Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".