ABSTRACT
The American South has been integral to the history of U.S. filmmaking from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present. Cinematic representations of “southernness,” formulated within as well as outside the region, often construed the South as an exceptional place marked by cultural backwardness, religious fanaticism, economic destitution, and intolerance of gendered, classed, and racial alterity. Films associated with the South informed and were informed by a history encompassing an agricultural society based on racialized chattel slavery; terrors and upheavals of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow; industrial and consumer capitalism; (sub)urbanization; the Civil Rights movement; de jure desegregation; and influxes of mass media and (inter)national popular culture. This essay explores myriad films—many of which are iconic—about the South and its purportedly oppositional role in the national narrative. In unfolding the economic, social, and institutional development of the medium, we focus on the importance of southerners to the evolution of the American film industry and trace the impact filmmaking in the South and by southerners has had on regional, national, and global cultures.
