Border Witness: Reimagining the US-Mexico Borderlands through Film, by Michael Dear. University of California Press, 2023, 318 pp.

Abstract

Michael Dear’s Border Witness: Reimagining the US-Mexico Borderlands through Film offers a profound engagement with a phenomenon he calls the border film genre—in this case, seventy-two films (produced in a span of more than one century) and the narratives they have broadcast globally in that time. As Dear himself declares, “[t]his book is not a work of conventional film criticism or film theory” (68). Rather, it is an intriguing interdisciplinary exercise that draws from multiple subjects—film studies, ethnography, art history, cultural geography, autobiography, history, and political science—to make sense of the Mexico-US borderlands, their inhabitants, and representation. The result is a unique interpretation of the visual and narrative cultural production that has shaped large-scale perceptions about this consequential and oft-mythologised territory. Delivering, in Dear’s own words, “an unabashedly idiosyncratic and opinionated report based in four decades of experience, research, writing, and activism along the southern border”, he places narrative tropes articulated via film production at the centre of this construction (8). Remarkably, Dear has included both US and Mexican productions as his object of study—a perspective few scholars have tackled—to offer multi-focal analyses of border life from both sides of the line.

Keywords

• border film genre
• cultural geography
• us-mexico border
• violence representation
• cinematic ideology