Loren Pilcher
Gender, Race, and Rural Development in the Films of the Southern Educational Film Production Service
State interest in films about the rural South coalesced in Georgia from the 1940s to 1960s. Pilcher’s talk traces the short-lived Southern Educational Film Production Service, a nonprofit service for government agencies in the southeast. Chartered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the unit operated in Athens, Georgia with a team of progressive filmmakers, mostly well-educated White men with humanitarian aims. Two productions and their afterlives reveal the experiment’s White masculine perspective toward institutional development in the South and tensions between representing rural communities to facilitate social change and promoting their modernization by segregated government agencies.
Loren Pilcher researches at the intersection of film and media and American cultural studies with a focus on images of gender, race, and sexuality in the US. They specialize in nonfiction films made outside of entertainment cultures and how they represent people and places in the US. Their current project examines government films made in the mid-twentieth century American South, particularly how federal and local agencies depicted gender and race in the region in the final years of Jim Crow segregation and how these productions reappear in new media.