Southern Appalachia and the documentary film

Abstract

g^* £P by Edward L. Counts The documentary is an established film genre dating back to the earliest periods of motion picture history. In the early 20th century, the entertainment motion picture led the way in the development of cinematic style and technique. Filmmakers discovered that, instead of filming long, static scenes, they could film subjects separately from several positions and "glue" the strips of film together to form scenes and tell a story. This process was called editing and was the key to important improvements in motion pictures. Filmmakers manipulated shots, time, space, continuity, motion and other elements offilm to tell a story or carry a message. The motion picture became a powerful communications medium with a unique "language." The first documentary film which displayed this unique film language was Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" released in 1922. The film was an account of an Eskimo family struggling to survive in a harsh arctic environment. Through the success of this film, Flaherty fathered the tradition of the modern documentary. After "Nanook of the North," the documentary film concept grew in power and artistry around the world. Documentary filmmakers used their cameras to investigate social issues. They explored politics, agricultural problems, wars, exploitation of people and resources, labor problems, pollution, poverty, civil rights issues, and cultures. Unlike newsreels, the documentary asserted a point of view and often advocated change. Therefore, the "classic" documentary evolved as a non-fiction film which usually concerns a social issue seen from a particular point of view. The documentary does not simply and objectively record it—it interprets, provokes, evokes, advocates, questions, stimulates. Appalachian culture was the subject of several documentaries produced during the past ten years. Some of the most important films about the region were made by a group of filmmakers at the Appalshop Workshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The portrayal of Southern Appalachia's people and culture in literature has been studied extensively by various researchers. Through an examination of this literature written by observers of the region, a set ofdocumented cultural traits can be derived. After such a review, this set of documented cultural traits could be used to analyze documentary films about the region. Some writers which are frequently cited in studies of the region are John Campbell, Harry Caudill, Thomas Ford, Loyal Jones, Horace Kephart, Jack Weiler, and Cratis Williams. A set of cultural traits derived from a review of their work would not be scientific, but would contain the biases of the documentors, some of which were natives of the region and others were not. The purposes of such a review are not to describe a "typical" mountaineer or to advocate a sub-culture model. Observers and social investigators have documented many characteristics of Southern Appalachian culture. For the purpose of this article, six of the more commonly emphasized ones will be discussed by citing examples of where they have been documented and then 19 pointing out films in which they occur. These six cultural traits are individualism, traditionalism , concern for religious matters, love-of-beauty, fatalism, and sense-of-place. Individualism. The cultural trait which is probably the most commonly mentioned in the literature is individualism. Writers have observed and documented this trait for years. In 1 90 1 , John Fox, Jr., wrote that the individualism and self-reliance found in the Southern Appalachian mountains were results of the extreme isolation experienced by Appalachian pioneers.1 A few years later, Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders observed that this individualism was the key to understanding the character ofthe mountaineer.2 John C. Campbell, in a well-known work entitled The Southern Highlander and His Home, suggested that the chief trait of the highlander was independence.3 Ina 1929 article published in The Century Magazine, Maristan Chapman described the spirit of the Southern Highlanders as "uncompromisingly individualistic ."4 Years later, Cratis Williams summarized his findings of a review of literature about the region in "The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction." In this work, which has become a standard reference to the study of the region, he included the cultural trait of self-reliance suggesting that it was one of the most dominant traits of the region...