The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is in such little retired . . . valleys . . . that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant change in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream . . . Washington Irving, \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,\" 1820

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

Film tourism – Evolution, progress and prospects

Beginning with the first travelogues of the late 1890s, the film and tourism industries collaborated both directly and indirectly to shape representations of North America’s western landscape and its people. These non-narrative motion pictures intersected with the rise of mass consumerism, modern tourism, the forces of imperialism and colonialism, as well as industrialized forms of transportation. In particular, railroad travel films from the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Northern Pacific Railway Company transformed motion-picture goers into armchair tourists, exposing audiences to the scenic wonders of the West. These transcontinental railroads, themselves products of nation-building initiatives, competed against one another to increase passenger traffic by marketing the sublime and often overlapping landscapes of the American and Canadian Wests as potent nationalist and unifying symbols that heralded each country’s uniqueness.

All Aboard! Travel Films, Railroads, and the North American West, 1897–1910

This article analyzes the relationship between Hollywood and the tourist in dustry in constructing analogous representations of the Canadian Northwest and the U. S. Southwest by comparing Rose-Marie (1936) and Ride the Pink Horse (1947). In representing these western landscapes, film and tourist discourses exhibited a tension between utopic and dystopic images. Moreover, essentialized Indian imagery coded these sites as spaces of authenticity and regeneration for Euro-Canadians/Anglo-Americans.

Primitive Encounters: Film and Tourism in the North American West

Something happens to you when you cross the border into another country; it's exciting even if it's only the country next door. From Jeopardy. Dir. John Sturges, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp., 1953. Picture the Stilwins, a suburban Californian family, as they arrive at an unmarked beach in Baja California, Mexico. While exploring the abandoned fishing pier, little Bobby accidentally gets his foot stuck between the rotting planks of the dilapidated jetty. His father, Doug, frees his son, but suddenly the structure collapses! Falling debris pins Doug's leg to the shore. In four hours the incoming tide will drown him. His wife, Helen, frantically drives off in search of help. En route, she encounters a man named Lawson at a deserted gas station. Helen pleads for his assistance. But Lawson, an escaped American convict, seizes both her and the car. Will Helen trade sexual favors to save her husband's life? When one crosses an international border, shocking things happen. In Jeopardy (1953), director John Sturges orchestrates a tumultuous cinematic ride. Having left behind their petit bourgeois comfort zone, the Stilwins have entered into an alternate realm just beneath the US-Mexican border. This voyage to el otro lado is fraught with danger. The 'average American in peril' premise of the film corresponds to a recurring theme in postwar Hollywood cinema wherein individuals fall victim to crime or are themselves implicated in criminal activity due to the circumstances of fate. With its unsettling qualities of nihilism, anxiety, and despair, Jeopardy displays the thematic structure and visual imprint of what film critics collectively refer to, as film noir.1 This heterogeneous group of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood films is identified by a set of basic cinematic conventions that defy Classical Hollywood's narrative, discursive, and stylistic paradigms.2 These criteria include, but are not limited to, a lack of symmetry and order; chiaroscuro; oneiric flashback sequences; visual expressionism; voice-over narration; urban underworlds; gritty realism; hardboiled antiheroes and predatory women; themes of alienation, uncertainty, and confusion; as well as an overall lack of faith in the smooth functioning of the social environment. Yet, unlike most films noirs that depict iconographic images of empty rain-washed streets and flashing neon signs lit against the backdrop of decaying metropolises, Jeopardy spotlights the barren Mexican borderlands.3 This unconventional diegetic setting further obscures film noir as a unified and coherent film category and relegates the film to a peripheral position outside the noir cannon. Jeopardy is thus doubly marginal due to its border location and its position on the edge of a tenuous film category. Nevertheless, the border setting effectively transmits a key discursive impulse of film noir by demarcating a departure from the "normal" world within a unique transnational context. Such lapses in the otherwise normative existences viewed on screen, in turn, presage a more general lack of stability in North American culture and society. In particular, Jeopardy plays upon Middle America's paradoxical desire for and fear of the cultural Other, even when "it's only the country next door." Jeopardy is one of a handful of films noirs that similarly use the border as a narrative and visual device to signal physical and symbolic transition. These films use borders to grid the liminality of postwar North American relationships during the dynamic shifts from World War II to the Cold War.4 The characters in what I term border noirs do not merely traverse noir's abstract universe; their journey to the other side is a literal one as they have crossed over a physical line of demarcation-the Mexican or Canadian border lines. These border locations ultimately supercede and even challenge the national dimensions contained within. That is, the characters' final destination of either Mexico or Canada is less important than the process of crossing and collision. …

Dark Limbo: Film Noir and the North American Borders

Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era

Peter Geller. Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-1945. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. 280 pp. $85.00 cloth, $29.96 paper. The notion that Canada is synonymous with the North is an idea ingrained in the popular imagination. The sublime allure of the frozen landscape has fascinated explorers and tourists, while artists and writers have employed northern imagery to express a unique Canadian sensibility. As such, imaginative constructions of the North have been used as discursive tools to distinguish Canada from the United States. In the nineteenth century, for example, imperialists argued that Canada's cold climate produced a distinctive character that contrasted with that of its southern neighbor. In recognizing that northern-ness is "an integral part of the Canadian ethos," Peter Geller effectively demonstrates that the North is more than a physical region or a conceptual category but is a visual expression. Northern Exposures reveals how, in the first half of the twentieth century, southern Canadians took and circulated pictures of the Artic and Subarctic, along with the Aboriginal population, to wield control over the northernmost regions of the Canadian nation. Far from being merely an aesthetic complement to the written word, these visual images reinforced institutions of colonial power and ultimately served "to incorporate the North into the larger Canadian nation" (11). For far too long, the use of visual evidence to interpret the past has played second fiddle to textual records. This is partially due to challenges in documenting photographs, which often lack information pertaining to dates, locations, or image takers. Moreover, due to the decomposing nature of cellulose nitrate, locating film footage proves even more difficult. Yet Geller overcomes these hurdles by combing through such archival sources as the National Archives of Canada's Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Collection and the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, and by relying on filmmakers' production notes, correspondence, and reviews. In Chapter 1, Geller outlines his argument and methodology, which is the contextual analysis of the social and cultural meanings of visual imagery. Geller not only "reads" images, but also considers their production, circulation, and, to an extent, reception. The text includes 86 reproductions of photographs and film stills, providing readers with many opportunities to uncover their own layers of meaning. The subsequent three chapters examine how agents of the state, organized religion, and commercial interests visually represented the North. First, Geller analyzes the photo albums of the North West Territories and Yukon Branch (NWTYB) to show how the federal government attempted to impose its "own version of social and corporate relationships on the north" (17) to counter perceived threats to Canadian sovereignty. Geller focuses on photographs taken by Major Lachlin T. Burwash, an exploratory engineer in the service of the NWTYP, revealing how they romanticized the northern frontier and its "primitive" population while promoting the North as a "civilized" destination for settlers, tourists, and foreign investment. Geller then turns to Archibald Lang Fleming, first Bishop of the Arctic, whose photographs and films positioned the North as a primordial terrain en route to becoming part of the modern Christian world. Fleming pictured the northern Aboriginal population as the "people of the twilight," placing them in a "transitional position in the semi-darkness between the spiritual wilderness of the arctic night and the guiding light of Christ's way" (59). …

Dominique Brégent-Heald

Papers

All Aboard! Travel Films, Railroads, and the North American West, 1897–1910

Primitive Encounters: Film and Tourism in the North American West

Dark Limbo: Film Noir and the North American Borders

Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era

Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-1945