Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era by Dominique Brégent-Heald (review)

Beginning with Mary Louise Pratt’s understanding of “contact zones” and Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space,” as well as Chicana/o and border studies theories, “Borderland Films reveals the ways that [U.S.] cinema, its critics, and its audiences functioned in circuits of meaning-making in which all participants helped to shape perceptions of North America’s border regions” (4). Brégent-Heald explains her use of terms such as border, frontier, and borderlands, and lays out this book’s crucial thrust of combining print and film studies in order to ask myriad questions about history, gender, space, and landscape. The book centers on the time period of 1908–20, incorporating two dominant events of the era (the Mexican Revolution and WWI), in order to “analyze filmic portrayals of borders and borderlands and also consider the industry that produced those representations while placing the filmmakers, their motion pictures, critics, and audiences in their larger cultural, social, and political contexts” (11). Textual sources besides the films themselves, including newspaper articles, monographs, and other documents, play a key role as the author explains limitations based on deteriorated or lost films.

Chapter 1 begins with a definition of the space of this study: “the southwest frontier, the northwest frontier, and the ‘last frontier,’ that is, the Klondike” (17). The US-Mexico-Canada context is explained by examples from films by notable directors, such as D. W. Griffith, who portrayed Canada and Mexico through the landscapes of Fort Lee, New Jersey. The development of the film industry and more sophisticated critics and audiences meant a change in shooting location as the film-going public expected more, and the subsequent move to California meant arriving at a place that could pass for others (Mexico, the Northlands, and the Klondike) that was undergoing a “white-washing” (37–40).

The second chapter opens with a description of the era’s “longing for a mythical colonial past and a visual respite from the exigencies of modern, industrial-capitalist society” (41). Indeed, film portrayals of French and Spanish colonial life are juxtaposed with a dour modernity. A long section analyzes Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884) and the production of a nostalgic yearning for the California of yore, and particular attention is given to Griffith and Romaine Fielding as well as film criticism of the era that questioned the perceived essentialism of Mexico. Similarly, films about Canada’s Northlands and Klondike featured the fur trade as cultural mythos informed by literature from both Canadian and American authors (Jack London, for example), and this pitch toward literary inclusion demonstrates changes in film marketing that stemmed from the desire to attract a larger audience.

Starting with Pratt’s aforementioned “contact zones” as well as notions of mestizaje, the third chapter describes tales of miscegenation as well as the problematic “half-breed” in films of the era, paying particular attention to “the structural parallels between cinematic representations of Indigenous, mixed-race, Mexican, and French Canadian characters” (92). A return to Griffith’s adaptation of Ramona, due to its location that draws from the mixing of three cultures, provides an introduction to the “Indian Question,” and most films of the era divide the answer between “separation or assimilation” (102). Entire races and genders are characterized in film as either noble (the exotic native woman who sacrifices herself by assimilating into white culture) or intrinsically bastardized mixtures, and some films even invoke Spain’s Black Legend in order to discount Mexico (112). More influential, still, were the Mexican Revolution and WWI, both marking important shifts in film production and financial expectations. To the north, the British-French dichotomy mirrors the binary of US-Mexico relations, though the former is racially white and the latter racially mixed. Often, fur-trapper films emphasize the progressive notion of geographical determinism.

Continuing the study of race, Chapter 4 examines in detail the spaces created in these films as they...