Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** Protecting Borders, Imagining Frontiers: Canadian Film in Hemispheric Perspective
*** Work in progress *** As most scholars in Europe who do Canadian Cultural and Literary Studies I am not solely
specialized in Canada but rather teach at an Institute of English and American Studies. Being
trained in American and Latin American Studies, the predominant part of my teaching, my
research and my publications is in US literary and cultural history and American film. When
we started doing research for our book on the History of Canadian Film – the first book in
German on the topic – I had studied Canadian film and Canadian history quite intensely. But
still, one of the most eye-opening insights during the work on the different chapters of
filmmaking in Canada was to realize the deep divide between the study of anglophone and
francophone Canadian film. We structured our book in different chapters, mostly according
to genres: Silent film and Early Canadian Filmmaking until 1940s; Documentary film,
Animation and Experimental film; Feature Film since WWII. Most of the books we read for
each of these chapters made quite a strict distinction between francophone (or québécois) and
anglophone filmmaking – in a way that sometimes you could get the impression that the
scholars were studying film from different, separate nations, as if there were no exchanges
and communication between filmmakers, no common discourse between scholars, as if
filmmakers were living in different countries. Rather than adapting to, and repeating this
approach, in our book we tried to stick to the national frame – although at the same time, due
to contemporary discourse of migration and globalization, we were skeptical whether the
concept of “national film” still was an adequate way of categorizing film.
Looking form outside of Canada, my initial approach to the study of film in the national
paragigm was guided by the troublesome and closely tied relation of Canadian film
production/reception to the much more powerful American film industry – a topic that has
been a long-time preoccupation of Canadian filmmakers, the Canadian film industry, and
Canadian film studies. The questions that were controversially discussed since Grierson’s
establishment of the NFB, or maybe even before: How can Canada compete with Hollywood
and American film industry? What is specific about Canadian Film? What is specifically
Canadian about Canadian film? However, the more I studied Canadian film history and the
more I got acquainted with our contemporary film scene in Canada, the more I noticed that
1 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** Canadianness is much less a topic in filmmaking and in film studies than I originally assumed
– I do not want to say that it is not a topic at all, but less then I had initially assumed. As all
national perspectives, the question of Candianness mostly becomes a topic when discussing
the relation to an outside of the nation – and in this outside for different reason often is the
US.
Writing the book on Canadian film history, I realized that my focus on Canadianness
and my comparative perspective – USA-Canada – was the reason why I was so struck by the
divide between anglo- and francophone filmmaking and film studies. So, it was me, the critic,
who imagined and wished to construct a national unity and homogeneity, from outside.
Such considerations and reflecting on questions of national film history, made me link my
recent study of Canadian film (which I am just starting to work on) more directly to my
broader interest in American Studies and Postcolonial Studies – and more specifically to
Transnational American Studies and Hemispheric American Studies – critical approaches that
question, explore or deconstruct national categories and the thinking in national paradigms.
From such a perspective alignments of Canadian directors, actors and producers that go
beyond the national framework acquire a more central relevance – and in some cases might
show to be more important as intertextual references and discursive contexts than the search
for Canadianness or specifically Canadian forms of expression. For example Deepa Mehta’s
work or Atom Egoyan’s Ararat come to mind, also the international aesthetics of David
Cronenberg or the focus on regional culture and history of many québécois filmmakers.
Thus in my current research project I position Canadian film in the context of the Western
Hemisphere and do a comparative study of the US-Mexico border and the US-Canada border
in North American film production. In such border films, national identity and affiliations are
negotiated while being exposed as conflictual and constructed sites.
In the following I will first briefly outline the concept of “Hemispheric American Studies”
and will then discuss Canadian contributions to of North American border representation.
My thesis à Border films move Canadian film into a hemispheric frame because they invite
comparisons with the US and other parts of the Americas – and this implies different notions
of Canadianness.
2 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** Hemispheric American Studies
In the past few decades quite a few publications have shifted the study of American cultural
history as well as the study of Canadian cultural history towards what has been discussed and
theorized as Hemispheric American Studies. Such an approach to the Americas as an
interconnected whole takes up threads from the longer history of political and cultural PanAmericanism and from intellectuals who thought about inter-American relations in the 19th
and 20th century. The essays by the Cuban writer and political activist José Martí „Nuestra
America“ and „Madre America“ are of central importance for thinking the hemisphere as an
entity. Martí’s seminal late 19th century essays highlighted contradictions in the relationship
between the U.S. and Latin America that have since remained valid: He sees Latin America
united with the US when opposing ongoing attempts of European colonialism but at the same
time emphasized, warned and anticipated conflicts with the U.S. because of U.S.’ imperial
desires – as a country that, as Peter Hulme put it: is postcolonial and colonizing at the same
time. In Latin America, this contradiction and ambivalent relation to the U.S. later has been
discussed as a love-hate relationship, with Latin America adoring U.S. culture, economy, and
democracy but at the same time opposing the U.S. dominant role in the Western Hemisphere.
In our times, issues such as globalization, postcolonialism, migration and NAFTA have added
to the theoretical, political and methodological justification of Hemispheric American Studies.
Considering this hemispheric frame, as it has been explored in such more recent publications
as Gretchen Murphy’s Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S.
Empire (2005) and Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000) and Caroline Levander and Robert Levine’s
Hemispheric American Studies (2008), it remains to be asked what role Canada takes in the
hemispheric frame of affiliation and identification. And what about Canadian film
production?
Most of the pertinent publications in the field refer to Canadian cultural, literary and political
history, commenting on Canada as part of the Western Hemisphere. Historically the position
of Canada in the hemisphere in many ways equals the one of Latin American countries as
analysed by José Martí: A closeness – even stronger than in Mexico and other parts of Latin
America – is accompanied by attempts to distinguish Canadianness from US-Americanness.
In Canadian film history, the attempts to protect the Canadian film and media market, to
compete with American film production – as it characterized Canadian film production since
3 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** the inception of film in the late 19th century. The public funding of feature film production in
the 1920s and 1930s, the dream of a Hollywood of the North, John Grierson’s notion of
Canadian film, the NFB, the concentrating on documentary film and animation are each
connected to and expression of the ambivalent relation to the powerful Southern neighboring
country.
***
What is the role of Canadian film within a Hemispheric American Studies? Different aspects
are noteworthy here:
• The production, Hollywood of the North, American studios producing in Canada (in
similar way as in Mexico),
• Distribution of Canadian film in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean
• Dominance of American film and popular culture in Canada (an topic that has haunted
Canada since the inception film culture
• Content: Migration – and which is part of my current research: Border crossing
***
In my research project, I am approaching these questions by analyzing border representations
and the symbolic meaning of North American borders in American, Canadian, and Mexican
film. In this project I examine border representations: U.S. Mexico border and U.S.-Canada
border but also other borders in the Western Hemisphere: as, for example, the border between
Guatemala and Mexico in the movies El Norte and the very recent: Sin Nombre.
I will start with one of the earliest representations of the US-Mexico border in American film.
The first cinematic representation of national borders are closely intertwined with images and
the cultural discourse of the Frontier -In the U.S., silent film for the first time made visual material about the remote region
of the Southern border accessible to a broad audience all over the U.S. and, in fact, the globe.
The American silent film popularized patterns of representation and of the symbolic meaning
4 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** of the Southern border that have remained part of the cultural imaginary and have become
standard repertoire of the visual communication of inter-American issues. As Elena
Dell’Agnese puts it:
[…] the US-Mexico border has been invented and re-invented by the camera, which has
selected certain clichés and developed its own topoi. Through the century, the border was
depicted as a racialised space, as a gendered area where masculine and feminine
stereotypes can be portrayed against a backdrop of colonial fantasies, as a place of
contested historical heritage and even as a symbolic landscape of cultural hybridisation and
encounter. (2005: 205)
One of the most extraordinary and indicatory symbolically charged border
representation of the silent era is provided by Charlie Chaplin’s comedy The Pilgrim (1923).
Although the brief appearance of Mexicans as bandits with large sombreros and mustaches in
the last seconds of the movie corresponds very clearly to stereotypical images, Chaplin’s take
on Mexicans and on the topic of border crossing runs counter to conventions of his time. In
The Pilgrim – within the generic parameters of the comedy – not only Mexicans appear in a
ridiculous pose but also Anglo-Americans. But Chaplin’s application of border symbolism
and stereotypes of Mexicans as bandidos, and Americans as pious Protestants and moral
people rejects any mimetic reading from the start. The viewer learns about the comic
symbolic code of the film right in the first frames when dress code is exposed as a way to
communicate and to establish identities:
Chaplin plays an escaped convict who steals a minister’s clothes to get out of his
prison uniform. After a long train ride he arrives in a Texan small town where he – by mistake
– is welcomed as the new priest of the community. The priest’s true identity is revealed when
he tries to get a former fellow crook to return money he had stolen from the priest’s landlady.
But rather than incarcerate the priest/criminal, the sheriff releases him at the Mexican border.
à film clip
the zigzagging course of one character mediating between two identities (convict and
clergyman).
The intertitle “Mexico: A new life! Peace at last!” translates the visual language into
colloquial patterns. However, this Mexican space of freedom and utopia is instantly debunked
5 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** as an illusion, a deception. The movie ends with Chaplin the tramp on the borderline,
undecided, split, constantly moving and remaining in a fully symbolic mode of
inbetweenness.
Certainly the movie plays with the fact that leaving the states when crossing the border
criminals were able to escape U.S. jurisdiction. But this factual basis of the border crossing,
the crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border from North to South in this comedy acquires a
symbolic meaning that in the decades following Chaplin has been restaged in countless
narratives, from Kerouac’s On the Road to the more recent The Three Burials of Melquiades
Estrada. In these narratives the crossing enables the finding and testing of repressed longings,
desires, and lifestyles.
à Considering such rich border imagery of the US-Mexico border, it remains to be asked
whether we find anything comparable in representations of the US-Canada border. What role
does this Northern border of the US play in American film and what patterns of representation
do we find in Canadian film history. What significance do border/boundaries/frontiers have in
Canadian film history?
The most successful Canadian silent film was Back to God’s Country (1919) as part of the
socalled Northwoods Melodrama. James Oliver Curwood and Ernest Shipman, with Nell
Shipman in the female leading rold.
After her father is killed by an outlaw, Dolores (Nell Shipman) marries Peter who came to her
loghouse home from the East. Later the couple goes on an expedition to the Arctic. While
they are at sea, Dolores meets the ship's captain, who is the man who killed her father. The
captain causes an 'accident' to happen to Peter, so Dolores is all alone and defenceless. After a
chase on dog sleigh through the Arctic ice, Dolores is finally successful in rescuing herself
and her husband.
There are no national borders in this film. But Back to God’s Country is a film about the
Frontier as the meeting point of civilization and wilderness. The film was shot on location in
Alberta, with lots of wild animal scenes in the first part, and Artic scenery in the second part.
It is the life in and experience of the wilderness that is at the center of this plot structure.
6 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** Because of the different regional setting: Western mountains, Eastern urban center (Ottawa),
Artic, Inuit population, the Chinese, (as well as an actor in blackface) the film presents itself
very much as „Canadian“ – although at the same time aiming at an American audience that
would understand this „Canadian“ narrative in terms of Frontier life and mythology. With the
Western as a generic frame. After all, the film is based on a novel by the American adventure
author James Oliver Curwood. Thus Back to God’s Country provide a national narrative that
frames Canada by showing characteristics of the Canadian population, landscape, wildlife.
After shooting this Canadian Western, the producer Ernest Shipman and Nell Shipman
separated. Nell Shipman moved to Hollywood where she worked as actress and as a film
producer – certainly quite remarkable for a woman at the time. In 1920 Nell Shipman
produced Something New that is set in the Southwest – a Western that substitutes cars for
horses. Structurally very similar to Back to God’s Country, we finally have a woman rescuing
her lover from the hands of bandits. This time the setting, however, is Mexico and the chase
does not take place on dog sleighs but rather in a car that traverses the Southwestern
borderlands, with the heros trying to escape Mexico, back to he US
In Something New we find different patterns of representation and functions of border
crossing: (1) The denegrading of Mexicans, (2) the use of the border symbolism for defining
national identities, (3) making Mexico and the border crossing part of its comedy mode and
(4) imagining Mexico as a place of freedom and self-realization. Interestingly this production
of 1920 also adds a gender perspective that appears to be quite progressive in some respects
(although in the end, Nell Shipman’s films always fall back into a patriarchal mode of gender
relations).
Something New was produced, written and directed by Nell Shipman who is also starring in
this Western and early car movie shot at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Next to Mary Pickford, Ernest and Nell Shipman are probably the best known Canadian stars
of the the silent film era. The Shipmans were active as actors, directors and producers,
producing the best known Canadian silent film: Back to God’s Country. – After this success
the couple separated and Nell Shipman re-settled in Hollywood where she continued to work
as producer, director and actress. – thus quite a remarkably modern woman.
Something New starts with a frame narrative: We see Nell Shipman in the role of Nell
Shipman the author (as the intertitle inform us), thinking about “something new” in script
7 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** writing. A race between a horseman and a car inspire her to write a story about a woman
going to Mexico to get to know “real life”. The film then switches to staging Shipman’s
script. We see Nell Shipman arriving at some bordertown in Mexico, staying on the farm of
one of her relatives. Eventually she is kidnapped by Mexian bandidos. The major part of the
57 minutes movie is dedicated to the rescuing of Shipman by the male hero and the
subsequent escape of the couple. This is a rather conventional plot – but Shipman adds a very
entertaining and hilarious aspect: the hero chases the bandids in his car, a Maxwell sedan and
the couple escapes in this car. The movie contains many stunt scenes, and even shows
Shipman driving the car through extremely rocky terrain when trying to escape from the
bandidos. Shipman is shown shooting some of the bandits, defends herself against sexual
assaults, and through her initiative the wounded male hero is rescued and led back to the US.
Once they spot the American flag, they are rescued.
National symbolism is quite evident.
Mexico first functions as a space of freedom and self-fullfilment of a woman: She is shown as
a professional writer in Mexico, driving a car and eventually rescuing the male hero who
rescued her. The film plays with different functions of “Imaginary Mexicos”: The scriptwriter
Shipman in the film uses Mexico as a setting for her story as “the Land *****”. When
crossing the border she is shown in a role that appears rather extraordinary for its time: She is
shown as a strong woman, fighting and defending herself in a Mexico terrorized by bandids
and in the borderlands of almost impenetrable rocky landscape. – in the end the US – which is
where she started out from physically and in her imagination – is where she returns to.
In Something New the crossing of the border to Mexico functions as a crossing from “reality”
to “imagination”, and Mexico functions as a space of imaginative invention, of fantasy that
contrasts the US and Mexico not just as “real” neigbors but in terms of national symbolism.
The film plays with these different functions in a way that – I think – was rather new to film
history at the time, and that indicates the function of the US-Mexico border as a closed
boundary for the Mexicans and an open frontier for Americans – a pattern that is
characteristic for American film up to our days.
After the period of the silent film – apart of Nell Shipman, Mary Pickford was the most
popular Canadian contribution – North American national borders have become a topic in
many movies – most significant certainly: Mexico in the Western. As already was obvious in
8 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** the silent era, the meaings of “freedom” self-fulfillment, adventure are connected to this
border rather than the US-Canada border in the cultural and cinematic imaginary.
Usually documentaries about the U.S.-Canada border emphasize the similarities between
countries and people, a closeness that hardly has any threatening aspect – except of crossborder smuggling of goods and people.
One such documentary:
Two Countries, One Street (dir. Jean Palardy, 1955), 28 minute NFB documentary
This short documentary visits the 3 Quebec border towns of Rock Island, Stanstead and
Beebe, and the Vermont town of Derby Line to see how residents and officials cope with a
civic life that is cut down the middle by an international boundary.
One political issue that has inspired film narratives on the US-Canada border are First nation
reservations located along the St. Lawrence, the international border. The native tribes refuse
to accept the national devide of their people which has caused conflict with authorities. It is
an issue that has been controversial for a few decades.
You Are on Indian Land (dir. Mort Ransen, 1969), filmed with a Mohawk film crew and
activists.
The film shows the confrontation between police and a 1969 demonstration by Mohawks of
the St. Regis Reserve on the bridge between Canada and the United States near Cornwall,
Ontario. By blocking traffic on the bridge, which is on the Reserve, the Indians drew public
attention to their grievance that they were prohibited by Canadian authorities from duty-free
passage of personal purchases across the border, a right they claim was established by the Jay
Treaty of 1794.
This issue has become part of a recent American feature film: Frozen River in which an
American white woman joins a Mohawk women who is trafficking illegal immigrants over
the border. – screening clips.
Television:
Little Mosque on the Prarie – series that focuses on the Muslim community in the fictional
prairie town of Mercy, Sasketchewas. Plays with the Frontier/Settler community imagery of
9 Markus Heide, *** work in progress *** Little House on the Prairie – but also has references to immigration that negotiate boundaries
of citizenship and belonging. First episode: airport control (9/11) interviews the new imam
Amar Rashid – who turns out to be born and raised in Toronto.
The Border – a Canadian drama that aired on CBC Television. The series is set in Toronto
and follows agents of the fictitious Immigratin and Costoms Security ICS agency. ICS was
created by the government of Canada to deal with tran-border matters concerning Canadian
national security, including terrorism and smuggling. This is the only dramatic treatment of
Canadian border issues in terms of national security – whereas in the US this has for a long
time been a topic in TV drama (like Walker Texas Ranger, Miami Vice, 24).
Border control scene are part of a few more recent film: Like for example: Ararat (2001),
directed by Atom Egoyan, re-entering the country is an issue, customs official suspecting a
young Canadian-Armenian returning from Turkey to carry drugs into Canada. During the
interview the official learns about the Armenian genocide.
Highway 61, dir. Bruce McDonald, 1991
In this film the ambivalence of the inter-American relationship between the US and Canada is
brought up in an interesting way that reminds of the 19th century assessment by José Martí of
cultural and international relationship between the U.S. and Spanish America. The admiration
of U.S. culture while at the same time being critical of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. In
this road movie we get both aspects translated in scenes as well as in the general plot
structure. Route 61 is a road movie whose title refers to the highway leading from Ontario to
New Orleans and to Bob Dylan’s famous song Highway 61 Revisited.
Border films such as Highway 61 use filmic techniques and forms of exression as
iconographic imagery (e.g. flags) but also employ cultural stereotypes (like gun shooting,
drug use). What we get in Highway 61: the border crossing: for fulfilling one’s dreams, for
smuggling drugs, for escaping from prosecution, for self-fulfillment.
10