Just in Time: Erwin Wagenhofer’s Appropriation of the Classical Western Genre in Black Brown White (2011)

Erwin Wagenhofer’s film Black Brown White (2011) features a trafficking truck driver protagonist whose views are challenged by a family he delivers into the eu , enabling the film’s reflection on the legal, social, and economic dimensions of contemporary migration and international border control. This article argues that the film’s critique is engaged through its productive appropriation of the genre of the classical western on a formal and narrative level. After locating Black Brown White within the contexts of European and Austrian cinema, the article examines the film’s transformation of the classical western’s depiction of the landscape as well as the genre’s recurring thematic conflicts regarding the establishment of justice and the law. Constructing an eu as a contested, unfi nished frontier- like space and having the protagonist, like his western forbearers, deliver justice beyond the law enables the film to question inequities and contradictions in the erection of the so- called Fortress Europe.