Wind Blast, a Chinese Western in a nomadic plateau

This analysis of Wind Blast (2010) presents a type of genre filmmaking in Chinese cinema heavily indebted to Hollywood. Wind Blast is a Chinese Western; in fact it falls into a category of Asian Westerns, including Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000), Sukiyaki Western Django (Japan, 2007), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (South Korea, 2008), A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop (China, 2009), and Let the Bullets Fly (China, 2010). All these Westerns may be described as ‘Nomadic’ films, to use a Deleuzian principle, unfolding along rhizomatic ‘lines of segmentarity’ (from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21). The paper will set out to delineate the Western space of Wind Blast and to examine its signs of spatiality that connects it to the Hollywood Western, while also exploring how it is also disconnected from its source. The Chinese Western possesses its own Western space that is located in the Western topographical regions of China. The paper will examine how this space is infused and affected by the Deleuzian concept of difference.