In your historical and cinematic judgment, what is the single best film on the Civil War? Why?
How and why has the cultural memory of the American Civil War in film developed since 1915? What were the main themes and topics that films have addressed? How and why did they address them in the ways that they did? Do you agree with Bruce Chadwick, who argued that, although the Confederacy lost the actual war, the South won the conflict in the movies? Why or why not? Or do you agree with your instructor that the movies portrayed multiple of the war memories (Lost Cause up to World War II, then Unionist/Reconciliationist in the 1950s-60s; anti-Southern/anti-war in the 1960s-1970s; Unionist/Emancipationist in the late 1980s; Reconciliationist/Lost Cause in the 1990s-early 2000s; Emancipationist in the 2010s) while also reflecting the context of the times in which they were made (such as the Great Depression, Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, feminism, etc.)? Why or why not? In your historical and cinematic judgment, what is the single best film on the Civil War? Why? What Civil War movie remains to be made in order to give us a better historical view of the conflict and its significance?
