Western, boundless different

‘Westerns are films about conflicts on the American frontier.’ This is how the film critic and film historian Joe Hembus (1933-1985) once defined the most original of all American film genres, which conquered the cinema on 1 December 1903 with ‘The Great Train Robbery’. But Hembus immediately clarified: ‘The national border is not meant. Rather 'the frontier', the border as the space in which America creates and re-creates itself. This frontier is not just a geographical space, and it does not belong to any particular time.’ In this sense, our Western collection includes films that are not famous classics of the genre. Rather, they are films that take up the Western stylistically and thematically, modify its images and narrative styles, think in new, different or lateral ways. And sometimes shift the genre into the modern age: films that can be read as a political, economic and social state of development, but also as an artistic one.