People of the Cumberland (1937)
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Film Description
People of the Cumberland (1937)
Sponsor: Highlander Folk School. Production Co.: Frontier Films. Directors: Robert Stebbins [Sidney Meyers], Eugene Hill [Jay Leyda], Elia Kazan, William Watts. Writers: Erskine Caldwell, David Wolff [Ben Maddow]. Camera: Ralph Steiner. Music: Alex North, Earl Robinson, Elie Siegmeister. Sound Editor: Helen Van Dongen. Narrator: Richard Blaine. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 21 minutes.
Documentary celebrating the work of the Highlander Folk School, a progressive adult education center founded in 1932 in the mountain community of Monteagle, Tennessee. People of the Cumberland demonstrates how education and the labor movement can transform an impoverished mining region and bring hope to its people. Made by activist filmmakers, the movie ends with a call for a “new kind of America.”
Resources
Association of Documentary Film Producers, Living Films: A Catalog of Documentary Films and Their Makers (New York: Association of Documentary Film Producers, 1940), 46; Educational Film Catalog, comps. Dorothy E. Cook and Eva Rahbek-Smith (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1943), 351; William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 174–85; Charles Wolfe, “Straight Shots and Crooked Plots,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 253–56.