Description
Book SynopsisSince publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.
Table of ContentsTable of Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments Andrea Reiter and Simon Spiegel Introduction: Utopian Realities Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent Part 1: Tracing Utopia Susanna Layh Utopia Revisited: Reading Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in the Light of the Utopian Tradition Peter Seyferth Neither Fact Nor Fiction: Made in Secret as a Utopian Education in Desire Simon Spiegel The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda Videos as Utopian Texts Part 2: Alternative Documentary Politics Matthew Holtmeier Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button Andrea Reiter Prospectivity in Political Documentaries Chelsea Wessels Practicing Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement Part 3: New Forms of Documentary Activism Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner Trans-Utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities Dale Hudson Post-Utopian Interventions by Students: Interactive Documentary and Micro-Revolutions Jane M. Gaines Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring List of Illustrations
