简介

U.S. film history film genres histories and theories of moving image culture popular cultural formations of identity (especially gender, race, nation, and region) Courtney's current book project,Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the West, the South, and the USA, considers the role of moving image culture in the dramatic reimagining of the U.S. that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when popular ways of defining “America” and “Americans” were under palpable strain, she argues, moving images helped viewers negotiate conflicted sentiments about the nation, in part, through an implicit and sometimes explicit opposition between two filmic places; places this book calls the “leaky” screen South and the “empty” screen West. Split Screen Nation interrogates this opposition across a range of popular screen forms, including Hollywood films, but also home movies, industrial films, and atomic test films.