Loren Pilcher

My research focuses on documentary and nontheatrical film with an emphasis on gender, its intersections with race and class, and queer methodologies of film analysis and archiving. I am interested, broadly, in how moving images have mapped place and social identity in the U.S. and the American South, as well as how marginal films and screen media circulate in archives and new media spaces today.

In my current project, I analyze how government-produced films made in Georgia in the 1950s and early 60s centered performances of "respectable" masculinity and femininity as a way to recalibrate images of Black and White race relations in the Jim Crow South. These films rendered an institutional ideology of white supremacy in a subtler form—the idyllic visual field of state-sponsored media.