Borderland Films

Borderland Films is an ambitious and impressive work of cultural history. While focused on a relatively short period, 1908–1919, the book covers approximately five hundred films made in the United States in those years. Most of the films discussed have been lost in print form, but as Dominique Brégent-Heald proves, much relevant information can be gleaned from the extrafilmic textual record, including film reviews, publicity materials, letters to the editor, and production records. Contributing to her analysis of these films is the author's synthesis of scholarship from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including social and cultural history, film studies, and border studies. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the book is its effective argument for the study of place-based films generally and “borderland films” specifically. Heretofore bracketed under the amorphous heading of “westerns,” these borderland films are distinctive, the author argues, for their use of those liminal settings, the spaces that make up the boundaries between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, to explore the dynamics of geographic and social marginalization. Border regions are not merely backdrops to these stories—they are central to the film narratives and their audience appeal. Such a place-based approach enables Brégent-Heald to span a variety of genres, including the western, the melodrama, and its hybrids, as well as several geographic locales. Considered comparatively, the disparate border regions have much in common, especially in the ways they provided the opportunity for Americans to discuss the intertwined dynamics of primitivity and civilization, race and gender, and war and citizenship

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