MIE Anti-racist Education Network: The Racial Pedagogies of the Development Film in the Americas

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.