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Film Review Strangers and Kin. Written and directed by Herb E. Smith (Appalshop Films, 1984), color, 48 min., 16mm. This exceptionally rich and intelligent film uses the "hillbilly" stereotype to essay the struggle between primitivism and progress, traditionalism and modernism. By having three actors/narrators pose as various historical personages, reading from and acting out accounts from diverse written sources, and by interlacing clips from old movies, 1930s federal government documentaries, television shows, and CBS documentaries, the film charts the evolution of the Appalachian mountain people, or "hillbilly," stereotype over the past three centuries and as a product of changing economic situations. Early writers, such as William Byrd, II, regarded mountain people as barbarians , 19th-century local color writers rendered them as crude but noble Anglo-Saxon purists, modern filmmakers and public policy makers often portrayed them as obstacles to progress, and, from the 1960s on, "liberal' television journalists and anti-poverty warriors classed them as industrialization's victims to be uplifted and educated. Throughout the film the narrators like the mountain people to Indians, people in tune with their natural environment but viewed by agents of modernization as savages who must bend to economic change or die. The actors/narrators celebrate the integrity and naturalness of the mountain folk and propose no compromise with progress. For them, the myths and stereotypes about mountain people have become so pervasive, so corrosive, that they threaten the survival of true mountain culture. With its foot-tapping musical score, vivid and amusing clippings from such sources as D.W. Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies, and engaging personal reminiscences, Strangers and Kin entertains as well as it instructs. Although visually compelling, the film suffers from a mild case of documentary film disease—the tendency toward historical reductionism that comes with over-statement of one's case and overkill of the opposite side. The film views mountain culture uncritically and monolithically, ignoring the willingness of many mountain people to accept elements of modernism and obscuring the diversity within the range of mountain cultures. The actors' dressing up as other people adds humor, but it often serves only to caricature the very people they accuse of stereotyping the mountain folk. These criticisms aside, Strangers and Kin provides a powerful and revealing argument on the mixing of myth and reality in American literature and popular culture, for in forming images of the mountain people Americans were (and are) often really trying to find 71 their own place in a rapidly changing, modernizing world. In that sense, the film addresses issues of cultural assimilation, social integration, and economic exploitation in the context of modernization. It asks, really, whether progress ought to move mountains. Randall M. Miller Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia 72 ...

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