Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
The Development Film in the Americas
-
Molly Geidel
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
In this book, Molly Geidel traces the rise and fall of the development film, an overlooked film genre that circulated widely in the Americas from the 1940s through the 1970s. Development films, often short documentaries, were made at the behest of state agencies, global governance organizations, and private corporations to link capitalist conceptions of economic growth to improved quality of life. Development films made this link beautifully compelling, blending elements from ethnography and socially committed leftist film traditions to create indelible narratives of underdevelopment and modernization. The Development Film in the Americas tells the story of these films and the hemispheric cohort of filmmakers who crafted them, chronicling the filmmakers' fraught relationships with both the organizations they worked for and the actors in their films.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Molly Geidel
Molly Geidel is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College and author of Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties.
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
v -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Figures
vii -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Acknowledgments
ix -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1. From the Popular Front to the Modernization Mission
24 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2. Dispossession as Development in US Information Agency Propaganda, Petrodocumentary, and Puerto Rican Community Education Filmmaking
58 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3. Experiments in Fundamental Education Filmmaking and Latin American Regionalism at Pátzcuaro
92 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4. Perfecting the Development Film Form in Revolutionary Bolivia
123 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5. Brutal Pedagogy in the Kennedy Years
155 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
6. Women in Development and the New Experiential Documentary
189 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Epilogue
225 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
235 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Selected Development Film Filmography
275 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Bibliography
281 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
301
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 31, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780520416505
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
326
eBook ISBN:
9780520416505
Keywords for this book
postwar propaganda; visual modernization; social realist aesthetics; Cold War media; documentary persuasion; state-sponsored cinema; rural transformation narratives; film and ideology; ethnographic visuals; political filmmaking networks; global visual culture; cinematic nation-building; archival film research; leftist visual traditions; media and development
