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Utopia and Reality

Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds

Editor(s) Simon Spiegel,Andrea Reiter,Marcy Goldberg

Hardback - £65.00

Language: English

Genre(s): Media, Film and Theatre

Series: New Dimensions in Science Fiction

February 2020 · 304 pages ·216x138mm

· Hardback - 9781786835246
· eBook - pdf - 9781786835253
· eBook - epub - 9781786835260

About the Book
Contents
About the Editor(s)

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.

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

Author(s): Simon Spiegel

Simon Spiegel is a research associate at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich, and Privatdozent at the University of Bayreuth.

Author(s): Andrea Reiter

Andrea Reiter is a film scholar and documentary filmmaker. She has a doctorate in film studies from the University of Zurich.

Author(s): Marcy Goldberg

Marcy Goldberg is a film historian, university lecturer, editor and translator.