Area Coded: American Regionalism in Film

Programmed by Jessica Green

The United States has spent roughly 120 of its 250 years creating the moving-image mythology of itself. To travel through American cinema is to travel through America itself—not as one country with one identity, but as a collection of distinct places, histories, cultures, and dreams constructed through expansion, migration, displacement, genocide, enslavement, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. Our nation's regional films get beneath the mythology: the communities that shape the nation, the contradictions that define it, and the local cultures that ultimately become global. The Gulf Coast, West Texas, the Deep South, Rocky Mountains, New England, the Rust Belt, and the Pacific Northwest produce particular ways of living and seeing the world. The films in this series explore the very specific American places that produce culture that the rest of the world now recognizes as American.