Seville. He is a member of the Research Group IDECO, and is currently working on a doctoral thesis about New Thai Cinema (1997–2010). MaryEllen (Ellie) Higgins is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny. Her books include Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Ohio University Press, 2012) and The Historical Dictionary of French Cinema (coauthored with Dayna Oscherwitz, Scarecrow Press, 2007). She has published articles on African cinema and literature in Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Perspectives on African Literatures at the Millennium, and Broadening Our Horizons: Critical Introductions to Amma Darko, among other scholarly venues.

254 Contributors Andrew W. Hurley holds a degree in law and a Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Melbourne. He is a Senior Lecturer in the F ­ aculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney and teaches in the International Studies Program. He is the author of The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change (Berghahn Books, 2009) and Into the Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction (Camden House, forthcoming). He has published articles in a range of journals including New Formations, New German Critique, The Journal of Australian Studies, Continuum, and Perfect Beat, on the international dimensions of popular culture. Tsitsi Jaji is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate faculty ­member of Africana Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and pan-African Solidarity (Oxford UP, 2014) and her ­ chapbook, Carnaval, appears in Seven New Generation African Poets ­(Slapering Hol, 2014, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani). Jesus Jimenez-Varea is an Associate Professor in the Media and Communications Department of the University of Seville, Spain. His area of ­expertise is the intersection of popular culture, narratives, and image theory. He has taught and presented papers about these subjects in Britain, Italy, Spain, and the United States. His texts have appeared in a number of international publications such as The International Journal of Comic Art and The Journal of Popular Culture. In recent times he has contributed to volumes published by Praeger, Intellect, and McFarland. Rita Keresztesi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches courses on African American, Afro-Caribbean, and West African literary and cultural studies. She was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 2010–2011. She is the author of Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (Nebraska UP, 2005 and 2009). Clifford Manlove is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny, where he teaches 20th-century literature/ criticism, postcolonial studies, and film. He researches critical/film theory, utopian studies, reggae and Rastafari, and colonial/postcolonial narratives, especially from the Caribbean, West Africa, and American South. He has published in Cinema Journal, South Atlantic Review, Minnesota Review, College Literature, (Re-)turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, and Left Curve. He has a recently published book chapter on Peter Jackson’s use of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in King Kong in Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, and has forthcoming chapter on Aldous Huxley’s use of evolutionary theory in Brave New World (in The Individual and Utopia). He is completing a book on The Harder They Come, “The Harder They Came: On Jamaica’s First Feature Film, Reggae, and Rastafari.”

Contributors  255 Dayna Oscherwitz is Associate Professor of French and Francophone ­Studies at Southern Methodist University where she researches and teaches on French and African cinema, postcolonial studies, and postcolonial immigration. She is co-author with MaryEllen Higgins of The ­Historical ­Dictionary of French Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2007) and author of Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-colonial Heritage (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Studies in French Cinema, The French Review, and Research in African Literatures. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai is Assistant Professor in the English, and Media and Information departments at Michigan State University. He is a graduate from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and the University of Iowa. His research areas include the history, theory, and production of documentaries, and the specificity of Tamil cinema and its complex relationship with Hollywood and popular Hindi films. His recent publications include Cinema: Sattagamum Saalaramum (Cinema: Frame and Window) (Nizhal Pathippagam, 2012). This book is an anthology of scholarly essays in Tamil on documentaries and experimental films. His recent documentaries are Unfinished Journey: A City in Transition (2011) and Migrations of Islam (2014). Carolina Rueda is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American literature with emphasis in film from the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. Her dissertation focused on contemporary Latin American cinema, in particular the urban setting and its function in the production of significations: forms of individual and collective survival, traumatic memory, the idea of besieged cities, and issues associated with diaspora, among others. She is currently working on her first book manuscript about urban Latin American cinema in the new millennium while starting to develop her future investigation on contemporary Latin American women filmmakers. Brent Strang is a Ph.D. candidate in Stony Brook University’s Cultural Analysis and Theory Program. His dissertation is a cultural study of the remote-control device. He has published in Journal of Visual Culture and Cinephile, and has a forthcoming chapter in Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film with Palgrave Macmillan. Carlos G. Torres-Rodríguez recently received his Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma with minor in Literary Criticism and Film and Video Studies. He is currently completing a book based on his dissertation ­ mpresas “Nomadism, Poetics of the Desolation and Intertextuality in E y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero, de  Álvaro Mutis.”  He has published articles in areas such as contemporary Latin American literature, ­European and Colombian cinema, as well as book and film reviews. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

256 Contributors Giovanna Trento is Lecturer of Italian in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Capetown, South Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and Ethnography from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author of a book on Pasolini’s constructions and representations of Africa and the Pan-South: Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini. Panmeridionalismo e r­appresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale (Mimesis, Milan 2010) and has published and lectured internationally on topics related to the representations of Africa in Italian literature and cinema, Italian colonial-diffused culture and its links with Futurism, colonial concubinage in Ethiopia and gender relations in the Horn of Africa, and colonial and genre cinema and literature. Chelsea Wessels is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Performing Arts at Cornell University. She recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews, where her dissertation focused on the transnational Western. Her research de-centers notions of the Western genre as an American form, pointing out the interrelation of national and global factors that have led to the emergence and the adoption of the Western as a political and popular genre.

Index

27A (film) 132, 138 Abel, Richard 185 Aboriginal people and their filmic representation 132–6 Aboriginal Westerns 129–45; as frame-breaker and Godsend 136–9; of Mowajum community 133–6; outlaws, lawbringers, and cowboys themes 139–42 accented Western 88 accordion in The Wind Journeys (film) 199–209 Accra 25; and cowboy spectatorship 27–30 Adventures of the Four Stars (Anyichie) 26, 38–39 advertisements of movies for theatres 14 Africa: decolonization of 81–82; as a postcolony 81 Africa Consolidated Theatres 13 African films: promoting African colonialism 83; trashing the Western’s revenge 96–108; Western element in 86–92 Africans: animated behavior of at the movies 17–19; identification with cowboy hero 18–19; pleasures of playing the outlaw 24–39; spectator practices at films 17–20, 24–25, 27–30 A-girl character 72–74 Alassane, Mustapha 25, 30–34, 86 allegories of power 34–39 Ambler, Charles 20 American Dilemma, An 239 American frontier, expanding 2–3 American identity in Westerns 183, 185 Americanism in Italian Westerns 49 American-ness 110 American Westerns. See also Westerns: civilizing and centralizing impact on

Italy 45–46; enthusiasm waning in Southern Africa 16; popularity in Southern Africa 11–21; reinvented in Italy 42–55; relationship to Australian Bushranger films 130 Andrews, Nigel 154 Anglophone Caribbean. See Caribbean anti-cinema 84 anti-clericalism in Spaghetti Westerns 70 anti-colonialism resistance channelled through African film goers 18–20 Antonio Das Mortes (film) 188–94 Anyichie, J. A. Okeke 26, 38–39 apartheid 12–13 apocalypse in the post-Western 72–76 Argentina’s national identity imaginary 184–7 Argentinean cinema 184–7 Argento, Dario 54 Ashcroft, Bill 39 Australian File Commission genre 132 Australian New Wave 129–33 Australian Westerns 129–45 Babylonian Conspiracy in Django (film) 70–71 Backroads (film) 130, 132 Baden-Powell, Robert 220 badmanism 111–12, 114, 118 Baja California peninsula 216, 224–7 Bajo California, el límite del tiempo (film) 213–30; as a Post-Western and psychological Western 215–17 Bamako (film) 82, 84–85, 87; incorporating Death in Timbuktu 89–92 Bandit Queen (film) 228–9 Barber, Karin 24 Barunga, Albert 133 Bazin, André 3, 61, 69, 72, 114, 149 Bellver Sáez, Pilar 227

258 Index B-girl character 72–73 Bingo 36–37 bioscope show 12, 15 Black, Stephanie 121–2 black colonial revision of the Western 116–17 black diaspora 117 Black Power (Wright) 27, 29 Black Silk (film) 153 Bolado, Carlos 213–15 Born Fi’ Dead (Gunst) 118 Brazilian nordesterns 191–2 Brignone, Guido 45 Broken Arrow (film) 50–51 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the cinema 13 Bulawayo 12, 14, 15, 19 Burgoyne, Robert 185 Burns, James 89 Burstall, Tim 130 Buscombe, Edward 2, 4 Bushranger films 130 B Westerns 49; in Southern Africa 16; Tamil 165–78 Callenbach, Ernest 190 Camargue Westerns 1, 43 Camerini, Mario 48 Campbell, Federico 226 Campbell, Joseph 226 Campbell, Neil 1, 67, 88, 215, 233 cangaceiro story 190–2 Caribbean: cinema producing cultural identity of 115–16; independence nationalism 114–16; reconfiguring the Western to subvert imperialism 110–23 Carmichael, Deborah 228 Caruth, Cathy 106 Cassava Westerns 25, 26 Cave, Colin 141 Cawelti, John 199, 215 censorship of Westerns shown to Africans 17, 19 Chad 97, 106 Chaibancha, Mitr 153 Chang, Jeff 122 Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The (film) 130, 132, 143 Chaowara, Petchara 153 Chee, Fabio 221 chiaroscuro lighting 202 Chude-Sokei, Louis 113, 116 Cinema Novo 190

cinemas’ racial segregation in southern Africa 12–13 cinematic realism 84 citizenship differentiated from subjects 35–36 class resentment in Spaghetti Westerns 53–54 class struggle in Latin American Westerns 194 Cold War Westerns 191 collective social space in Latin American Westerns 193 Collins, Felicity 142 Colombian Westerns 198, 201–9 colonialism: in Aboriginal films 140–2; of Africa by Italy 44–45, 47–48; in Australian Westerns 131; in Django (film) 69–70; in The Harder They Come (film) 113; promoted by colonial cinema 83 colonialist Fascist epic 53 Coloureds. See non-whites Comaroff, Jean 5, 26–27 Comaroff, John 5, 26–27 Compañeros (film) 54 conflict between civilization and savagery 156–9 Connell, R. W. 244 conquest fictions 3 continuity of convenience 173, 175 Corbucci, Sergio 43, 44, 60–61, 72–74, 111, 115, 119–20, 131 Corkin, Stanley 194–5 cowboy spectatorship in Accra 27–30 cowboy themed gangs in Africa 16–17, 20 Cox, Alex 62, 119 creolization of the classic Western 112 crime and decolonializing citizenship 27, 34 Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western (Klein, Reitzer, Schulze) 4 cultural ambiguities in Italian Westerns 49–52 Cummings, Denise K. 3 Damiani, Damiano 51–52 Daratt (film) 96–108 Davis, Therese 142 death in the post-Western 72–76 Death in Timbuktu (film) 86–91 decolonization 81–82; in Caribbean films 110–23; of development 85;

Index  259 and differentiation between citizens and subjects 35–36 Derrida, Jacques 112 Diawara, Manthia 18, 84 Di Chiara, Roberto 184 Diop, Ousmane Socé 36 Dirlik, Arif 6 distressed heroes 214 distribution of the sensible 83 District Six 13 Django (film) 44, 60–71, 111, 119, 131; as a critical Western 68–69; depicting invisible histories of modern colonialism 69–70 Django Unchained (film) 60, 62–63, 75–76 “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin” song 61–62 Double Luck (film) 152 Dred Scott case 35 Ealing Studios 130, 131 Eastwood, Clint 249 Easy Rider (film) 228 Edols, Michael 129, 131–3, 135–8, 141–2 Ellam Unakkaga (film) 169 El Ultimo Malón / The Last Indian Raid (film) 183–7 Enga Pattan Sothu (film) 175, 178 enthusiasm for Westerns in Southern Africa 11–21 esthetic of hunger 189–90 Europe’s appearance of the Western films in 43–44 Fanon, Frantz 81, 83 Fascism and the Italian Western 43, 44–48, 53 Fellion, Courtney 188 Ferroni, Giorgio 48 fetishization of black masculinity 113 fictional world of its own 2 Film Fables 234 filmic image, violence of 83–92 Fisher, Austin 2, 5, 68, 88 Fish-eyed (lens) Karnan 167 Fistfull of Dollars (film) 60, 72 Floating (film) 129, 131, 135–6, 138–9, 142, 144 fossils in Westerns 225 France’s appearance of the Western films in 43 Frayling, Christopher 5, 42, 68, 176 French, Philip 199, 215, 229, 233

frontier narrative 53; in Italian films 47–48 Fulci, Lucio 54 Gabara, Rachel 87 Gabriel, Teshome 7, 115, 193 Gallagher, Tad 160 Gallego, Cristina 200 Ganga (film) 177–8 gang culture in Africa influenced by Westerns 16–17, 20 gangsta rapper 142 García Espinosa, Julio 189 Garvey, Marcus 122 generic contexts in Latin American Westerns 183–7 Genette, Gérard 156 Genina, Augusto 47–48 Germany’s appearance of the Western films in 43 Getino, Octavio 7, 189 Ghana’s fascination with Western’s cowboy outlaw 29–30 Gladio Network 120 global interdependency exhibited by Western-driven Italian films 42–43 Global North 90; military power depicted in African films 87–88 Global South 5–6; love narratives in 60–76; and neocolonialism 82–83; reception of Django (film) in 60–71; reconfiguring the Western to subvert imperialism 110; and Tamil B movie Westerns 165–78 Gramsci, Antonio 52–53 Great Train Robbery, The (film) 68, 97–98, 200 Greca, Alcides 184 Gruber, Frank 213 Guerra, Ciro 198, 201–9 Gunst, Laurie 118–19, 120 Gussman, B. W. 19 Gutsche, Thelma 15 Hagg, Russell 130 Hair, P. E. 16 Hall, Stuart 112, 115, 116 Hamilton, Annette 185 Hanuman Film Company 152 Harder They Come, The (film) 69–70, 111–23, 131 Haroun, Mahamt-Saleh 96–97, 99, 105–8 Harris, Kenneth 112

260 Index Harrison, Rachel 155–6 Harrow, Ken 96 Hay, James 46, 48 Hearne, Joanna 3 Henzell, Perry 69, 111–23, 131 hero as character in the Westerns 218–20 Hertz, Carl 11 Herzog, Werner 129, 136, 224 High Noon (film) 61–62, 67 Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Rollins and O’Connor) 3 Hollywood’s share of the global cinema market 14 Horizons West (Kitses) 4 Horn of Africa portrayed in Italian cinema 46–47 horsemanship in Aboriginal films 141–2 Howe, Leanne 3 Hutcheon, Linda 156

Western film 69–70; reappropriated version of the classic Western 111; violence in films 116 Jameson, Fredric 119 Jandamarra 140–1 Japan’s appearance of the Western films in 43 Johannesburg 11 Jones, Howard M. 199

Il fanciullo del West / The Boy of the West (film) 48 Il grande appello / The Last Roll-Call (film) 48 Il mio nome è Nessuno / My Name is Nobody (film) 55 imperial imaginary 83 imperialist axiomatics 81 imperialist ideology 3 Indians. See Native Americans Indick, William 216, 220 Indigenous identification 129 indigneous tribes in the Westerns 222–3 individualism in American Westerns 114 Italian Westerns 42–47. See also Spaghetti Westerns; constructing national memories 52–55; cultural ambiguities of 49–52; local and global nature of 47–48 Italo-Western genre in Australian films 136–9 Italy: appearance of the Western films in 43–44; colonialism in Africa 44–45, 47–48; contributions to the American Western genre 42–55; need for popular culture expressed in cinema 46–47; self-representation of 49–52; ties to America 45

Lalai (film) 129, 135, 139 Lamming, George 25, 29 Landon, Kenneth Perry 152 landscape: symbolism and modernity 224–7; of the Western 198–209 Landy, Marcia 47, 55 Langford, Rachael 33, 140 La Reine des Bandits 37–38 Last Wave, The (film) 132 Latin American Westerns 183–95; critique of the state 191 legitimacy of violence 2 Leone, Sergio 43–44, 60, 68, 72, 88, 149, 166 Le retour de l’aventurier (film) 25, 30–34, 86 Levine, Allison J. Murray 84 Le Western: Le Cinéma américain par excellence (Rieupeyrout and Bazin) 3 Life & Debt (film) 121 likay theatre 155 Limbrick, Peter 130, 131, 140 Lo chiamavano Trinità / They Call me Trinity (film) 55 Long Live Sandawara (Mudrooroo) 141 Losers, The (film) 219 Lo squadrone bianco / The White Squadron (film) 47–48 love: in the Global South 60–76; in Tamil B Westerns 165–6 Love, J. R. B. 133–4

Jaishankar 172 Jakkamma (film) 178 Jamaica 121–2; and prevalence of American movies 114; producing a

Kaalam Vellum (film) 165–70, 175–8 Kangaroo Westerns 130 Kapur, Shekhar 228–9 Karnan, M. 165–78; aesthetics of his B Westerns 171–7 Kavanagh, Thomas M. 190–1, 195 Kingston 118–20 Kitses, Jim 4, 183 Klein, Thomas 4, 130 Kollin, Susan 215

Index  261 Maingard, Jacqueline 84 Mali 82, 84 manda 216 Manley, Michael 120, 122 Mann, Anthony 213 Marcellini, Romolo 49 Markowitz, Harvey 3 Martin, Ivanhoe “Rhyging” 111 Martin, Vincent ‘Ivanhoe’ 122 Marut, Kru 152 Marxism and the Italian Western 43, 54 masculinity: decentering in Tamil Westerns 165–6; fetishization of black 113; obsession with in African films 100, 103–4; and rebellion portrayed in the Western 111 Mayne, Judith 24 Mbembe, Achille 81, 82, 85, 112 McEwen, Cheryl 85 McRae, Henry 152 Melamed, Jodi 237, 239 melodrama in Tamil B Westerns 167–70 Metanee, Sombat 154 Mexicans depicted in Westerns 229 Mexican Westerns 213–30 Mezzogiorno 52 Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited, The (Naipaul) 110 Miller, Cynthia 4 mining compounds showing movies as alternative to violence 13–16 Minow, Martha 105, 107 mis-en-scène 61–66, 75 Mitchell, Lee Clark 96, 102, 103, 104 Mitchell, W. J. T. 225 mixed theatres 13 Mocoví 184–7 Morricone, Ennio 166 movie spectatorship in Africa 17–20, 24–25, 27–30 movies shown in mining compounds as alternative to violence 14–16 Mowaljarlai, David 135 Mowanjum 133–6, 141–2 Mudrooroo 141 Mystery Road (film) 129, 131, 143–4 mythical concept of the Wild West 216 Naficy, Hamid 1 Naipaul, V. s. 110–11 nangfarang 151 narrative communities 115 national identity: in Latin American Westerns 183–7; and the Western 4–5

national imaginary 185 national memories constructed in Italian Westerns 52–55 Native Americans: as characters in Westerns 222–3; impacting national identity 185; lack of representation in Spaghetti Westerns 50; new presentation of in the 1950s American films 50; shifting representation of in Westerns 3 Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Hearne) 3 Neale, Steve 25 neo-colonialism: in Africa 82–84; resistance version of the Western 117 neo-imperialism and Latin American Westerns 188–9 neoliberal multiculturalism 237 New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) 188 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 82 No Country for Old Men (film) 233, 241–9 non-whites attending cinemas 13 Northern Rhodesia 18 novels depicting pleasures of playing the outlaw 38–39 Noyce, Phillip 130, 132 Nyasaland 12 O’Connor, John 3 Olaniyan, Tejumola 84 oppositional relationships in Italian Westerns 50 opposition between modernity and tradition theme in Thai cinema 153 Orlando, Ruggero 45, 48 othering used in Argentinean cinema 184 “other inside the country” concept in Italian films 49 outlaw: dress outfits of 32–33; role in Aboriginal films 129, 139–45; roleplaying figures 26, 30–34; theoretical pleasures of playing in Africa 24–39; of the Western in Jamaican film 111 Pan-South 51 partisan resistance to Fascism 53 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 51, 52 Peckinpah, Sam 219 Pedro (film) 25 Pennai Vazha Vidungal (film) 166, 167–8 Per un pungo di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) (film) 43–44

262 Index Pestonji, Ratana 152–3 Philips, Ray 14 photo-comics 37–39 Pimchawee’s Love Journal (film) 153 plantation slavery in the post-Western 75 politics in Latin American Westerns 183–95; in Antonio Das Mortes (film) 188–94; in El Ultimo Malón (film) 183–7 Porter, Edwin 97, 200 possession by the past 106 postcolonial Africa, reframing the image of 81–92 postcolonial Western 113 postcolony 112 postmodern pastiche in Thai cinema 156 post-Western 233–49; Bajo California, el límite del tiempo (film) as an example 215–17; death and apocalypse 72–76; women characters in 72–73 Powdermaker, Hortense 18–19 power relations disparities displayed in Latin American Westerns 183–95 Pratt, Mary Louise 184 pro-Indian Westerns 50 psychological Western 216–17 public spaces and racial segregation 12–13 Questi, Giulio 53 Quien Sabe? / A Bullet for the General 51–53 Quiring, Loren 97 racial liberalism 237 racial segregation in southern Africa 12–13 racism 237 Raghavan, V. S. 167 Rancière, Jacques 83, 234, 249 Ranger and his Horse, The (film) 14 Rastafarian community 113, 114, 118, 122 Raw Deal (film) 130 re-accenting of films 1–2 rearchivization of absence 105 rebellion in the Jamaican film 111 reflexivity in films 68–69, 84–85 reframed region/regionalism 4–5 reggae music 117–18, 122–3 Reine des Bandits (film) 25–26 reinforcement of social conventions in Thai cinema 150–1

Reitzer, Ivo 4 Rembrandt lighting 202–3, 208 Requiescant (film) 52, 54 resistant spectatorship 18 Reynolds, Glenn 20 Rhone, Trevor 111 Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis 3, 149 road movie 228 Rocha, Glauber 189 Rollins, Peter 3 Romeo and Juliet 150 Routt, Bill 130 rudeboy character 111, 114 Saint, Lily 25, 34 Sanbassatra, Prince 151 Sanjinés, Jorge 192 Santi-Weena (film) 152–3 Sarzynski, Sarah 191–2 Sasanatieng, Wisit 149–50, 154–61 Saunders, John 224 Schatz, Thomas 149 Schepisi, Fred 130 Schlesinger, I. W. 13 Schlesinger Company 13 Schulze, Peter 4 Seaga, Edward 115–16, 120 Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins (Howe, Markowitz, and Cummings) 3 Sen, Ivan 129, 131, 139, 142 Sentinelle di bronzo / Sentinels of Bronze (film) 49–50 settler colonial mode 140 settlers in Southern African and their enthusiasm for movies 12–13, 16 sexuality in Tamil B Westerns 172–4 Seydor, Paul 219 Shane (film) 224 sheen reading 37 Shohat, Ella 3, 88 Simmon, Scott 105 Sissako, Aberrahmane 82, 91–92 Sissoko, Cheick Oumar 107 slavery in the post-Western 75 Slotkin, Richard 107 social order, danger by movies in Southern Africa 17–18 Solanas, Fernando 7, 189 Sotto la croce del sud / Under the Southern Cross (film) 46–47 South African Republic 11 Southern Africa and its reception of American Westerns 11–21

Index  263 Southern Question (Italian) 49 Southern Rhodesia 19; and its reception of American Westerns 11–12, 15 sovereignty theory differentiating between citizens and subjects 35–36 Spaghetti Westerns 2, 4, 42, 49, 191. See also Italian Westerns; appropriated by the Third Cinema 119–20; class resentment depicted 53–54; as critical cinema 68–69; historicity in 69–70; lack of Native Americans in 50; mimicked by The Harder They Come (film) 112; parody 54–55; portrayals of Italian society and classes 51; representation of the Other 50; Third World sympathies of 51–52; violence in 115 Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (Frayling) 5 spectators 89–91 spectatorship when viewing movies in Africa 17–20, 24–25, 27–30 Spivak, Gayatri 81 Stam, Robert 3, 4, 84, 88 Stewart, Jacqueline 24 Storm, Esben 132, 138 Stracittà culture 46 Strapaese culture 46 Survana of Siam (film) 152 sympathetic role of the dissident criminal 27 Tamil B Westerns 165–78; aesthetics of 171–7; melodrama of 167–70; subversion of the movie genre 165–6 Tarantino, Quentin 60, 62–63, 75–76 Tcheuyap, Alexie 27 Tears of the Black Tiger (film) 149–61; as postmodern pastiche 156–7; transcultural nature of 155–6 Teo, Stephen 155 Tepepa (film) 53 terzomondismo 51 Thai Gentlemen Fighers (film) 152 Thai Westerns 149–61; becoming prominent worldwide 159–61; conflict between civilization and savagery 156–9; generic convention in 156; history of 151–4; linearity vs. cyclicism in its evolution 159–60; opposition between modernity and tradition theme 153; postmodern pastiche in 156

Thelwell, Michael 113, 122–3 Third Cinema 6–7, 110, 115, 188–94; appropriation of the Spaghetti Western 119–20 Third World sympathies of Spaghetti Westerns 51–52 Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (film) 233, 235–41 Thunderheart (film) 185 Tidikawa and Friends (film) 132–3 Toomelah (film) 143–4 Tosh, Peter 117, 123 transculturalism: in Latin American Westerns 188; in Thai cinema 149, 154–5 Transpeninsular (Campbell) 226 trash and the Western 96–108 Trinidad: and dominance of American cinema 110–11; and prevalence of American movies 114 True Blue (film) 14 Turner, Frederick Jackson 2, 219 Union of South Africa 11 U.S.-Mexican border relations 235–6 van Onselen, Charles 15 Van Riper, A. Bowdoin 4 vigilante violence 98–108 Vijayalalitha 171, 172, 174, 175 Vilakazi, Absalom 19–20 violence: in Aboriginal films 140–1; of global economic and political system depicted in African films 87–88; in Jamaican film 116; in Latin American Westerns 189, 194; legitimacy of 2; and politics in Kingston 118–20; in Spaghetti Westerns 115; sustaining colonialism 82–92; visual and symbolic in Bamako (film) 82–93 Wasuwat, Manit 152 Weheliye, Alexander 35 weight of the western frame 2 Weir, Peter 132 Western Africa sympathizing with the cowboy outlaw 27–34 Western all’italiana 42–44, 51, 52, 54 Western comics in African publications 36–37 Western dress and slag adopted by Africans 16–17

264 Index Westerns: addressing American neo-imperialism 183; in African cinema 86; associated with concept of America 183; black colonial revision of 116–17; borrowed and reformulated 1–2; creolization of 112; crossing borders to Mexico 213–30; decolonializing for the Caribbean 110–23; evolution from classical to post-Western 3; as a genre 3–4; global nature of 194–5; hero character 218–20; Indians as characters 222–3; in international contexts 4–5; landscape in 224–7; as a love narrative 60–76; parody of genre 30–34; postcolonial 113; reappropriated in Jamaican films 111; as a reframed region/regionalism 4–5; and Thai cinema 149–61; use of the landscape to narrate 198–209; women characters 220–2

Westness 4 When the Snake Bites the Sun (film) 139 Where the Green Ants Dream (film) 129 white settlers and their relationship to Native Americans 184–7 Wild Bunch, The (film) 219 Wilmsen, Carl 229 Wind Journeys, The (film) 200–9 witnesses 89–90 women: in the Spaghetti Westerns 72–73; in Tamil Westerns 165–6, 172–4; in Westerns 220–2 Woolagoodja, Donny 139 Woolagoodja, Sam 135, 140 Wright, Richard 25, 27–28 Yojimbo (film) 65, 67 Zinnemann, Fred 67