ABSTRACT

The American South has been integral to the history of US 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. In unfolding the economic, social, and institutional development of the medium, this chapter focuses 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. The proximity of the Civil War to the advent of motion pictures corresponded with prolific cinematic portrayals of the region, many of which lamented a lost way of life and offered dramatic revisions of events and people.