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

In Borderland Films Dominique Brégent-Heald explores the idea of “borderlands” to draw together the visual cultures of the borderlands of the United States with Canada and Mexico. Few scholars attend to the role of the US-Canadian border in the cultural dynamics of North America—with such exceptions as Kornel Chang, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and Claire Fox. Moreover, Brégent-Heald contextualizes her study in the Progressive Era, a time when political transformations in the North American hemisphere brought these three nations into intimate contact.

The films of this period reflect and subsequently influence the geopolitics of the borderland regions by shaping policy and public opinion about the relationship of the United States to its neighbors. The north and south borderlands are places where ideas about the formation of national, gender, sexual, and racial identities are enacted and take shape. Like other film critics—notably Chon Noriega, Arthur Pettit, and Charles Ramírez Berg—Brégent-Heald argues that early images of the border emanate from narratives that predate the inception of cinema. And she notes thematic continuities regarding the meaning of borders and frontiers while observing the contrast between the Mexican and Canadian borders involving issues and ideas about US national security. This contrast, in which Mexico poses a security threat while Canada is perceived as nonthreatening, emanates from the Progressive Era and the symbolic representations and storylines of cinematic features, persisting still into current political ideology. Yet both borders are central to ideas about US expansion; moreover, the concept of the frontier as a place to be conquered and colonized abides across the Northwest and Southwest of the United States and in the North in relation to the Klondike, often considered the “last frontier”—though others might argue that US expansion into the Pacific designates another final frontier.

Brégent-Heald explores how visual culture and fictions embodying border mythology engaged the Progressive Era’s diverse publics, readerships, and audiences. Indeed, she shows that the border has often been deployed as a convenient shorthand for capturing the ideals of the Progressive Era, standing in for splits between moral values, opposing forces, and other spheres of difference and division, particularly with regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Although many of the films in this study are no longer in circulation or even extant, Brégent-Heald turns to their “paper trail,” borrowing Thomas Cripps’s term, to contextualize them, relying on their description in written texts—periodicals, biographies, literature, newspapers, and government documents—to provide a more complete cinematic portrait of the era.

In each chapter she compares Mexico and Canada with the United States as a point of reference but not the defining center of her analysis. She teases out differences between the interrelated ideas of the “frontier” and the “borderlands” across various American colonial spaces in early Hollywood, noting how they contribute to the formation of US national identity. She notes parallels between representations of the “Southland,” or the southern US border spaces, and the “Northland,” or land abutting Canada and the Klondike, discerning the various symbolic meanings attached to these borderlands, particularly as imagined spaces of interracial intimacies and contact where normative gender and sexual identities might be redefined and challenged, particularly in relation to the production of racial boundaries. Borders, north and south, become zones where people encounter difference.

Overall, Borderland Films is a clearly written and well-argued exploration of the impact of cinema on North American international relations. This sprawling and ambitious archive of hundreds of borderland films is a much-needed corrective to border studies in the American hemisphere and a model of global and comparative border studies. It will no doubt become a key text of the field.