Home Arts The Development Film in the Americas
book: The Development Film in the Americas
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The Development Film in the Americas

  • Molly Geidel
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
View more publications by University of California Press

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.


Publicly Available Download PDF
i

Publicly Available Download PDF
v

Publicly Available Download PDF
vii

Publicly Available Download PDF
ix

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
1

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
24

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
58

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
92

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
123

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
155

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
189

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
225

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
235

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
275

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
281

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
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
Downloaded on 18.11.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520416505/html
Scroll to top button