In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

TCM SPOTLIGHT: SOUTHERN WRITERS (Wednesdays in November, 8pm)--This month TCM has put together a very interesting program of pictures based on the writings of Southern novelists and playwrights. It's a good idea, because the southern "voice" has had a lasting effect on American culture, and on movies, right from the start. D.W. Griffith, who went a long way toward elevating American cinema to the level of an art form and a big business, grew up in Kentucky and he set the tone for the idea of the Old South in the movies with The Birth of a Nation. That picture is not part of this tribute, but I'd like to quote James Agee (who wrote The Night of the Hunter, showing on November 11th) on Griffith's film. "Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them," wrote Agee in the late 40s, "and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does." Agee, himself a Southerner (he grew up in Tennessee), was one of the great compassionate liberal voices of his time but it's interesting that he tried to rationalize the genuinely racist aspects of the picture (Griffith was shocked to realize that his film had re-energized the Ku Klux Klan, and that's what led him to make Intolerance). The romance and chivalry and lost beauty of the pre-Civil War South was a big theme in movies and literature from the Reconstruction period through most of the 20th century, and the tragedy of the destruction of the old way of life was given far more attention than the tragedy of slavery. And, of course, the glory of the Old South was the theme of Gone With the Wind (November 4th), which was for years considered the great American movie--it was referred to constantly, it was brought back into theatres every year for week-long engagements and it was the film against which all others were measured by the industry. I think it's beautifully made and extremely entertaining, but there's no way that African-American audiences could have seen it in the same uncomplicated way that we did when we were kids--why would they? Why should they?

Things started to change in movies in the '40s with pictures like John Huston's In This Our Life (also showing on the 4th), in which a scared, arrogant white Southerner railroads an innocent black man into jail--a scenario that is repeated in many pictures from then on, including To Kill a Mockingbird (showing on the 11th), of course. It also figures prominently in the 1949 adaptation of Intruder in the Dust, not included in this tribute; William Faulkner is represented by the 1959 adaptation of The Sound and the Fury, which builds from only one section of that extremely complex novel, and in the end feels a little closer to Tennessee Williams, represented by Elia Kazan's film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. With writers like Faulkner, Williams, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, all represented here, we enter into another register--troubled, brooding, unsettled. Characters like the preacher in The Night of the Hunter, Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Hazel Motes in Wise Blood (shown on the 11th) and almost everyone in No Country for Old Men (the 25th), seem to live in the shadow of tragedy. They all speak the language of a haunted world.

by Martin Scorsese