During the mid-20th century, the development film captured the imaginations of experts and politicians within the western world, cementing what Michael E. Latham in his 2000 book Modernization as Ideology calls the ideology of modernization as the hegemonic model for development. In The Development Film in the Americas, Molly Geidel argues that filmmakers working to create this genre built on leftist aesthetics stemming from the Popular Front of the 1930s to present development as natural, achievable, and necessary. As scholars have shown for contexts throughout the world, the theoretical models of development never manifested on the ground as planned and never accomplished the full extent of planners’ visions. Development films, on the other hand, did show this fictive, fully realized outcome as reality and as evidence of the efficacy of development programming.
Little scholarship exists about these films, and in their moment, they generated some, but not substantial, public dialogue. Geidel attributes this to limited screening and archival practices. Rarely shown to public audiences outside of educational settings, the audiences nevertheless contained the very experts, academics, and politicians charged with designing and implementing development initiatives, creating what Geidel refers to as a “self-fulfilling feedback loop” (17). Based on careful viewing of over 70 development films produced between 1941 and 1975, Geidel analyzes their contents while focusing on the artists who created these films alongside the discourses of development communicated through their labor. When possible, Geidel examines the role of the films’ actors, who often simultaneously served as development’s intended beneficiaries, as well as the reactions of the communities whose realities these films sought to transform.
Though scripted and carefully managed, the films portrayed their subjects as reality, often using melodrama to render “traditional” societies as abject, awaiting outside intervention as narrated by the voice-over of the narrator. Films often stripped their subjects of the historical context to portray development as apolitical and as applicable to a variety of contexts. For example, Geidel discusses the process of creating The Forgotten Village (1941), the first development film, and the decision of the directors to omit references to the Mexican Revolution and to excise themes relating to class and agrarian reform.
From The Forgotten Village, Geidel traces this history across three decades. Using USIA films, Geidel shows how filmmakers recreated U.S. history to provide a blueprint toward a capitalist future dependent on petroleum and resource extraction, presenting this process as a beautiful, wholesome model for other countries to follow. Examining the productions by the UNESCO-affiliated Center for Fundamental Education and Adult Learning (CREFAL), headquartered in Mexico, Geidel shows how the development film used as educational tool became development itself; practitioners believed the films would induce incremental, self-directed changes, which would eventually scale to community-wide transformation and the so-called modernization of Indigenous communities. Turning to the case of Bolivia in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, Geidel shows how the themes of self-help and depoliticization continued in film production. Films recast the revolutionary directives as technical problems to be solved by endeavors such as lowland colonization and infrastructure development aided by the military’s civic action initiatives—along with substantial amounts of U.S. aid.
Later chapters trace the decline of the development film, using the personal and professional trajectories of three filmmakers to demonstrate their changing approaches to development films, largely stemming from growing disquiet with U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. At the same time, changing ideas about work and productivity, as seen in the intersection of 1970s feminism and development, called into question past depictions of women and ushered in a cinematographic tendency to emphasize individual lived experiences and thus revise the development film aesthetic.
Geidel’s book illuminates the connections between Cold War propaganda, visual production, politics, and development, emphasizing how artists powerfully transformed societal thinking, in this instance regarding the construct of development. Historians should take heed of these artists’ labor, for as the epilogue powerfully reminds the reader, artistic production retains this powerful possibility.
