Borderland Films

The early twentieth-century was a defining period for the American film industry. First established on the East Coast, it soon moved to Southern California, where filmmakers took advantage of advancing technologies, developed new techniques, and catered to the public’s increasing cinematic appetite, all within the shifts and changes of the Progressive-Era United States. Brégent-Heald’s Borderland Films focuses on an especially popular and successful genre of this time, films set in the border regions between the United States and both Mexico and Canada. Over 500 films made in the 1910s found the borderlands an ideal setting to address critical issues of race, gender, and nation, in ways that both articulated and shaped the era’s debates. A first chapter lays the book’s foundation, by discussing how film emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and came to depict three border areas: the American Southwest, the Northwest, and Alaska. Chapter Two, “Liminal Borderlands,” begins to connect specific films to the book’s arguments, showing how early twentieth-century movies portrayed borderlands as existing in an in-between state filled with ambiguities and tensions that filmmakers could exploit to address social issues. For example, films set in “Old Mexico” and “Old Canada” offered viewers a respite from modern life, allowing them to indulge in an imperialist nostalgia for supposedly simpler times that nonetheless were understood as inferior to modern society. Subsequent chapters draw out further the ways that borderland films addressed the tensions of Progressive Era America. “Racial Borderlands” argues that films regularly probed the dynamics of race in border regions, using tropes such as the “vanishing Indian” and the “half breed” to explore its instability. Similarly, “Gendered Borderlands” sees film as a forum for representing the conflicts between notions of Victorian womanhood and the emergence of the “New Woman.” In “Crime and Punishment,” the author shows how motion pictures characterized border spaces as dangerous places that required the intervention of US forces. Such fears were heightened by the outbreaks of the Mexican Revolution and First World War and the films discussed in “Revolution and War” used these international conflicts to advocate for strong US involvement.

Americanization · Archaeology · Art history · Liminality · Movie theater · Political science · State (computer science) · American History and Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture