Border Cinema

Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics

Edited by Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan

SERIES: Global Media and Race

Rutgers University Press

The rise of digital media and globalization’s intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema’s form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

While border aesthetics have attracted increasing attention over the last decade, this wide-ranging and innovative collection offers a dynamic argument about why border cinema has become a central direction in contemporary film. Intricately weaving the digital technologies that support it and the shifting global politics that are its target, the book intervenes precisely and provocatively in how we understand world cinema today. Timothy Corrigan, author of A Short Guide to Writing about Film

Examining media from around the globe, this collection of essays compellingly interrogates the relationship between the digital and border cinema aesthetics. As the editors show, the border has become multiple, even mobile borders; mediated representations of these third spaces call viewers to political action and ethical engagement while affording opportunities for re-imagining subjectivities in a post 9-11 world. Essential reading for those invested in the way cinema imagines liminal social spaces. Laura Isabel Serna, author of Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture

Recommended. Choice

While border aesthetics have attracted increasing attention over the last decade, this wide-ranging and innovative collection offers a dynamic argument about why border cinema has become a central direction in contemporary film. Intricately weaving the digital technologies that support it and the shifting global politics that are its target, the book intervenes precisely and provocatively in how we understand world cinema today. Timothy Corrigan, author of A Short Guide to Writing about Film

Examining media from around the globe, this collection of essays compellingly interrogates the relationship between the digital and border cinema aesthetics. As the editors show, the border has become multiple, even mobile borders; mediated representations of these third spaces call viewers to political action and ethical engagement while affording opportunities for re-imagining subjectivities in a post 9-11 world. Essential reading for those invested in the way cinema imagines liminal social spaces. Laura Isabel Serna, author of Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture

Recommended. Choice

MONICA HANNA is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the coeditor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination.

REBECCA A. SHEEHAN is an associate professor of cinema and television arts at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of The Ethics of the Inbetween: The American Avant-Garde and Film-Philosophy.

Table of Contents

Introduction: “Moving Images: Cinematic Contestations of Global Borders in the Digital Age,” by Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan
“Composite Aesthetics as Cultural Cartographies of Europe-in-Transition,” Marina Hassapopoulou
“Undocumation: Documentary Animation’s Unsettled Borders,” Rebecca A. Sheehan
“The Art of Witness in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001),” Rosa-Linda Fregoso
“The Cinematic Borderlands of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel,” Monica Hanna
“Challenging European Borders: Goran Paskaljevic’s Honeymoons,” Anita Pinzi
“Remapping the Borderlands in ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?” Elena Lahr-Vivaz
“Crossing through el Hueco: The Visual Politics of Smuggling in Colombian Migration Films,” Jennifer Harford Vargas
“Toward a Transfrontera-Latinx Aesthetics: An Interview with Filmmaker and Artist Alex Rivera,” Frederick Luis Aldama
“No-man's Land: Shifting Borders and Alternating Identities in Contemporary Israeli Cinema,” Anat Zanger and Nurith Gertz
“Te Borders We Cross in Search of a Better World: On Border Crossing in Three of Amos Gitai’s Feature Films,” Yael Munk
“Filipinos at the Border: Migrant Workers in Transnational Philippine Cinema,” José B. Capino