Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity / John Shelton Lawrence and Marty S. Knepper

Abstract: This paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others such as State Fair (1933, 1945), The Music Man (1962), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), and A Thousand Acres (1997), we clarify the kinds of identity most popular with national audiences and anchor it in nostalgia about an imagined simpler and happier past. We also reflect on the absences in this popular picture and describe representative patterns of consistency and selectivity of stereotypes for other regions of the country in Hollywood’s cultural cartography.

In our larger expository design, the Iowa experience is merely personal and illustrative to aid others in exploring their regional cinematic identity. In a substantial “Appendix: Guide to Regional Portrayal in Films” the reader finds a bibliographic and filmographic guide organized as follows:

I. Regions of the United States

II. Individual States of the United States

III. National Cinemas

These sources will help readers locate printed and online sources that will assist them in mapping their own home terrain. It invites the kind of awareness that we developed through our exploration of Iowa films and stereotypes. The list is currently hosted at the University of Iowa Communications Department server http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/resources/regional_filmographies.html. Posted with an invitation for others to contribute knowledge, it has grown and will undergo future revisions. Depending on publisher preferences, this resource could be taken offline or it could remain as a steadily growing resource for the exploration of regional identities.

THIS IS BEN.

He grew up on a farm in Iowa. When we discovered him at a strip mall near Ames, he was wearing nothing but overalls, and a baseball cap. We hosed him down, and gave him some new clothes—including a pair of Savane Deep Dye Pants. Last we heard, he had changed his name to Paolo and was running for mayor of Palm Springs.
---from a Savane ad in Texas Monthly magazine, Oct. 1998

I keep wishing I was somewhere else / Walking down a strange new street / Hearing words that I've never heard / From a man I've yet to meet.
---Margy's words from the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "It Might as Well Be Spring," State Fair (1945)

<1> Part of our sense of who we are comes from reflecting on what others think about us. This essay is our account of living in a region that was once but no more primarily rural and seeing that region represented through the stereotypes of popular films. Regional stereotypes have always existed in drama--playing a prominent role in Greek comedy, for example, in which the country bumpkin was a well-recognized butt of the joke for the city people who attended the plays. One of the best known bumpkins is the unfortunate Strepsiades of Aristophanes’ The Clouds. He is a farmer who marries a rich woman from the city and finds life in Athens with her and his delinquent son torturous. A few centuries later the Roman poet Horace immortalized the contrasting stereotypes of rural and urban in his tale of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse; the former leads a safe, modest life in the country and is shocked when exposed to the dangerous pleasures of the City Mouse.

<2> More than two thousand years pass, and new forms of the rural stereotype emerge for the place where we live. As academic city folks and long-term Iowa residents, we have long known that some "bicoastals" identified us from 30,000 feet as "the flyover people" [1]. Our suspicion was that they imagined us sitting in small cafes wearing seed corn caps or floral house dresses, eating third helpings of lemon meringue pie washed down with mugs of weak coffee--our culinary reward for chowing down a main course of pork chops and mashed potatoes slathered with gravy. Or did they see us as unhappy souls like Iowa farm girl Margy, craving to leave our tedious little towns? Assuming that Iowans crave to be somewhere and someone else, the Savane ad cited above asks us to picture the clueless farm-bred Ben at an Ames strip mall, waiting to be hosed down before his chic makeover to Palm Springs Paolo. We have wondered for years why outsiders thought of us in these ways, if they thought of us at all.

<3> During occasional fantasies our hands reach into the sky to grab those high-flying bicoastals from their airline seats, forcing them to come down to where we live. We could show them a different Iowa with urban cultures that have attracted Iowans from its farms and small towns to larger cities for decades. Those smug--or oblivious--passengers might be so shaken by the rude interruption of their journey that they wouldn’t look at our city ways. Certainly reporters who visit Iowa for Presidential primaries leave the cities with their malls, rallies sponsored by organized labor, and universities in order to stand in front of barnyards for speculations about "the farm vote" or “the Iowa voter.” Like most Iowans, we have grown accustomed to the world’s determination to dress us in bib overalls.

<4> Our sense of existing in a region ignored or disdained was disrupted when two popular films created a new form of tourism for the state. First came the movie Field of Dreams (1989), followed by The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Together they brought hundreds of thousands of people to Iowa from around the globe. They continue to come more than a decade later. What manner of story could lead tourists to see Iowa as heavenly, a place where dreams can come true?

<5> Field of Dreams tells the story of a baseball diamond created in a cornfield by Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner). It becomes a sacred space that reconciles Ray with his dead father, redeems the scandalous 1919 Chicago White Sox, and saves the failing farm. This moving tale inspired two competing tourist venues at the film site near Dyersville. Families come to this magic place seeking to repair damaged relationships; many come to celebrate baseball as it was before it became merely a money game for the players [2].

<6> In The Bridges of Madison County, an emotionally starved farm wife, Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), gets romanced into a lifetime afterglow by itinerant photographer Robert Kincade (Clint Eastwood). The rustic bridges, the lush grass, and the charming farmhouse provide the attractive setting for their erotic joy. Responding to this story's pastoral bliss, world tourists come to kindle those same warm passions at sites associated with the film. Some lovers come to marry, and others to renew their vows, on Roseman Bridge. (“The Sewers” 22) To accommodate these desires, “Francesca's House” was left standing; couples could dance there on the linoleum kitchen floor or climb into the bathtub to indulge romantic fantasies. In nearby Des Moines, the Hotel Savery created the Francesca Suite, with "the actual bed" from the movie set [3].

<7> It was wonderful business for Iowa, but like the Field of Dreams excitement, the Bridges phenomenon deepened our puzzle. How could we have missed the potential magnetism of our state's rural places, a force hidden from us, yet potent enough to pull distant urbanites out of their usual disdain?

<8> The question launched a journey of discovery that eventually led us to study nearly 200 “Iowa films”--films with Iowa settings or characters. As we looked into the origins, content, and interpretations of these films, we found a richness of literary and historical association that made the topic of Iowa’s cinematic cultural identity worthwhile to explore with both students in formal course settings and citizens in public forums.

<9> Having seen so many films and discussed them so frequently with such groups, we now better understand our Iowa-cinematic identity (Knepper 2003). We believe our experience and methods can assist others who want to clarify the cultural identities ascribed to them merely because they live in a particular geographic place. Regional stereotypes may be one of the last identity-shaping categories to receive attention. Yet attitudes toward regions influence our sense of self as we accept or resist popular images. Furthermore, regional stereotypes impact a region’s sense of itself and its economic development. This essay briefly summarizes some of our approaches, classroom experiences, and conclusions. For anyone who finds studying regional stereotypes in film an inviting route to self-understanding, we append a “Guide to Regional Portrayal in Films" with numerous Web links that provides orientation to other regions.

II. Collecting Films, Novels, and Other Cultural Signifiers

<10> Since cinema had led to our puzzling over regional identity, we decided to view a larger group of Iowa films, from the early silent era to the present. By talking to friends and using film indexes [4] we discovered dozens of films that presented images of Iowa and Iowans. Some movies we had never heard of; some we will never see because they have not been preserved; a few could only be seen on cable channels at 3:00 a.m. But most could be rented or purchased in video, and now DVD, formats. We began viewing a collection that has grown every year.

<11> Along with the films, we gathered literature by full-time or part-time Iowans on which individual movies were based. Phil Stong’s novel State Fair, the basis for films made in 1933, 1945, and 1962, had been a national best seller in 1932. Robert Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County was so successful that it was translated into many other languages and became the subject of several full-length parodies in the United States. W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, the literary source for Field of Dreams, was also a best selling novel. Peter Hedges’ novel What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which explores the survival problems of small town America in the 1990s, inspired an identically titled film (1993) that students found sadly truthful as a portrayal of rural decay.

<12> To further enlarge our base of evidence for Iowa’s cultural identity, we collected other kinds of signifiers for the state. Items ranged from picture postcards (plenty of pigs and corn on those), regional jokes (“You can tell someone’s Iowan if . . .”), to official publications such as chambers of commerce promotional leaflets, centennial celebration materials, travel guides, the website home page for the state government, etc. [5]. Such resources hint that people on the ground below occasionally foster the stereotypes held by people flying over us. In order to have some kind of distinctive identity, the natives may act out the stereotypes that outsiders bring to them—particularly in the context of tourism, where pleasing the customer is part of the business.

III. Icons, Characters, and Plots

<13> Popular film conveys its messages quickly, relying on familiar physical images, behaviors, and motivations that establish the social atmosphere of a geographical place and prepare us for a particular type of narrative. By viewing a collection of place-related films, one begins to detect patterns of recurrent physical settings, character types, and plots.

The Absence of the Urban

<14> It was not difficult for us or the students to see that Iowa’s cinematic history was relentlessly rural. The clue had been there in Field of Dreams and The Bridges of Madison County, where the late twentieth-century Iowa landscape is defined, as it is in so many Iowa films, by fields of corn, silos, water towers, windmills, John Deere tractors, pickup trucks, dusty roads, red barns, pigs and cows, the town square with courthouse, wholesome looking kids, heavy set women in house dresses and aprons, men in overalls, and the white Victorian house with a swing on the porch. Houses have plenty of wallpaper, lace curtains, chintz sofas, and wood floors. When it’s time to eat, get out the beige casseroles, white bread sandwiches, fried chicken, and jello. These icons suggest a culture unaffected by any post-World War II trends in architecture, interior decoration, or cuisine. And they suggest a culture that fails even to meet the standards of middle class chic set by those beacons of taste, Better Homes and Gardens and The Ladies Home Journal, both published in Des Moines, Iowa.

Social Conservatism

<15> As well as suggesting a benign but behind-the-times ambiance, these kinds of physical settings have their negative uses when associated with social conservatism or extreme reactionary behavior. Such traits are displayed in both Field of Dreams and The Bridges of Madison County: Ray Kinsella’s fantasy of the magic baseball field is met with disbelieving scorn by his community, which is shown as supporting book censorship. In Bridges the people of the small town near the farm give the impression of being sexually repressed, judgmental, and gossipy. In both films it is Iowa as physical place that has the magic, not the average Iowans surrounding the lonely individuals who courageously oppose smothering conventions.

The Safety and Sanity of the Rural

<16> Yet it was important for us to learn that there is not a single value associated with Iowa's cinematic anchor to the social and economic past. By developing a sense of the different types of plots in the films we discovered positive codings—not just for the landscape, but often for the people who live in it and their way of life. Some films, for example, contrast the dangers or superficial values of the big city with the safety of an Iowa that has not become part of contemporary life. In the film Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), the leading character, Laura (Julia Roberts), flees from deadly spousal abuse on the East Coast and finds her safe haven in a calm Cedar Falls, Iowa, where she meets a kind and protective drama teacher. In Titanic (1997) the story is told through the eyes of Rose Dawson (Gloria Stuart) of Cedar Rapids, the spunky heroine who, after her romance and adventure at sea, settles down for a quiet life in Iowa, rejecting the high life her mother wanted her to embrace.

Agrarian Virtue

<16> We found a much larger group of films featuring Iowans who travel and take their positive rural values with them. Several films about World War II, including the recent Tuskegee Airmen (1995) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), feature heroic figures whose martial virtues derive from the Iowa work ethic and community values. Playing on the contrast between country character and city decadence, we see an innocent young couple from Iowa victimized by greedy New Yorkers—and surviving—in Married to It (1993). In the comedy Joe’s Apartment (1996), the leading character naively arrives wearing his University of Iowa jacket and is immediately mugged several times. But he eventually conquers the Big Apple, using his agricultural background and his unusual ability to communicate with singing cockroaches. A similar comic premise appears in The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997), where Des Moines Blockbuster Video employee Wallace Ritchie (Bill Murray) visits London and stumblingly outsmarts Russian and British conspirators.

The Pathos of Rural Economy and Environment

<17> In addition to the upbeat theme of traveling Iowans who survive, sometimes despite naivete and nerdiness, we also found grimmer films that explored the economic crises that periodically afflict Iowa’s farmers and small towns. Country (1986) focuses on the family crises aggravated by bad weather, low commodity prices, and high interest debt during the Reagan era. Miles from Home (1988) suggests how quickly a farm family can lose it assets and its honor in swings of the commodity and credit markets. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape explores the limited career opportunities for a young man in a small town that is watching its local retail outlets surrender to those operated as corporate franchises. A Thousand Acres (1997) explores the grim health consequences associated with the accumulating toxins of contemporary industrial farming. Such films neither demean nor valorize rural Iowa, but call our attention to the serious problems that hang over a vital sector of the national economy.

<18> Developing narrative categories such as these—films of city/country contrast, traveling Iowans, farm crisis—allowed us and the students to see a more nuanced picture of our state cinematic identity. But we remained puzzled at Hollywood’s fixation on Iowa’s rural character.

IV. A Historical Perspective on Iowa’s Rural Identification

<19> At this point we were assisted by ideas from an important historical overview of Iowa and the Middle West generally. James R. Shortridge’s book The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture analyzes America’s cultural geography. He presents evidence that Iowa emerged for the nation in the twentieth century as the representative rural Midwest state, serving as a symbol for an entire large region (100). Corresponding to the variety we had found in our categories and individual films, he reports that sometimes Iowa’s rural character was seen as valuable, while sometimes it was derided. In his understanding, the rural heartland was admired from 1900 to 1920 for its “pastoral traits of morality, independence, and egalitarianism” (8). In the urbanizing 1920s and into the 1930s, the novelist Sinclair Lewis and others painted an unattractive picture of rural Americans as old-fashioned, moralistic, and culturally backward (12, 44-45) [6]. The rural Midwest reached a low point in popular opinion around 1950 with no mitigating shift in attitude until rural nostalgia emerged in the later decades of the century as a reaction to the stresses of urban life (Shortridge 39). This interpretation by Shortridge is consistent with the tourist phenomenon associated with Field of Dreams and The Bridges of Madison County. Tourists come looking for a feeling of the past that gives them a greater emotional sense of security than does life in the present. Baseball played for the love of the game and the exchange of passionate vows on an old wooden bridge apparently suggest a purity of intention and permanence that people find lacking in our current culture.

V. The Conventions of Hollywood's Cartography

<16> While considering our region’s reputation in the nation, students from other areas of the country reminded us we should not neglect some fundamental realities of filmmaking that are likely to affect every region. Most films come in ninety-minute packages that rely on stereotypes of character and place that aid the swift flow of narrative. Every region has cause to gripe about the inaccuracy and exaggerations of its image in popular films since they are not meant to convey a factually accurate picture of a region’s complexity. A filmgoer who has not traveled in New York State is unlikely to realize that vast sections of its terrain are rural. In Hollywood cartography, New York equals the greater metro area of New York City. And someone who has not traveled in California may be surprised to discover that its agricultural acreage and crop values far exceed that of a Midwestern farm state like Iowa or Wisconsin [7]. But this agricultural dominance of California is hardly part of the cinematic map. Like the truncated New York State, California as represented in film shrinks to the greater Los Angeles area, San Francisco, Carmel, and Palm Springs. The suburbs of L.A., the southern California beaches, the streets of San Francisco with its cable cars, bridges, and Victorian houses are common ingredients for a film with a California setting, because they are distinctive. Features that California shares with other region, such as its rural agricultural and forestry operations, are invisible on the screen.

<17> As we have suggested, the contemporary Iowa that we know has factories, office buildings for white collar industries, national franchise outlets, art museums, casinos, large malls, interstate highways, suburbs, pervasive computer technology, and large universities. Demographics reveal Iowa has a culturally diverse population. The state has family violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling addiction, and criminal mayhem (Iowa Department of Public Safety 1995). Iowa's population transitioned to its predominantly urban character back in the 1950s [8], and we thus have the same urban challenges as other states. Such facts, however, work against a cultural geography of distinctive regional traits needed by Hollywood's cinematic cartographers.

<18> Most Hollywood producers, even in the late twentieth century, have deliberately drawn the curtain on much of the Iowa familiar to those who live and travel within the state. When the casting call goes out for the rural place or the naïve but plucky traveler, the idea of Iowa has already moved forward in line for the audition. The "truth" of those roles lies in the fact that a substantial number of Iowa's acres remain dedicated to producing corn, soy beans, and livestock. It's equally indisputable that Iowa lacks assets for the most popular forms of tourism based on mountains, deserts, oceans, steadily mild temperatures, and major urban attractions. The picture of Iowa is true enough for Hollywood; it's just not the Iowa that Iowans would recognize as the place they live in.

<19> Students who helped us map the cinematic territory of Iowa found that the images were more complex than they had expected and that the images of Hollywood have been absorbed by native Iowans who sometimes believe popular myths about the state even in the face of overwhelmingly obvious contradictory realities. Students could laugh at the parade of teen nerds and the old-fashioned settings in Iowa films, but found that other cinematic portrayals--teens fleeing the state, for example, and the invisibility of cultural minorities—disturbed them. In the end, we, like the students, valued studying ourselves and our state in the mirror of film—even if the mirror lies about and distorts who we are.

Endnotes

[1] See the discussion of this term in Keyes (1998). [^]

[2] Brett Mandel (2002) tells the story of those who make the pilgrimage to Dyersville in hopes of finding an echo of their movie experience. See also the ESPN broadcast production, Dreamfield (1998). Marty Knepper visited the Field of Dreams tourist sites several times and interviewed Keith Rahe, who manages the “Ghost Players.” See also "For sale: bridges” (C1). [^]

[3] Marty Knepper visited Winterset, the town depicted in Bridges, on 1 June 1995, the day of the movie’s premiere, and returned in subsequent visits to interview store owners, the Chamber of Commerce director, and staff at Francesca’s House tourist site. Students also visited the Madison County sites. See Brack (1995). [^]

[4] The most reliable source of information about older films comes from Munden (1971). This source is available online <http://www.chadwyck-healy.com> through university or private subscription; fictional settings for films, if identified in the plot summaries, are indexed. The International Movie Database <http://www.imdb.com> is less thorough and consistent but helpful; it often indicates where a film was shot. [^]

[5] See Dundes and Prager (1996) for the chapters “You Might Be Considered a Redneck If,” 89-92, and “United States of America, Census Bureau, Utah Region,” 93-94, both offering samples of regional put-downs. [^]

[6] Sinclair Lewis’s harshest depiction of the Middle West is found in his Main Street (1920), whose fictional setting is Gopher Prairie, Minnesota—actually Sauk Centre, Minnesota—a town near the Iowa border. [^]

[7] See the USDA compilation of statistics for 1999-2001 in "State Ranking by Net Farm Income," and "State Ranking by Cash Receipts" <agecoext.tamu.edu/publications/facts/facts03/6_15.pdf>, which indicates California and Texas rankings ahead of Iowa and other Midwestern states. [^]

[8] Sage (314) cites 1956 as the year in which urban population exceeded rural. Schwieder (288-295) elaborates on the shift toward urbanization and the industrialization of Iowa’s economy. [^]

Works Cited

Brack, Richard, “Spend the night as Francesca; Savery Suite even has the bed that has the whole world talking,” Des Moines Register, 15 June 1995: 1A, 3A.

Dreamfield. Dir. Kris Ostrowski and Tim Crescenti. 45 min. Crescenti Moon Productions, 1994.

Dundes, Alan and Carl R. Prager, Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1996.

Iowa Department of Public Safety. 1995 Uniform Crime Report. 10 Jan 2005 <http://publications.iowa.gov/archive/00000551/01/95iaucr.pdf>.

Keyes, Ralph. "The Flyover People," Newsweek, 3 Aug 1998: 14.

Knepper, Marty S. and John Shelton Lawrence, "Iowa Films, 1918-2002," Annals of Iowa 62 (Winter 2003): 30-100.

Munden, Kenneth. ed. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971--.

"For sale: bridges, souvenirs, dreams," The New York Times, 18 Oct. 1995: C1.

Mandel, Brett. Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams. South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, 2002.

Schwieder, Dorothy. Iowa: The Middle Land. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1995.

"The Sewers of Madison County," The Economist (US), 23 Sept.1995: 22.

Sage, Leland. The History of Iowa. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1974.

Shortridge, James R. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1989.

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). "State Ranking by Net Farm Income," and "State Ranking by Cash Receipts," 10 Jan 2005 <http://jenann.tamu.edu/resources/publications/agsector/facts/6_15pages.pdf>.

Appendix: Guide to Regional Portrayals in Film

<1> Using printed materials and the Web, one can explore regional identities for several sections of the United States and the world. The listings that follow demonstrate a growing awareness of stereotypes rooted in regional geography and their effect on the sense of cultural identity. Such concern logically extends earlier attention to stereotypes of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. While our listing emphasizes regions and states of the United States, it also encompasses some studies of national cinemas for other countries. It can serve both those seeking an overview of place-defined identities as well as those who want to focus on a particular region. The listings are organized into three sections.

I. Regions of the United States

II. Individual States of the United States

III. National Cinemas

If your particular state or region remains unmapped in its cinematic portrayal, begin developing your own listings and interpretations of the patterns you have noticed. The Web makes it easy to publish your findings electronically and to collaborate with others who can help in identifying films and interpreting the symbolism through which they convey their images of geographical places and associated cultures.

I. Regions of the United States

<2>THE MIDWEST

Shortridge, James R. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1989. With attention to popular culture, Shortridge discusses the geographical elasticity of the Midwest concept and the shifting stereotypes associated with its people and way of life. Serving as section editor for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Midwest (2005), Shortridge has posted a statement on "Images of the Midwest": <http://www.allmidwest.org/encyclomages/statement.html>.

<3> THE NORTHEAST

Lewis, George. “The Maine That Never Was: The Construction of Popular Myth in Regional Culture,” Journal of American Culture 16, 2 (Summer 1993): 91–99. A film-focused treatment that reveals conventions aimed at promoting tourism.

Sheldon, Karan. "New England in Feature Films." This online essay analyzes themes according to the following categories: development of Yankee characters, small town life contrasted with city values, seafaring tales, family secrets, and haunted New England <http://www.oldfilm.org/nhfWeb/ed/essays/essay_NE_Film.htm>.

<4>THE SOUTH

Campbell, Edward D. C., Jr. The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981. A treatment that organizes periods around these themes: the black defense of the white world in the silent film (1907-1923), Hollywood's golden era (1928-1939), the reform of the South (1941-1980), as well as an extended analysis of Gone with the Wind (1939) as national epic. Contains several dozen production stills.

French, Warren, ed. The South and Film. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1981. Essay-length studies of individual films such as Birth of Nation, Gone With the Wind, The Southerner, Sergeant York, and The Yearling. Also includes essays on directors John Ford, Robert Altman, and Martin Ritt, and writer William Faulkner. Contains a "chronology of the evolution" of the Southern film from D. W. Griffith's Old Kentucky (1907) through Coal Miner's Daughter (1980).

Heider, Karl G., ed. Images of The South : Constructing A Regional Culture on Film and Video Athens : U of Georgia P, 1993.

Kirby, Jack Temple. Media-Made Dixie: The South in American Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978.

Langman, Larry, and David Ebner. Hollywood's Image of The South: A Century of Southern Films. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. A filmography with short interpretative essays that precede listings on these themes: Southern aristocrats, Southern belles, feuds and feuding, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the carpetbaggers, and the Ku Klux Klan.

MacEwan, Valerie. "Am I A Southerner?" 27 Mar. 2002. Online essay that offers condensed summary of contemporary and past Southern stereotypes prevalent in television and film. <http://www.popmatters.com/columns/macewan/020327.html>.

Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Williamson, J. W. Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. Develops themes oriented to stereotypes of character that drove the plots of films with Appalachian settings: the hillbilly fool, the coonskin cap boys, the social bandit, good old boys, mama's boys, and hillbilly gals. Strong on the treatment of a region's cultural identity as defined by its film presentation. Williamson has compiled a filmography with short plot summaries for the period from 1907-1995. <http://www.library.appstate.edu/appcoll/filmography.html>.

<5> THE WESTERN

Because of its importance for the American heroic myth and the development of the nation, the Western has probably been the most prolific regional film genre. Jon Tuska in The Filming of the West (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) relates that he watched over 8,000 Westerns in the decade he spent writing his book. Michael R. Pitts, in Western Movies: A TV and Video Guide to 4200 Genre Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997) also conveys this vastness and illustrates that the page demands of merely listing the Westerns crowds out the space needed for thematic commentary. There are numerous Western filmographies organized around differing principles: chronological, thematic, auteuristic, ideological, etc.

Cawelti, John. Six Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999. An important theorist of popular genres, Cawelti has created several thematic filmographies for the Western. The extensive "Bibliographies and Filmographies" section, 167-215, lists films using these categories: director, critical success, outlaws, parodies and comedies, musicals, the building of the railroad, and cavalry. Among online filmographies referred to by Cawelti is Filmsite.Org’s listing, which offers information about genre conventions, history of the western, stars, etc. <http://www.filmsite.org/westernfilms.html>.

Hardy, Phil. The Western. New York: Penguin, 1995. Offers chapters on the decades from the 1930s through the early 1990s. The filmography for several hundred films indicates the fictional place setting for many and provides plot summaries.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford, 1992. Written from a gender-sensitive standpoint, Tompkins gets at the generic formulas that place the physical and social spaces of the Western "west of everything."

<6> II. Individual States of the United States

As an economic development strategy, many states have created commissions to facilitate film production. Some of them post lists of films shot in the state. These have the promotional purpose of demonstrating the suitability of the state for filmmaking. Their lists should be used with these facts in the foreground:

<7> (1) Independent films are often made without distribution agreements. Some fully finished "ghost films" are never even screened at festivals. So a film listed as made in a state may never have been seen by a theatrical audience and will leave no traces in the culture of commentary. On the other hand, direct-to-DVD distribution options may allow independents to receive commentary and low-volume commercial distribution.

<8> (2) There is no firm relationship between the location of a film shoot and the symbolism of cultural identity linked to place. Hollywood has shot thousands of films in its studio lots that depict life in other states. Especially well known examples of geographical displacement are the "spaghetti Westerns" of Sergio Leone /Clint Eastwood shot in Spain and Italy. Finally, many films are shot without culturally locating the action in any particular place, a practice that simplifies the demands on the film's iconography.

<9> (3) Some films are shot in several different states, so the same film can appear on several lists. In studio-centered film making, much shooting takes place in studio lots and sets, with occasional forays for shooting "on location" for authentic physical portrayal of a space. But even the "location" can be a fiction—as when the Murder She Wrote TV series would take its crews to Mendocino, California, for its outdoor scenes of coastal Maine.

ALASKA

Fienup-Riordan, Ann. Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995. A unique study by an anthropologist who explores the Hollywood representation of the Alaska Eskimo against carefully delineated ethnographic realities. She presents the theme of the Alaska Eskimo as the "noble primitive" differentiated from the howling "savages" of the Plains in classical Hollywood westerns. She discusses the interaction between film image and Eskimo self-understanding. The book contains a large number of production stills, movie posters, and documentary photographs from museum exhibitions and Eskimo life. Comprehensive filmography of both fiction, documentary, and ethnographic films and TV programs.

ARIZONA

The Arizona Film Commission maintains a chronological list of films and television from 1923-2002. Production companies, directors and stars are listed, but there are no plot summaries or thematic interpretations. <http://www.commerce.state.az.us/pdf/film/History.pdf>.

Arizona Highways Magazine Sept. 1981 is a special issue focused on Arizona as a film site. Four articles deal with sets, physical landscape, and the history of representing the West: Gary Reveles, "The Wild West Lives in Old Tuscon" and "Filmed in Arizona"; William R. Florence, "John Ford . . . the Duke, and Monument Valley"; Virginia Greene, "Some of the Photos That Sold Monument Valley." Extensively illustrated with production and landscape photographs.

CALIFORNIA

Mendocino Coast

Levene, Bruce. ed. Mendocino and the Movies: Hollywood and Television Motion Pictures Filmed on the Mendocino Coast. Mendocino, CA: Pacific Transcriptions, 1998. The Mendocino Coast area of Northern California has been a frequent shooting site for films and television. This book is basically a scrapbook, with local press stories, posters, and other film memorabilia. No critical or thematic perspectives.

Hollywood

In 2000, the American Cinematheque organization offered a thematic festival at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles called "Hollywood on Hollywood" with 17 films (such as Sunset Boulevard) that present the industry. The list of those films is posted. <http://www.egyptiantheatre.com/pressreleases/2000/hollywood2000pr.htm>.

COLORADO

The Colorado Film Commission posts a dates and titles filmography that covers 1897-2002. <http://www.coloradofilm.org/filmography.html>.

Emrich, David. Hollywood, Colorado. Los Angeles: Post Modern Book Co., 1998. Focuses on the silent period when the Old West was much more visible in the imagery of the films. Accompanied by an identically titled video with extended clips from several films. <http://www.silentsaregolden.com/hollywoodcolarticle.html>.

GEORGIA

The Georgia Film, Video, and Music Office maintains a list of films shot in Georgia back to 1973. <http://www.georgia.org/filmndex.asp?qui=1&qual=6>.

HAWAII

The Maui County Office maintains a short list of titles only. <http://www.filmmaui.com/film_history.htm>.

IDAHO

Boise State University maintains the Howard Anderson Film Archive online. It provides a comprehensive listing of films shot in Idaho, providing shooting locations, plot summaries, and citations for film reviews. Does not develop a cultural or regional interpretation of "the Idaho image." <http://www.boisestate.edu/hemingwayfc/filmcat.html>.

ILLINOIS (Chicago only)

The Center Stage organization in Chicago has created a listing of films according to these categories: set or shot in Chicago, featuring Chicagoans, or "intrinsically about Chicago": <http://centerstage.net/stumped/chicagoinfilm/>.

INDIANA

The Indiana Film Commission offers a titles only list of films shot in the state: <http://www.in.gov/film/filmographyndex.html>.

IOWA

Knepper, Marty, and John S. Lawrence. "Iowa Films: 1918-2003." Annals of Iowa. 62.1: 30-100. An interpretive essay and comprehensive filmography with annotations for nearly 200 films with Iowa fictional settings, traveling Iowa characters, Iowa history, or documentary treatment of some aspect of Iowa culture. Contains an appendix on researching regional films. (Available for $6+$1 S+H, State Historical Society, 402 Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, IA 52240.) An abbreviated version of the filmography is posted as a PDF file at <http://www.americansuperhero.comowa.html>.

---. "Visions of Iowa in Hollywood Film." Iowa Heritage Illustrated Winter 1998: 156-66. An interpretive essay that discusses agrarian virtue, Iowa settings and characters in WWI films, pastoral romance, nostalgia, tourist sites, and films about the agricultural crises of the 1980s. Includes a short filmography with 41 films. The same issue of this magazine contains Chris Rasmussen, "Mr. Stong's Dreamy Iowa," 146-56, an exploration of the novel State Fair that became the basis for the identically titled films of 1933, 1945 (Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), and 1962. Available for $6+$1 S+H, State Historical Society, 402 Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, IA 52240.

KANSAS

The Kansas Film Commission has a web page "Kansas Credits" that lists films chronologically 1952-present. <http://kdoch.state.ks.us/kdfilm/fc_credits.jsp>.

Prasch, Thomas, ed. "The Cinematic Presence of Kansas and the West: Film Reviews." Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 24.2 (2001): 136-58. <http://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2001summer.htm>. A group of historically-oriented reviews for several films with Kansas settings. Extended commentaries are provided for In Cold Blood (1967), Ride the Devil (1999), John Brown's Holy War (1999, documentary), Buffalo Girls (1995), Buffalo Soldiers (1997), Wild Bill (1995), Ninth Street (1998), and Half Past Autumn: The Life and Work of Gordon Parks (2000).

MICHIGAN

The Michigan Film Office maintains a dated list of films going back to 1946. <http://www.michigan.gov/hal/0,1607,7-160-17445_19275-51916--,00.html>.

MINNESOTA

Minnesota Film and TV Board maintains a list of films shot in Minnesota since 1970. No filmographic information, interpretations, or plot summaries. <http://www.mnfilm.orgnfo/>.

NEBRASKA

The Nebraska Film Office maintains a list of films made in the state since 1938. Contains dates, production companies, and shooting locations. <http://www.filmnebraska.org/filmed.htm>.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

The New Hampshire Film Office maintains an alphabetical list of 60 films/television productions shot in the state. <http://www.filmnh.org/filmography.php>.

NEW JERSEY

The New Jersey Motion Pictures and Television Commission maintains a list of film and television programs titles dating from 1978. <http://njfilm.org>.

NEW MEXICO

Film New Mexico maintains a list covering the period 1898-2002. No plot summaries or thematic interpretations. <http://www.edd.state.nm.us/FILM/MOVIES/movlist.html>.

NORTH CAROLINA

The North Carolina Film Commission maintains an alphabetical list; no dates or other filmographic information. <http://www.ncfilm.com/pastfilms>.

OREGON

The Oregon Film Office maintains a list of shoots chronologically organized from 1908 to 2004 under “Film History in Oregon.” It includes titles, dates, and shooting locations. <http://www.oregonfilm.org>.

OKLAHOMA

The State of Oklahoma Film Commission maintains a list of films made in the state. No filmographic information is provided.<http://www.oklahomafilm.org/Default.aspx?tabid=229>.

PENNSYLVANIA

The Pennsylvania Film Office maintains a list of film shoots since 1977 and provides dates, production companies, and shooting locations. <http://www.filminpa.com/filminpa/filmography_film.jsp>.

RHODE ISLAND

The Rhode Island Film and TV Office posts a list of productions dating to 1943. No plot summaries or shooting locations. <http://www.rifilm.com/film.html>.

SOUTH CAROLINA

The South Carolina Film Office offers an alphabetical title list linked to information about production date, company, and locations and principal actors. <http://www.scfilmoffice.com>.

TEXAS

Graham, Don. Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas. Dallas: Texas Monthly Press, 1983. Graham discusses some Hollywood films that have been influential in creating a Texas image. A native Texan, he also comments wryly on movie-generated cultural expectations for Texas and Texans that are discrepant from the largely urban, post-industrial life of the late 20th century.

----------. Giant Country. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1998. A book about Texas life, literature, and several films with Texas settings that appeared after Cowboys and Cadillacs.

The Governor's office of Texas posts a comprehensive by-the-decades titles list without stars, plot summaries, or interpretations. <http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/film/filmography>.

UTAH

The Utah Film Commission maintains an alphabetical list of film and television titles without dates or other information under the “Shot in Utah” heading. Many titles link to their entries in the International Movie Data Base. <http://film.utah.gov/index.html>.

WISCONSIN

The Wisconsin Film Office lists films back to 1916; dates and titles only with links to the International Movie Data Base. <http://www.filmwisconsin.org/wisconsinstars/films.htm>.

WYOMING

Farmer, Walt. Wyoming: A History of Film and Video in the 20th Century and The Making of Shane (both are CD-rom books). Farmer has created a website that presents a filmography by the decades with standard filmographic information and brief plot summaries. Site advertises the books mentioned above, which contain graphics--production stills, memorabilia, posters, etc.--in addition to production information. Contains some speculation about cultural impact, but the emphasis falls on facts about films, their production, and promotion. <http://www.theastrocowboy.com/Mlist/mlist.htm>. Farmer also posts a comprehensive list of television shows shot in Wyoming. <http://www.theastrocowboy.com/vlist.htm>.

<10> III. National Cinemas

“National cinema” is not a reliable category for the exploration of film-defined cultural identities. For example, Routledge (London and New York) publishes a series edited by Susan Hayward; through 2004 it has issued titles on Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Nordic, Spain, and China. However, the content of these books is oriented to periods, studios, stars, genres, and aesthetic movements. This is not a serious omission, since the absence of discussion about “national character” or “national cultural identity” reflects the difficulty of identifying any such “essence” in the way that films within a nation portray the culture identity of that nation. A suggestive conceptual discussion of nationalism in cinema is Susan Hayward’s “Introduction: Defining the ‘national’ of a country’s cinematic production” in her French National Cinema (Routledge, 1993), 1-17. One may conjecture that national identity is more likely to be explicitly portrayed in the case of a subordinate region such as Ireland or Scotland vis-à-vis Great Britain. Negative stereotypes may be fostered as the hegemonic discourse of a greater power and positive stereotypes may emerge as the expression of regional pride and the impulse to resist. That said, these references to resources on national cinema should be approached with the understanding that they may contain less about cultural identity than one finds in regional analyses.

The University of California/Berkeley maintains some online film related bibliographies for these regions: Africa, Asia (China, Korea, Japan), South/Southeast Asia, Germany, Latin America, Middle Eastern, Russia/Soviet Union, Spanish under “Bibliographies on National Cinema.” <http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/FilmBibMenu.html>.

The University of California Press publishes a list of titles under the rubric "World Film and Television.” <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/bfi/wfilm.sub.html>.

CANADA—BRITISH COLUMBIA

Browne, Colin. Motion Picture Production in British Columbia, 1898-1940: A Brief Historical Background and Catalogue . Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1979. <http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/movingim/general/movingim.htm>.

Duffy, Dennis J. Camera West: British Columbia on Film, 1941-1965. Victoria: Provincial Archives of British Columbia, 1986.

CANADA—NOVA SCOTIA

Eastern Eye: A Nova Scotia Filmography, 1899-1973. Halifax: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, 2000. A bibliography of film, video, and selected television productions, created by, for or about Nova Scotians; includes “A Brief History of Film in Nova Scotia” and a database of over 2500 film descriptions, plus indexes.

IRELAND

Herr, Cheryl Temple. Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the Midwest. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. This unique study compares two rural regions (Ireland and Iowa) that are linked by emigration and their common subordinate status within the representational and money economies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Includes an extended comparative analysis of the Irish Eat the Peach (1986) and Field of Dreams (1989).

Irish Film and Television Network maintains a list of films made in Ireland or about Ireland. <http://www.iftn.ie/filmographyndex4.htm>.

Pettit, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000). An analysis that deals with both film and television imagery of Ireland from the beginning of film history through the 1990s.

SCOTLAND

Petrie, Duncan. Screening Scotland. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. This historical study describes the images of Scotland during the period of British centralization and dominance, followed by a later period of developing independence.

SCRAN offers a site listing documentary films about Scotland. <http://sites.scran.ac.uk/films_of_scotland/Resourcesndex.htm>.

WALES

Berry, David. Wales and Cinema: The First Hundred Years. U of Wales P, 1994. This is an encyclopedic history that encompasses filmographic information, interpretation of themes, actors, directors, and the business of film production.

Blandford, Steve. ed. Wales on Screen. Brigend, Wales: Poetry Wales, 2000. This edited volume deals with themes of representation by outsiders (UK/US), self-representation, development and survival of a native film industry vis-à-vis more heavily capitalized outsiders, the preservation of children's culture in a world saturated by Disney products, and the place of women in the industry.

Acknowledgements: Karla Tonella at the University of Iowa posted an earlier version of our list online. We also offer special thanks to Dennis J. Duffy, Robert M. Lindsey, Karan Sheldon, Howard Summers, and Dwight Swanson for their many detailed suggestions about where to look.

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.