Film
Cold Mountain, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird ...and the list continues. Here's a collection of our essays and features from the last two decades on Films, which you can read through Project Muse by following the links below. We start with material from our archives that we've only just recently made available online.
The Strange Career of Atticus Finch
by Joseph Crespino
"Certain school districts across the country have censoredTo Kill a Mockingbird for its sexual content, and some have banned the book because of its depiction of racism."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
Mojo Productions, in association with Company Carolina and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Department of Communication Studies
Good Ol' Girls, the world premiere
reviewed by Shannon Ravenel
"She'll bring you casseroles and she'll kill you, too."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Clutching the Chains that Bind: Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Faust has some things to say about Scarlett O'Hara, the South's favorite bad belle. Three other scholars of southern women's literature and history talk back.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Race and the Cloud of Unknowing in Gone with the Wind
by Patricia Yaeger
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
J. W. Williamson's
Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies
reviewed by James C. Wann
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Images of the South: Constructing a Regional Culture on Film and Video
by Karl G. Heider, editor
reviewed by Ruth A. Banes
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995
The Law and the Code in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
by Robert O. Stephens
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
"Personal in My Memory": The South in Popular Film
by some of our favorite writers and filmmakers
with an introduction by Godfrey Cheshire
"We have two imaginary kingdoms. One, ‘the South,' exists primarily in song, oral traditions and folkways, native art and literature. The other, ‘Hollywood,' creates mass-produced audiovisual entertainments for American and world audiences, and develops its own mythology."
Alice Walker on Cold Mountain
Allan Gurganus on Sherman's March
Randall Kenan on Ode to Billie Joe
Kenneth Turah on They Won't Forget and I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Joe Flora on Sweet Bird of Youth
Andrew Garrison on Midnight Cowboy
Elizabeth Spencer on Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers
$0.99 download includes writing from Walker, Gurganus, Kenan, Turan, Flora, Garrison, and Spencer, as well as the Cheshire introduction, in eBook formats for KINDLE, for NOOK, or for SONY LIBRARY READER
Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
Tara, the O'Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind
by Geraldine Higgins
"Into the debate about place, race, and the second-best-selling book of all time, we can also bring Irishness."
Full Issue for Kindle ($6.95), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($6.95)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish
Anya Jabour
Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Review)
reviewed by Katy Simpson Smith
"As a regional phenomenon, southern girlhood is as culturally resonant as it is understudied. From the myths surrounding Virginia Dare to the surreal pageantry of modern debutantes, the South has shaped its young women in its own ritualistic image."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009
Always the Tragic Jezebel: New Orleans, Katrina, and the Layered Discourse of a Doomed Southern City
by Michael P. Bibler
"How can an almost seventy-year-old film, sensationalizing an event eighty-five years prior, so accurately reflect the details of a present-day disaster? The film wasn't depicting something analogous to Katrina as much as it was almost predicting Katrina."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina
Leigh Anne Duck
The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (review)
reviewed by Michael Kreyling
"Duck's book covers the middle years of the twentieth century, years dominated by Agrarian and Fugitive social and literary ideologies, by the Depression and the problem South, by the blockbuster novel and film Gone with the Wind, by the enigmatic Faulkner of Requiem for a Nun, by the tangled cultural currents of the Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston, and of course by race."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
Twenty-First Century Slavery: Or, How to Extend the Confederacy for Two Centuries Beyond Its Planned Demise
C.S.A: The Confederate States of America, directed by Kevin Wilmott
reviewed by Trudier Harris
"Are blacks to be proud of the film? Or is it just an expansive, self-indulgent joke that goes on too long?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Bright Leaves
by Ross McElwee (copyright 2003, distributed by First Run Features)
reviewed by Barbara Hahn
“It’s not necessarily that we want tobacco; tobacco wants us.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
John Lane
Chattooga: Descending Into the Myth of Deliverance River (review)
reviewed by Timothy Silver
"Billy Redden, the iconic 'banjo boy' who will ever be remembered for playing with Drew Ballinger on the hit song 'Dueling Banjos,' now mops floors at a local Huddle House and has a second job at a barbecue restaurant named—as luck would have it—'Oinkers.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
Teaching Gone with the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
by Mart Stewart
“‘There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
“A World Properly Put Together”:
Environmental Knowledge in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain
by Albert Way
“It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
O Brother, What Next?
: Making Sense of the Folk Fad
by Benjamin Filene
“Think of the tale of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and an enraged Alan Lomax trying to pin Dylan’s manager to the ground while Pete Seeger hunted for an ax to cut the cables.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Cold Mountain
reviewed by Edward D. C. Campbell Jr.
“This is a world in complete turmoil—a civilization falling to pieces—and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
“Oh, so many startlements . . .”
: History, Race, and Myth in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
by Hugh Ruppersburg
“It’s a southern tall tale, the story of a confidence man, of a treasure hunt, of a man trying to prove himself to his children and estranged wife, of a political campaign, of three buddies on the road, of the quest for home.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
Locals on Local Color
: Imagining Identity in Appalachia
by Katie Algeo
“Movies, television, comic strips, and postcards feature the lanky, gun-toting, grizzle-bearded man with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a coon dog at his feet
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
Driving Miss Daisy:
Southern Jewishness on the Big Screen
by Eliza Russi Lowen McGraw
“‘Now, Miss Daisy, somebody done bomb that temple back yonder, and you know it.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
The Redemption of Atticus Finch
letters to the editor by Marcus Jimison, J. Wayne
Flynt, Jewell
Knotts, and Joseph
Crespino
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000