‘The Falkirk Cowboys’: Post-industrial nostalgia and Europe’s Wild West

Citation

Toth G (2020) ‘The Falkirk Cowboys’: Post-industrial nostalgia and Europe’s Wild West. Scottish Critical Heritage [Blog Post] 23.06.2020. https://scottishcriticalheritage.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/the-falkirk-cowboys-post-industrial-nostalgia-and-europes-wild-west/

Abstract
In the 1970s, three workers at the British Aluminium Company in Falkirk began making their own amateur Western films, to the delight of their local community. Gyorgy Toth reviews the recent BBC documentary on the ‘Falkirk Cowboys’, and explores the wider cultural, political and economic context that made the cinematic mythology of the Wild West a cultural playground for Scotland’s industrial working class.

Keywords
Post-industrial; nostalgia; Wild West; Europe; workers; westerns

People

Dr Gyorgy Toth

Lecturer, History