Hollywood S Image Of The South

From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most contentious American time and place. Organized by subjects including Economic Conditions, Plantation Life, The Ku Klux Klan, and The New Politics, Hollywood's Image of the South seeks to coin a new genre by describing its conventions and attitudes. Even so, the Southern film crosses all known generic boundaries, including the comedy, the women's film, the noir, and many others. This invaluable guide to an under-recognized category of American cinema illustrates how much there is to learn about a time and place from watching the movies that aim to capture it.

From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most contentious American time and place. Organized by subjects including Economic Conditions, Plantation Life, The Ku Klux Klan, and The New Politics, Hollywood's Image of the South seeks to coin a new genre by describing its conventions and attitudes. Even so, the Southern film crosses all known generic boundaries, including the comedy, the women's film, the noir, and many others. This invaluable guide to an under-recognized category of American cinema illustrates how much there is to learn about a time and place from watching the movies that aim to capture it.

This book explores the expectations, experiences, and reactions of Allied servicemen and women who served in the wartime Pacific and viewed the South Pacific through the lens of Hollywood's South Seas. Based on extensive archival research, it explores the intersections between military experiences and cultural history.

Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South’s landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.

This comprehensive annotated bibliography reviews nearly 500 English-language studies published between 1915 and 2001 that examine the depiction of ethnic, racial, and national groups as portrayed in United States feature films from the inception of cinema through the present. Coverage includes books, reference works, book chapters within larger works, and individual essays from collections and anthologies. Concise annotations provide content summaries; unique features; major films and filmmakers discussed; and useful information on related titles, purpose, and intended readership. The studies included range from specialized scholarly treatises to popular illustrated books for general readers, making ^IProjecting Ethnicity and Race^R an invaluable resource for researchers interested in ethnic and racial film imagery. Entries are arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, while four separate indexes make the work simple to navigate by author, subject, gender, race, ethnic group, nationality, country, religion, film title, filmmaker, performer, or theme. Although the majority of studies published examine images of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians in film, the volume contains studies of groups including Africans, Arabs, the British, Canadians, South Sea Islanders, Tibetans, Buddhists, and Muslims—making it a unique reference book with a wide range of uses for a wide range of scholars.

The "southern" - as much a Hollywood genre as the "western" - is the subject of The Celluloid South. For decades the film industry, to provide profit-making entertainment, offered the public movies that neither raised difficult issues nor offended a majority of the ticket-buyers. As a result, Hollywood romanticized the south, particularly the antebellum era, in hundreds of films like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation, and Jezebel. During the 1920's and especially the Depression, the "moonlight and magnolia" romances increased to such an extent that Hollywood has been struggling since the late forties to rid films of the traditional images of the "southern." In his exploration of the "southern," Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. examines the film plots and images - their social, literary, and historical origins, and their impact on the creation of a popular mythology of the south. The unrealistic but seemingly harmless characterizations of a planter society, and agricultural economy, and especially slavery have hindered the region's self-assessment and warped the nation's perspective on race. Campbell looks beyond the productions themselves, however, to advertising techniques and the reactions of the viewers and reviewers in his examination of the "southern," its popularity and its decline, and its influence of the public's conception of history, contemporary conditions, and black/white relations. The Celluloid South is not a study of film per se, but of film as a reflection of society and the ramifications inherent in popular entertainment. Readers interested in southern history, popular culture, or cinema studies, as well as movie fans, will find The Celluloid South a fascinating look at Hollywood's development of the southern myth. Thirty-one film stills illustrate the text.

Personal. Public. Historical. The next issue of Southern Cultures is devoted entirely to Memory. . . . . . Why We Argue So Much About Robert E. Lee . . . Alice Walker, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer, Randall Kenan, and More Great Writers on our Favorite Films and What They Make Us Remember . . . Catfish Hunter: Baseball Legend, Small-town God . . . Life and Times: World War II–Era Appalachia . . . Growing Up in Hot Springs, Arkansas . . . New Poetry from Robert Morgan . . . What To Do About the Thomas Ruffin Statue . . . The Interview: "The Grandmother of Appalachian Studies" on the Long Women's Movement

Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry's output, Hollywood's Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of the Native Americans in film. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Smoke Signals , the groundbreaking independent film written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. Taken as a whole the essays explore the many ways in which these portrayals have made an impact on our collective cultural life.