Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics

Cinema

1

Introduction

Moving Images: Contesting Global Borders in the Digital Age

MONICA HANNA AND REBECCA A. SHEEHAN

The rise of digital media and the intensification of globalization since the 1990s have significantly transformed the form and content of global cinema. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema: a cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. The chapters in this collection demonstrate how contemporary border cinema collectively resists border fortification processes and shows how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while imagining a way out of the limitations of current political rhetoric and ideologies. Industrial and aesthetic turns toward the digital have permitted both a spike in cinema’s global distribution and formal innovations and experiments. These innovations have been particularly rich in the area of cinema’s empathic uses of sound and image as part of what this volume identifies as a haptic border aesthetics—one that communicates unique individual experiences through a universal language of images, sound, affective and embodied responses to generic tropes, and tactility capable of crossing cultural borders.¹ Along with focusing on the various kinds of cinematic narratives that have registered contemporary border crises, this collection is interested in how recent shifts in cinematic aesthetics brought about by digital filmmaking formally reflect and mediate evolving conceptions of individual and collective identities in relation to global borders.

Film theorists have long understood (or misunderstood) the digital as rupturing analog filmmaking’s photochemical index, its ontologically privileged relationship to the real. This apparent crisis occasioned by technological shifts in film production from the analog to the digital echoes disruptions caused by economic and political globalization that have led to an unfixing and reordering of indexes defining national identities. Political scientists and cultural theorists have in various ways registered how globalization’s demands for transnational flows of labor and capital have contested the economic and political sovereignty of the modern nation-state. This movement from local to transnational economic, political, social, and individual identity formations is manifested in the rise of multilateral economic and political agreements, including entities like the European Union (EU), agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and economic forums like the G20. The dislocation of the local, meanwhile, is reflected in the rising numbers of refugees and migrants across the globe, whose movements have been prompted by the high stakes of global capitalism.

This move toward the transnational has been further facilitated by technologies of the digital age. We see this in the rise of digital border crossings through social media, blogs, short messaging services, virtual private networks, and the like, used for purposes ranging from resistance and protest movements (the Arab Spring, Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance, the Me Too Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and Yo Soy 132), to alt government Facebook and Twitter accounts that emerged following U.S. president Donald Trump’s inauguration (Alt EPA, Alt National Park Service, Alt White House, and Rogue POTUS Staff), to the web-based deployment of political propaganda to influence the political process (Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and various European elections); to recruitment efforts on the part of ideologically extremist groups (ranging from white supremacist and white nationalist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, commonly known as ISIS).

Perhaps nothing bears witness to these shifts more clearly than the current backlash against them evident in contemporary politics throughout Europe and the United States and articulated through various ideological positions, from populism and protectionism to antiglobalization. This backlash is typified by Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogans and subsequent policy proposals, which have focused on bans and wall building, often using what Ian Haney López refers to as dog whistle politics to stoke racial animus, particularly against Arabs and Latinos. A similar backlash was manifested in Britain’s Brexit vote, which was fueled by anti-immigrant, racist, and nationalist rhetoric.² A backlash against globalization and transnationalism has also been articulated through anticapitalist rather than xenophobic rhetoric, particularly by socialist political candidates in the West (from Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom to Bernie Sanders in the United States) who have assumed similar antitrade and protectionist stances popular with both Trump and Brexit supporters.

Political theorist Wendy Brown reads the rise of wall building as a response to globalization perceived as a threat to national sovereignty.³ The chapters in this volume variously read in cinematic terms the postglobalization backlash Brown puts her finger on as attempts to refix indexical relationships between nation and geography, skin color and religion, accent and citizenship—relationships that have been challenged in a world increasingly globalized by trade and technology. Though her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty was published in 2010, the theories Brown presents are relevant to more recent political developments including the proposed U.S.-Mexican border wall and the effective wall that Brexit creates between the United Kingdom and European countries. Brown explores the paradoxes of Western countries extolling the tearing down of certain walls (notably, the Berlin Wall) and the opening of economic borders while constructing fences and walls at their own national borders. She links this national desire for walls, despite their demonstrated inefficacy and high cost, to unease with the nation-state’s waning sovereignty as the perceived price of globalized capitalism’s successes, arguing that these walls are meant to provide a visual testimony to sovereignty that is belied by their very existence. Brown’s theorization of borders is essential for thinking about the relationship between the virtual and the real, ideology and spectacle, and how images both reflect and produce the world they inhabit. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty reminds us that these physical walls serve most importantly as spectacles rather than pragmatically as effective measures against real twenty-first-century threats to national security like cyberterrorism, which cannot be contained by walls. In these instances, the virtual qualities of the digital realize potent physical powers to transgress borders that render real physical borders into impotent but materially large (and expensive) spectacles whose power is limited and determined by their function as images circulated by the media in the service of various political agendas, from the production of xenophobia to the scapegoating of immigrants for the failures of late capitalism. The ideological power of the image has never been greater.

Along with Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, another important reference point for our work in this collection is Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s seminal poetic and theoretical investigation of borders, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In this work Anzaldúa, like Wendy Brown after her, investigates the function of borders as spectacles of power and imposed demarcations of difference. For Anzaldúa, borders function as lines that both divide and connect. Significantly, Anzaldúa’s interest in borders begins with the U.S.-Mexican national border, which is the setting for her family history in southern Texas, though she then applies her analysis to a broader conception of borders as the manifestation of binary epistemologies surrounding identity categories. Rejecting this binary thinking, she proposes the concept of a borderlands where these borders are muddled and binaries break down. The applicability of Anzaldúa’s work goes far beyond the work of scholars thinking about the U.S.-Mexican border; it is invoked by scholars of transnational and marginalized communities more broadly. Taking a cue, then, from Anzaldúa, whose work informs many of the following chapters, our volume brings together investigations of border cinemas from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. While the chapters are by no means exhaustive or representative of the full spectrum of border cinema being produced around the globe, we have brought them together intentionally as works that speak to similar concerns and possibilities at this particular technological and political moment. The connections across these chapters demonstrate significant similarities and productive differences in how border cinemas across regions investigate the roles of borders and push the ways in which cinema can contest those very borders through aesthetic means afforded by novel technologies.

Border Cinema expands the parameters of what we understand by the terms that make up its title—border and cinema—and charts the implications for their ongoing intersections. As analog aesthetics give way to digital worlds, live-action images to computer-generated imagery (CGI), the passive spectator to the active user, and as age-old genres and tropes of national cinemas undergo recombination, cinema’s expansions bear the imprint of and act as a metaphor for the expanded conceptions of geopolitical borders in a digital age. Cinema’s expansions have involved multiple transitions. One of these is from the singular to the multiple, evident in the complexity and hypertextual tendencies of mainstream narrative cinema. A second transition is from the passive to the active, evident in recombinatory mechanisms that challenge linear narrative with hypertextual and contingent relations between images, from poetic aesthetics to video game adaptations, online fan communities, and virtual reality that transform spectators into users. A third transition is from the localized to the globalized, evident in the rise of the global distribution and consumption of cinema, along with cinema’s new multiplatform saturation, with ubiquitous exhibition on screens as small as smartphones and as large as those found in theater megaplexes. The transitions marking cinema’s expansions are also transitions that mark expanding concepts of borders. Border subjects now may mediate local situations through global media platforms, especially the new media of the internet, which has contested the geographic underpinnings for communities and identities by bringing subjects together who are physically worlds apart. Through an examination of expanded definitions of border and cinema, this collection updates the work of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s groundbreaking collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. Drawing in part on the Third Cinema movement, Shohat and Stam contend that axes of identity (nation, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, among others) cannot be separated from the critical study of media and political power given the global nature of the colonizing process [including neocolonial and neoimperialist processes], and the global reach of the contemporary media.⁴ While Border Cinema stages a similarly interdisciplinary conversation, its focus on how the evolution of cinema’s aesthetics have particularly reflected and participated in the figure of the border, a physical anathema to globalization’s goals and digital technology’s reach, allows for a more nuanced discussion about the relationship between aesthetics and identity.

Border Cinema also expands and updates the conversations of Hamid Naficy’s collection Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place and Jim Pines and Paul Willemen’s Questions of Third Cinema, both of which were published at a globally momentous time that witnessed the reconfiguration of the former Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square and the transformations of post-Mao China, the release of Nelson Mandela, and other historical events that signaled a major shift in global borders and politics. This era marks the beginning of the era of globalization (and digital media) on which Border Cinema focuses its attention. Similarly to these earlier collections, Border Cinema registers a shift in global politics borne out by cinema at the crossroads of another major shift in global politics, this one characterized by both a backlash against the globalized economy loosed in the late 1980s and a recent surge of transgressions against the borders of identities (defined by the axes Stam and Shohat laid out: nation, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity) through a globe-crossing cultural and personal interactions enabled by digital technology.

At the same time that this volume explores the expanding notions of border and cinema, it also seeks to continue the conversation started by the major theorists of Third Cinema about the intertwined relationship between aesthetics and politics. For instance, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal essay Toward a Third Cinema called for a cinema of subversion to advance a culture of subversion that would combat the greatest weapon of neocolonialism, Hollywood. The cinema Solanas and Getino envisioned had to be subversive not only in its content but also in its visual and auditory aesthetics, in its very form. As Solanas and Getino open their 1968 film La hora de los hornos (The hour of the furnaces) with rapid-cut editing, they mimic their view of cinema as a weapon, the camera acting as a gun shooting down colonial narratives and the acceptance of the West’s cultural imperialism. Similarly, Julio García Espinosa called for an imperfect cinema whose aesthetics of roughness, on-location filming, unpolished camerawork, and imperfect editing would counter Hollywood’s aesthetics of high-budget visual perfection. These imperfect aesthetics worked against the cultural imperialism Hollywood was able to advance with shiny images of consumption. They also democratized filmmaking by making low-budget productions not only palatable but popular with Latin American audiences, opening an exhibition space for anyone who wanted to make movies, not just the wealthy of the First World. Border Cinema expands on the intersections between aesthetics and politics defined by Third Cinema proponents in the 1960s and 1970s and reimagined by film theorists of the 1980s. By focusing on the figure (and reconfigurations) of the border in the age of globalization, the application of cinema’s aesthetics to politics has necessarily shifted from the Marxist concerns of Third Cinema at the height of Western imperialism to concerns about how digital aesthetics and expanded cinema impact and reflect identity (and its transformations) at a later stage of global capitalism. Border Cinema explores this critical shift.

Focusing on the intersection of contemporary cinematic aesthetics and borders, this collection intervenes in cinema studies and border studies in several essential ways. First, it considers how CGI, hypertext, and interactive aesthetics have been used to challenge essential, hegemonic, and homogeneous notions of identity and nationality. These techniques intervene in traditional conceptions of the power and unidirectionality of the cinematic image, from the screen’s influence on the spectator to the assumed privilege of cinema’s photographic index of reality. These digital shifts reveal that reality to be often a well-concealed construction, making the premise of the image as document just as suspect as the notion of the passive spectator. A recognition of the constructed nature of the cinematic image (and its correspondent ability to construct reality rather than simply reflect it), as well as the active potential of the spectator, have both been elevated in the postdigital age through hypertextual aesthetics and radical transformations in genre and national cinematic conventions. Several films analyzed in this collection use aesthetics to challenge homogeneous notions of identity through recombinatory mechanisms that challenge linear narrative processes by replacing the spectator with the user, the passive with the active, and the stable or fixed with the performative and changing, implying the self-determination of the individual as a challenge to the fixed identities and referents upon which borders depend.

Second, this volume explores how recent films and film cycles have innovated aesthetically and generically in order to raise challenges to traditional tropes that organize and define borders through the histories of national cinemas and traditional genre conventions. Several chapters investigate how interventions in and interruptions to the authority of the documentary image have been widely performed by aesthetic modes borrowed from subversive genres (animation, experimental cinema, television, and the music video) and used as figurative challenges to the authority of national borders and traditionally essentialized identifiers (race, gender, ethnicity, and class). Others explore how diverse challenges to traditional cinematic aesthetics have unsettled audience expectations when it comes to genre and film form (plot structure, editing, and mise-en-scène).

Finally, the volume examines how the ever increasing possibilities of digital production expand cinema’s reach beyond sound and vision to the haptic, imagining novel avenues for empathic connection between radically different subjects, both on- and offscreen. Thus, the haptic promises an uncharted territory for sensing the other, challenging vision’s primacy and its weakness as a sense quick to judge by appearances: the color of the other’s skin, the other’s gender, the other’s class. It is thus no wonder that vision is the sense most traditionally associated with injustice. Justice is an allegorical figure who is necessarily blind, and Plato depicts the deception of truth in the realm of vision: the shadowy underworld of the cave is the source of misperception and a naive belief in the reality of appearances. Sound might be construed as a secondary or corollary sense susceptible to the corruption of racist, nationalist, sexist, and xenophobic assumptions, for beyond sight we tend to create assumptions about identity through the sound of a voice: Does this person sound like a man or a woman? Black or white? Foreign or one of us? Touch, beyond being associated with physically reaching out beyond ourselves (either to comfort the other or to do violence to the other), bespeaks not only a novel sense in the realm of the cinematic (a medium dominated by vision and sound) but also a novel sense through which to connect with the other. Laura U. Marks, a film theorist whose work investigates the possibilities of haptic visuality, aligns the intercultural in cinema with an overcoming of the primacy of the visual. She argues that intercultural cinema bears witness to the reorganization of the senses that take place, and the new kinds of sense knowledges that become possible, when people move between cultures.⁵ In The Skin of the Film Marks describes a turn to the nonvisual senses as in part a response to the perceived imperialism of vision.⁶ Several chapters in this collection take up this point, investigating contemporary border cinema’s invocation of nonvisual senses.

While the focus of this book is on how recent cinematic aesthetics interact with and intervene in conceptions of global borders and the racial, ethnic, and cultural identities so often defined by them, cinema’s apparatus and aesthetics have actually long been interlaced with global borders. It is helpful to consider the relationship between borders and early cinema at a contemporary moment when film theorists have identified a return to the tendencies of cinema’s origins in the slew of recent technologies (3-D, 4-D, high definition, and virtual reality) that promise the spectator immersive embodied sensations and experiences very much akin to what attracted the first film spectators in the late nineteenth century, many of whom took the moving image as real (transgressing the borders of the screen) and believing, for instance, that the train in Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat would crash into them. It is thus unsurprising that the filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu used virtual reality in his 2017 exhibition Carne y arena (Flesh and sand) to break down the borders between U.S. and Them by sensorily immersing spectators in the experiences of refugees crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

The genesis of cinema’s apparatus can be understood as one rooted in division, emerging from photographic motion studies that attempted to divide a continuous and indivisible duration into discrete photographed instants, recalling the futile desires driving Zeno’s Paradox of Motion and the realization that within the border—the interstice separating two discrete frames—arises the infinite possibility of unpictured, ungrasped frames. It is no wonder, then, that, as Mary Ann Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, cinema emerged during a nineteenth-century zeitgeist of archive fever, a mania for collection in a period in which technology and industrial progress fueled Europe’s colonial expansion (the collecting of territories).⁷ All the same, while its mechanism divided and charted an actually continuous duration, cinema’s illusion of motion relied equally fittingly upon human vision overlooking and transgressing borders, perceiving apparent motion by overlooking the interstices between frames. Thus, at the heart of the filmic apparatus is the undoing of the borders its mechanism drew in time.

This image of a futile chase to impose divisions, only to find them transgressed by what lies infinitely in between, recalls the paradoxical figure of the U.S.-Mexican border in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, in which she presents the figure of the infinitely divisible and evasive razor edge of the barbed wire fence separating the United States from Mexico as her home as a Chicana. Her poetic opening to the book figures the fence that cuts the subjects who cross it, spilling their blood, as "una herida abierta [an open wound], where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds."⁸ She thus disfigures the image of a clean-cut border, just as the geography of the region, the blowing desert sand and the constantly moving ocean, underscore the physical border as a futile fiction.

From the earliest moments of film’s cultural history, its makers and consumers have recognized the potential for film to overcome borders (and to traffic cultural and political values across them). An early instance of this potential is Pancho Villa’s 1914 contract with the Mutual Film Company to film battles of the Mexican Revolution, a contract that emerged from Villa’s recognition of film’s propagandistic power to circulate his image as a Mexican Robin Hood both at home and abroad. In the same period, film’s potential for geographic transgressions was a point of concern in post-Victorian American society, where Christian leagues called for censoring film as early as 1908 out of concern that prizefighting films shot in the territories of Nevada and New Mexico would import the pugilism of the less developed U.S. territories to the civilized East Coast.⁹ This concern followed a general anxiety about film’s ability to transport the corrupting influence of urban environs to small-town America. Cinema conflated the divide between city and country, the pugilism of the U.S. Western territories with the cradle of its civilization in the East. At the same time, early cinema was key to constructing and reifying borders, in Villa’s case through the visualization of a racial line separating Mexico from the United States; cinematic representations of the Mexican Revolution invariably helped Americans visualize the divide between the United States and Mexico as a racial one.

As many of the chapters in this collection contemplate national borders around the globe at a time of heightened political tensions over immigration, it is fitting to recall cinema’s use in imagining and reifying divisions based on class, race, gender, culture, and nationality as ubiquitous to early cinema in the United States from the 1910s and 1920s, a period that coincided with a surge of immigration from Asia and eastern and southern Europe. The United States perceived this surge of immigrants from nonwhite, Catholic, and Jewish communities as a threat to its Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity. There were several laws limiting immigration from these regions in the era of early cinema’s rise. This series of legislative efforts culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act (also known as the National Origins Act) of 1924, which cemented Asian exclusion by establishing the Asiatic Barred Zone and curbed immigration of undesirable Europeans by creating a quota system by nationality for immigrants. Films like Making an American Citizen (1912), Traffic in Souls (1913), The Cheat (1915), and the serial film Patria (1917) make explicit cinema’s early role in maintaining the borders of America’s cultural identity and defining it squarely as white, Protestant, and Western European, an identity these films sought to protect from the encroachments of eastern European Jews, southern European Catholics, Asians, and Mexicans. The latter were represented as aligned with German attempts at attacking the United States following the Zimmerman Telegram, and as nonwhite outlaws, rebels, and peasants through cinematic depictions of the Mexican Revolution.¹⁰

Indeed, throughout its short history, cinema has proven essential in describing and maintaining the borders that define national and cultural identity through its propagandistic powers. Germany’s Third Reich used cinema as a mechanism for educating Germans in how to distinguish Aryan from non-Aryan traits through overtly anti-Semitic films (which were less common in Germany’s pre–World War II film production) like Fritz Hippler’s Der erwige Jude (The eternal Jew, 1940), and through films like La Habanera (The Havanan, 1937), which more subtly depicted the moral and intellectual inferiority of non-Aryan subjects—in this case, Latinos. Cinema’s use as a tool for drawing and underscoring national borders through visualizing and constructing racial difference is unsurprising given the emergence of its medium from attempts at the rational separation and ordering of fluid duration, attempts that coincided with the ongoing Western imperial separation and ordering of geographic space during the nineteenth century. As much as cinema has been used in such historical instances as 1910s America and 1930s Germany to delineate national identity on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, and language, at these same moments it also served as a powerful tool for imagining and forging identities (even as those identities were exclusionary, racist, and xenophobic).

This paradoxical power of cinema to both fix and unfix identity (what Siegfried Kracauer defines as its realist versus formative tendencies), to both reify and reimagine borders between communities and subjects, intensifies in the age of the digital as the ability to artificially create a seamlessly realistic world (through CGI) and to record the real world (through ubiquitous and affordable means of recording images anywhere and at any time) have both dramatically increased. Considerations of cinema’s recent aesthetic contestations to borders manifest themselves in diverse and overlapping ways throughout this volume. For example, Marina Hassapopoulou’s Composite Aesthetics as Cultural Cartographies of Europe in Transition locates a rupture in the index of national identity represented by and manifested in the composite image produced by CGI and the interactive and hypertextual aesthetics of spatial montage in European youth cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. Rebecca Sheehan’s Undocumation: Documentary Animation’s Unsettled Borders locates a similar rupture in the indexes of identity that take place in recent documentary animations about border subjects where documation’s avowal of artifice signals the fabricated nature of an image. By underscoring the possibility of intervening in the construction of an image, animation contests the indexical nature of photographic realism and its corresponding indexes of identity, from the visible identity of race to identities defining citizenship.

Both Hassapopoulou’s notion of composite aesthetics in European cinema after the creation of the European Union (EU) and Sheehan’s analysis of the role of animation’s artifice in recent border documations resonate with Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s argument in "The Art of Witness in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada that Portillo’s use of poetic images rather than traditional documentary ones refigure the spectator’s relationship to the victims of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, enabling the film to replace desensitization with activism. These chapters thus register in three distinct ways how the transition from analog to digital filmmaking, a transition hallmarked by the rise of various experimental and interactive aesthetics, reflects the undoing of essentializing and indexical identity claims, constructions of national identity, and the visible and indexes of race, gender, and class. Fregoso demonstraties how Portillo uses poetic" images in Señorita extraviada (Missing young woman, 2001) to intervene in the determinism of documentary images, underscoring the risk that traditional documentary images of victims of Juárez’s feminicides will function to desensitize rather than promote activism in the spectator. Fregoso variously identifies in Portillo’s film how poetic images replace the visual with the haptic in the film and, unlike expository images more keenly indexed to reality, create an active spectator who learns to empathize with the victims of Juárez’s feminicides and who is thereby spurred to activism rather than being distanced from the victims by images spectacularizing the violence.

Portillo’s use of a poetic mode to replace a passive spectator with an active one challenges documentary aesthetics to replace the actual with the performative (an extension of the haptic) and the given (about which we can do nothing) with an understanding of a situation in which acting and doing, performance, and self-determination matter. Animation plays a similar role in the documations Sheehan discusses as it imagines granting to children—some of the most powerless border subjects—the power to intervene in the constructed nature of their identities rather than being subject to the essentializing gaze of the camera (and of the state) that the photographic image risks asserting.¹¹ Hassapopoulou documents the same interventions in the (re)construction of European identity on the part of young audiences, made available through composite aesthetics that undo the necessary relationship between national (pre-EU) identity and cultural stereotypes by replacing the linear with the interactive, the visual with the haptic in a number of instances. Thus, Hassapopoulou, Fregoso, and Sheehan argue that the use of postdigital cinematic aesthetics plays a major role in transgressing borders through activating the spectator to empathize with cinematic subjects by replacing visual and auditory aesthetics with haptic ones.

Monica Hanna’s "The Cinematic Borderlands of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel explores haptic aesthetics in mainstream contemporary cinema by illuminating how subtle and complex postproduction editing and sound mixing generate empathic embodied spectatorship through cinema as a universal language imagined as transcending sensory, cultural, and geographic borders. The haptic" aesthetics that, for Fregoso, replace the dominance of the visual image in Portillo’s Señorita extraviada, function similarly for Hanna in González Iñárritu’s film as culturally and geographically distant characters are brought together with one another and with the audience through match-on-action cuts, sound bridges, and point-of-view uses of sound and image. Hanna argues that Babel (2006) uses haptic mechanisms to unite geographically and diegetically distant sound and image in order to elicit sympathy from the audience for characters who represent two groups of people, Mexican migrants and Muslims, both of which are frequently demonized in post-9/11 American politics. Her chapter suggests that the film views affective border crossing as a way to counteract some of the damage of national and political borders.

Contemporary border cinema frequently counters homogeneous conceptions of space, time, and historicity with heterogeneous ones as a means of signaling the replacement of a unifying and hegemonic national identity with heterogeneous cultural identities determined by individuals rather than a state. Reconfiguring time and space to reimagine ways of seeing and knowing the world, many of the films explored in this collection train us to review, reimagine, and reject existing borders. For example, in part following Anzaldúa, Hanna argues that Babel creates a cinematic borderlands as an antidote to the real and hardening borders of the post-9/11 world, particularly in U.S. interactions with Mexico and Arab countries. Hanna argues that techniques like match cuts and sound bridges aesthetically overcome the violence represented by contemporary bordering practices. The visual and sound editing of the film bring together story lines across national, regional, linguistic, and class differences to create an alternate space through cinematic overlays bridging time and geography and thus highlighting points of connection rather than