Since 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.
Tabella dei contenuti
Table 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
Circa l’autore
Undergraduate students.
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