"Western"

Film series

The Western is generally regarded as a typical American film genre, but it also has a long European tradition. German cinema, in particular, has demonstrated an affinity with Westerns, far beyond the “Wild West Romanticism” of the film adaptations of Karl May’s popular travel narratives.

The German Western took a different approach than the Italo-Western, which turns traditional patterns upside down. German directors adopt the myths and elements of the American Western, but interpret them in their own way. Thus, in the German Westerns, one finds the image of the noble savage exploited by the Whites, or the view of German immigrants who must find their way in a foreign land in the middle of a conflict of different cultures. Sometimes the frontier, the border region between untamed wilderness and civilization, is moved from the vast prairies of the American West to a remote village in the Alps or a desert region of Bulgaria. The Goethe Institut presents this under-researched aspect of German cinema in a series of four films, Apache (1973), Gold (2013), The Dark Valley (2014) and Western (2017).

At the beginning of the film series on May 17, the curator of the series, Prof. Jürgen Heizmann (Département de littératures et de langues du monde, Université de Montréal), will give a lecture on the German Western.