Valeska Grisebach describes her latest feature, Western (2017), as a “dance with the genre”.¹ Here the cinematic evocations of the Hollywood Western – the duel, the horse-riding nomad, the colonialist ideology – are mediated through a distinctive focus on the wordless gestures and (mis)communications between the film’s central male protagonists. Western invokes the ‘strong silent hero’ of a Gary Cooper or a John Wayne, only to undermine the heroic masculinity of the cowboy figure – his assertions of mastery over self, others, and landscape. The film strips action and violence from the genre’s narrative focus on male-male relationships, directing attention instead towards the protagonists’ desire for belonging and the challenges of intercultural communication. This exploration of taciturn masculinities is set against another frontier entirely, as Grisebach redirects Hollywood’s narratives of westward expansion, transposing them onto Western Europe’s relation to its so-called ‘Wild East’.
Set near a village in Bulgaria close to the Greek border, Western centres on a group of German construction workers commissioned to build a hydroelectric power plant and traces their shifting relations with the locals. We follow Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), the outsider of the group, on his first job abroad, as he ventures beyond the Germans’ makeshift camp and towards the Bulgarian village. In the aftermath of a co-worker’s prank, Meinhard connects with a group of local men from the village, befriending a local quarry worker, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), and his teenage nephew Wanko (Kevin Bashev). Yet, from a riverside scene of sexual harassment to a cut-off water supply, the raising of a flag to a white horse left for dead, tensions build between the ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler’ communities. Meinhard’s increasing yet precarious alignment with the Bulgarians exacerbates already existing friction with his boss, Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek), and co-workers. Early in the film, the construction workers gather around a campfire, laughing and drinking beers as one of the men braids another’s hair. “Is it ladies’ night or something?” Vincent asks tauntingly as he comes to join the group. The camera, as it so often does in Western, lingers on Meinhard lighting a cigarette, quiet and seemingly detached from his surroundings. Off-frame his coworker retorts, “Come on, don’t be like that. We know you have a dick”. Through the staging of this exchange, the framing of Vincent and Meinhard almost in shot/reverse-shot, the film connects this jocular policing of masculinity with the structure of a duel, which later comes to define the relationship between the two characters.
The film, however, refuses us cathartic release: the violence of the Western duel – whether between Meinhard and Vincent, or the construction workers and the locals – never quite arrives. The only shot fired is at a suffering animal. These suspended tensions put pressure on the film and its form – whether through its privileging of nocturnal scenes or the use of quiet, Western continually hovers at the limits of visibility and audibility. The three moments that rupture this suspension serve only to further reinscribe it. Each time, the camera tracks closely on Meinhard when suddenly another body breaks into the frame, attempting to topple him to the ground: Vincent; Wanko; a group of Bulgarians from the village. The imminence of violence comes to be felt at the borders of the frame. During the campfire scene, a sound from nearby startles the group of men, who then investigate. After spotting two figures at the top of a hill, the group chases them, driving all the way to the nearby village. “We’re back… It only took 70 years,” they laugh, referencing Germany’s occupation of Bulgaria in World War II. In connecting past military occupation with the present of European Union infrastructure projects, Western underlines the unequal relations between the two nations, gesturing towards the narrative’s neo-colonial dimensions. In doing so, the film gives ‘freedom’ – a theme central to the Western genre – another cadence. Discussions of personal freedom connect Meinhard with Adrian, but the film’s emphasis goes beyond the individual, alluding to the four freedoms at the heart of the EU: the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour across national borders. When is this freedom exploited? Western asks.
Abandoned along the side of the road by his mocking coworkers, Meinhard hitches a ride back to the camp from locals. This initial scene of betrayal clears the ground for Meinhard’s alignment with the nearby Bulgarian community. He sits in the darkly-lit back seat, his eyes shifting uncomfortably towards the window, as the driver (Adrian) and one of the men speak on the phone: “I thought he was fleeing across the border!” In its use of subtitle translation, the dialogue here reflects a strategy that is used across the film, exploiting the disjunction between the spectator’s capacity to fully understand the meaning of words spoken (German or Bulgarian) and the characters’ limited comprehension as they communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers. By calling attention to gaps in intercultural communication, Western does not suggest its failure, but rather points to the ways we make sense at the limits of understanding, attending to gesture, expression, accent, tone. Back in the car, Meinhard sits in uncomprehending silence as the Bulgarian men continue to size him up, questioning him and speaking across him. One of them gestures emphatically to the nearby Greek border: “there are refugees,” he teasingly warns, “aren’t you scared?” “No understand,” Meinhard replies. Yet for us, this exchange situates the narrative against the backdrop of the refugee crisis and attendant renegotiations of European borders.
As filmmaker, Grisebach herself crosses national borders, occupying a place between German and Austrian cinemas. Born in Bremen in 1968, Grisebach is a graduate of the Vienna Film Academy, where she made her debut feature Be My Star (Mein Stern, 2001), and she continues to be closely linked with the Austrian film company coop99, which co-produced Western. Despite this, Grisebach is more often associated with the stylised realism of the Berlin School, alongside other ‘second generation’ filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Ulrich Köhler. As with her previous critically-lauded feature, Longing (Sehnsucht, 2007), Western explores masculinity through a practice of ‘radical observation’ without judgment, attuned to the subtlest of gestures. By directing the genre away from its focus on male violence, which Jane Tompkins describes as “the most salient fact about the Western”,² the film gives space to the everyday rituals of masculinity. The men size each other up, establish power dynamics, and police group norms – we are encouraged to linger on a detail, a glance, an expression to interpret the non-verbal communication favoured by the film’s taciturn male characters. From the rivalry over authority between Vincent and Meinhard, to the knife Meinhard gifts to Wanko, Western traces these rituals to the male protagonists’ inexpressible desires for belonging. In the car with the Bulgarians, Meinhard struggles to assert himself and so he reaches for a word he understands, “soldat”, and claims to be a “légionnaire” — an allusion to Claire Denis’s film on the French Foreign Legion, Beau Travail (1999). Through this evocation of heroic masculinity, Meinhard shifts the dynamics of power in the car: Adrian glances backward in recognition, a gesture that sets their friendship in motion. Yet, whether Meinhard is telling the truth or constructing a fictive past is not clear and the film refuses to confirm anything.
The difference between Meinhard’s alignment with the locals and Vincent’s treatment of them is similarly indeterminate. We witness moments of connection, from learning to thread tobacco leaves to conversing about the loss of his brother, yet there are also more ambiguous moments: we see Meinhard take possession of Adrian’s white horse, keep earnings after a friendly game of poker, and have casual sex with a local woman whom Vincent also desires, Vyara (Viara Borisova). Given the unequal relations between them, is this exploitation? Western’s refusal of a fixed moral framework is a generosity towards the spectator, a component of what Catherine Wheatley describes as Grisebach’s ‘feminine aesthetic’.³ As Wheatley suggests, Grisebach’s films “offer themselves up as pluralities of meaning, from which the spectator can derive their own sense, with no interpretations prescribed or proscribed.”⁴ The film’s arresting final image is of Meinhard dancing alone at the village’s riverside party, once again at slight remove from his surroundings, his face inscrutable.
1 Jesse Cumming, “‘Where Are the Men I Can Imagine on a Horse?’: Valeska Grisebach on Western,” Filmmaker Magazine, https://filmmakermagazine.com/104985-where-are-the-men-i-can-imagine-on-a-horse-valeska-grisebach-on-western/ 2 Jane P. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28. 3 Catherine Wheatley, ’Not Politics but People’: The Feminine Aesthetic in Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht’. In New Austrian Film. Edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2011), 145-6. 4 Ibid., 146.
