Dominique Brégent-Heald. Borderland Films

The rise of cinema as a major form of popular entertainment that both mirrored and helped shape U.S. modernization and urbanization in the early twentieth century is a topic that has been well covered by a number of cultural and film histories. Dominique Brégent-Heald’s Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era draws on previous studies of Progressive Era film representations of labor, gender, race, stereotypes, reforms, and uplift, but offers a rich expansion on these cultural histories by linking them to the political and social issues of borderland studies—U.S. economic expansion, nationalism, cultural imperialism, militarization, and national security. Borderland Films analyzes the approximately five hundred fictional narratives placed along the Mexican and Canadian borders and the Klondike and produced between 1908 and 1920 to understand how the liminal periods and places represented in the films “created complex and paradoxical spaces to explore the social construction of nation, race, and gender in North America’s border region but ultimately expressed border anxieties over maintaining gendered, racial, and national boundaries during the early twentieth century” (3). Across an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue, Brégent-Heald compares film stories along the U.S. borders and delineates films thematically and chronologically, charting the shift from romanticized colonial nostalgia for the Spanish and French past to the post–World War I modern world. The study also traces the standardization of film production from single-reel-format films screened in small nickelodeon venues to the centralization of feature film production in southern California, the rise of dedicated movie theaters, and the expansion of U.S. film distribution around the world.

Americanization · Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Militarization · Modernity · Movie theater · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies