New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone

The western, it transpires, has not died out. It has simply changed shape, colour and compass point.

—Xan Brooks

Introduction: Post-Western Cinema

The term post-Western was first applied to cinema by Philip French in the 1970s (Westerns, 1973) and has been employed by a variety of critics since then to refer to very different books and films.¹ Writers such as Richard Slotkin (Gunfighter Nation, 1992), Kerwin Lee Klein (“Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word,” 1996), Frieda Knobloch (The Culture of Wilderness, 1996), Virginia Scharff, (“Mobility, Women, and the West,” 1999), John G. Cawelti (The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, 1999), Diane M. Borden and Eric P. Essman (“Manifest Landscape/Latent Ideology,” 2000), Tomislav Čegir (“Post-western,” 2002), Susan Kollin (Postwestern Cultures, 2007), Krista Comer (“New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest,” 2011), or Neil Campbell (“Post-Western Cinema,” 2011; Post-Westerns, 2013) have applied it successfully to the field of Western studies, although they do not necessarily seem to agree on its features or on the films or books that could be included in the category. Of course the root of the word is essential: what exactly do we mean by “Western”? Most film studies scholars systematically seem to address Westerns as a genre, whereas historians and literary critics seem to consider them from a regional rather than a generic point of view. In this sense, it is fundamental to mention the relatively recent “postregional” (Tatum, “Spectrality” 12) turn toward “critical regionalism” represented by critics like Kollin, Campbell, or Tatum, who have incorporated this concept (with origins in an architectural term coined by Lefaivre and Tzonis, later developed by Kenneth Frampton in 1983) to Western studies. As Stephen Tatum puts it, “places or regions need to be regarded not only as geopolitical and geological territories or physical landscapes, but also as sites produced by the circulation of peoples, of technologies and commodities, and of cultural artifacts, including of course images, stories, and myths” (“Postfrontier Horizons” 461–62). Kollin highlights the need to “work against a narrowly conceived regionalism” in order to “understand the region not as a closed or bounded space but as a continually changing and evolving entity in both content and form” (“Postwestern Studies” xi). Critical regionalism has become an extremely useful tool to address the tension between regionalism and globalization and to consider the West both as a local and global entity, not only as a geographical place but also as a genre, a discourse, and an ideology.

But if the root of post-Westerns—West—is essential, we cannot ignore the prefix post either: Is it intra-or extradiegetic? Does it mean that the action of the films takes place after the closing of the frontier, after either of the World Wars, or simply “the West today” (as in French’s original definition)? Or does it apply to films produced after World War II (Campbell, Post-Westerns 3) or after the so-called death of the Western genre brought about by the failure of Michael Cimino’s 1980 Heaven’s Gate (Cawelti 99–126)? The indefiniteness of the term has meant that it has been used rather superficially for any recent Western films or for modern “Westerns with a twist,” including remakes like 3:10 to Yuma (2007) or True Grit (2010).

Neil Campbell’s recent monograph (Post-Westerns, building on his previous shorter pieces) is the most ambitious and thorough contribution toward the definition and application of the category. He uses the term for films produced after World War II which are “coming after and going beyond the traditional Western [genre] while engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values” (Post-Westerns 31). Following Stuart Hall, he relates his use of the prefix post to words like postcolonialism, post-structuralism, or postmodernism, both in a chronological sense and in the sense of opposing their antecedents, deconstructing them and trying to go beyond them. Thus, post-Western films take the classic structures and themes of the genre to interact, overlap, and interrelate in complex dialogical ways with them...