FILM OF THE NINETIES

Conquered Space: The Western of the Nineties

This essay deals with the contextuality of the western genre in the nineties, and its connection to the tradition of the genre itself and the heritage of the society in which it was created. On reflection of the conditionality of the genre in the nineties, it is necessary to question the genre’s antecedents in the late sixties and early seventies, with an emphasis on the slump of the western in the eighties.

The relationship between the mythic and real — which is often the reason for an incomplete understanding of the western — is dealt with through the traditions of genre and through society’s inheritance of ethnic viewpoints. The western of nineties, with its substitution of the basic defining characteristics of the genre, has been tagged as gloomy, since, unlike the regular dualities of the past, there is an ambivalence toward the classic formulations of the genre today.

The citing of various examples of the nineties’ western also encompasses an examination of their complexity, an inquiry into the ’inner’ contextuality of individual films, and their connection to tradition itself. The essay questions the revisionist approach toward the, up to now, neglected participants in the conquest of the frontier west of Mississippi, the change in the moral viewpoint that appeared in the nineties’ western, and the change in the formulations of the genre toward tendencies in other film genres.

Tomislav Čegir