Development Film in the Americas
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A01=Molly Geidel
archival film research
Author_Molly Geidel
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFR
Category=NHB
cinematic nation-building
Cold War media
documentary persuasion
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnographic visuals
film and ideology
global visual culture
leftist visual traditions
media and development
political filmmaking networks
postwar propaganda
rural transformation narratives
social realist aesthetics
state-sponsored cinema
visual modernization
Product details
- ISBN 9780520416475
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Oct 2025
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
