[ecrea] SYMPOSIUM ST ANDREWS/FILMHOUSE - Commies and Indians: The Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers

You are cordially invited to attend an exciting new symposium organised 
by Dina Iordanova, Dennis Hanlon and Jonathan Owen from the Centre of 
Film Studies in St Andrews, to take place on Friday 17 May 2013, 
10am-6pm in the FilmGuild, at Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh. Please 
invite colleagues and friends to come along.

For all information, please look here: 
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmstudies/events.php?eventid=189, or email 
Stefanie at (sevdp /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) <mailto:(sevdp /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>



In the 1960s the Western genre, then waning in its native Hollywood, 
took root in many European countries. Though Italy's Spaghetti Westerns 
indeed remain the best-known result of this transposition, the genre 
also crossed political lines into Communist Eastern Europe. A highly 
diverse raft of state-socialist Westerns emerged that twist the genre's 
familiar tropes in accord with local culture and history, not to mention 
the ideological demands of the Cold War.

These 'Red Westerns' sometimes play as uproarious parodies of the genre 
and sometimes as sincere examples of it; they sometimes adapt Western 
narratives to local histories and settings, and sometimes fabricate an 
American West with the help of lookalike European locations. If, say, 
Yugoslavia's 'Gibanica' Westerns spin genre thrills out of that 
country's wartime Partisan struggles, then East Germany's 
/Indianerfilme/ take place in a recognisable 'West' - albeit a radically 
reimagined one where the Indians are good and the American settlers bad.

Our one-day symposium will chart this fascinating episode in European 
popular cinema and address such questions as where these films stand in 
the history of the Western: how might they connect to post-classical, 
revisionist, demystifying modes of the genre as embodied by Peckinpah or 
Leone?  This topic also enables us to explore broader, marginalised 
realities of Eastern Bloc film. With their Hollywood borrowings and 
frequent dependence on co-production, these films reveal the centrality 
of the transnational to this region's cinema. Their often Bloc-busting 
commercial success further affords consideration of popular pleasures in 
the people's democracies.

Confirmed speakers include *Professor Tim Bergfelder* (University of 
Southampton), author of the groundbreaking /International Adventures: 
German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s/, and 
*Professor Dina Iordanova* (University of St Andrews), renowned expert 
on East European and transnational cinema.

The event will include screenings of notable 'Red Westerns', including 
Jir(í Trnka's animated pastiche /Song of the Prairie/ (1949).


--
Dr Stefanie Van de Peer
Research Coordinator
Editorial Assistant
Department of Film Studies
University of St Andrews
99 North Street
St Andrews, Fife
KY16 9AD

Email: (sevdp /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) <mailto:(sevdp /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>
Tel: 01334 467 476