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

Denis Villeneuve's Hollywood thriller Sicario (2015), the story of a CIA incursion into Ciudad Juárez to combat the war on drugs, portrays America's southern neighbour as a country in chaos, which justifies American extra-legal and extra-territorial efforts to restore order. Outraged at how his city was depicted, Juárez mayor Enrique Serrano urged a boycott of the film, claiming that while thousands of people were killed in Juárez from 2008 to 2012 during a period of drug-cartel warfare, the number of homicides in Juárez had decreased in recent years. Readers and viewers curious about the long-standing derogatory depictions of border zones in American cinema, as well as the tensions they have caused between the US and its neighbours north and south, will be grateful for Dominique Brégent-Heald's expertly researched and argued monograph Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era. The recent controversy over Villeneuve's Sicario echoes numerous complaints from Mexican film exhibitors in the 1910s who, as Brégent-Heald documents, complained bitterly about films such as D.W. Griffith's The Greaser's Gauntlet (1908), in which the Mexican outlaw became a cinematic shorthand for a backward and racially inferior people. Clearly these stereotypes have a long and storied history.

Brégent-Heald estimates that during the 1910s the US film industry produced and exported close to five hundred fictional motion pictures set on or around the physical edges of the United States. They were set in northern Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the St. Lawrence River area, the Alberta-Montana border, the Pacific Northwest, and the Klondike. They ranged in genre from westerns, Indian dramas, Spanish costume pictures, and Northwest melodramas to comedies, crime dramas, and military films. One of the most striking findings in this study has nothing to do with variety and heterogeneity, but rather with patterns of similarity. Despite the different filmic categories and uses of setting and landscape, borderland films exhibited recurring characters, motifs, and themes that "characterized North America's borderland region in similar ways" (3). The border settings functioned as sites of intercultural encounters and social interactions but were also places of "conflict, coercion and competition" (3). While the filmic borderlands offer spaces for scholars to explore the social construction of nation, race, and gender, the films themselves express broader anxieties over maintaining those same categories and thus reinforcing gender, racial, and national boundaries during the early twentieth century. Brégent-Heald's chosen timeframe for Borderlands Films (1908–1919) necessitates situating these films within the context the Progressive Era and its values of reform, order, and moral uplift, and the role of entertainment, film in particular, in creating and shaping theatregoing publics. The early twentieth century was also a time of significant shifts in the motion-picture industry in terms of changing exhibition practices and audience demographics, marketing campaigns, and motion-picture production. Given how few films in her corpus are extant, Brégent-Heald offers a cultural history of filmic representations of North American borderlands by diligently consulting a wide variety of primary sources such as newspapers, monographs, periodicals, biographies, literary works, government documents, studio-generated synopses, advertisements (several of which are included in the volume), stills, trade journals, letters to newspaper editors, and film reviews. Given that readers will not be familiar with the content of these films, she also offers brief summaries throughout the volume to illustrate her arguments.

The first chapter traces the origins of borderland films by examining the broad cultural contexts for these productions, namely romanticism, anti-modernism, and the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis." A widespread ambivalence about modernity and a privileging of natural landscapes unique to North America (as opposed to Europe) paved the way for place-based films marketed through their dramatic scenery, supposedly authentic locales, and "local color." Interestingly, this push for...