Borderlands Cinema

WELCOME!

This Google Site will provide you with relevant and useful resources and tools to work on your research reports for Professor Benamou's Spring 2022 class on Borderlands Cinema. It includes helpful information on getting started with research, how to use and find scholarly books, how to find scholarly articles through library databases, and where to get one-on-one research help. Course Themes Include:

Course Description + Themes: A comparative exploration of documentary and fictional screen representations of border crossing and borderlands culture along shared borders in the Americas, as well as other regions (the Middle East, SubSaharan Africa) of the world, from the 1950s to the present.

Border Crossings:

  • In and out of Detention

  • Film Noir & Maverick Portrayals of the 1950s

  • Focalizing Migrancy: Realist strategies & Border Geographies

  • Humor & National allegory in 80s cross-border representation

  • Transculturation through border-crossing

Border Lands:

  • Uncertain Justice

  • Border as boundary; narratives of loss and longing

  • Border Productions and Narco-Narratives

Transborder Communities and Identities:

  • Reconstructing histories/transmitting cultural memory

  • Native Networks/Transborder Spaces

Image Credit: ¡ALAMBRISTA! - Directed by Robert M. Young, United States, 1977, via Mubi: https://mubi.com/films/alambrista.