Utopia and Reality

Description

Simon Spiegel

Bilder einer besseren Welt. Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film. Schüren. 2019

Theoretisch Phantastisch. Eine Einführung in Tzvetan Todorovs Theorie der phantastischen Literatur. p.machinery. 2010.

Die Konstitution des Wunderbaren. Zu einer Poetik des Science-Fiction-Films. Schüren. 2007

Andrea Reiter

Kritik, Aktivismus und Prospektivität. Politische Strategien im postjugoslawischen Dokumentarfilm. Schüren (in publication) 2019

　

　

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.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786835260
• Langue: English

Extrait

Utopia and Reality
Series Editors
Professor Pawel Frelik
University of Warsaw
Professor Patrick B. Sharp
California State University, Los Angeles
Editorial Board
Grace Dillon
Portland State University
Tanya Krzywinska
Falmouth University
Isiah Lavender III
Louisiana State University
Roger Luckhurst
Birkbeck University of London
John Rieder
University of Hawai‘i
Utopia and Reality
Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds
Edited by
Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter and Marcy Goldberg
© The Contributors, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78683-524-6
eISBN: 978-1-78683-526-0
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design by www.hayesdesign.co.uk
Series Editors’ Preface
Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Utopian Realities
Andrea Reiter and Simon Spiegel
1 Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent
Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel
Part 1: Tracing Utopia
2 Utopia Revisited: Reading Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in the Light of the Utopian Tradition
Susanna Layh
3 Neither Fact nor Fiction: Made in Secret as a Utopian Education in Desire
Peter Seyferth
4 The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda Videos as Utopian Texts
Simon Spiegel
Part 2: Alternative Documentary Politics
5 Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button
Matthew Holtmeier
6 Prospectivity in Political Documentaries
Andrea Reiter
7 Practising Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement
Chelsea Wessels
Part 3: New Forms of Documentary Activism
8 Trans-utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities
Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner
9 Post-utopian Interventions by Students: Interactive Documentary and Micro-revolutions
Dale Hudson
10 Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring
Jane M. Gaines
Illustrations
2.1 Kino-eye (00:14:13)
2.2 In the viewing hall (01:03:33)
2.3 The cameraman, creator of the city (00:56:13)
2.4 The camera monitoring the city (00:27:06)
2.5 The demolition of the past (01:05:17)
3.1 Screening party with Muffy LaRue, nerdgirl and J. D. Superstar (screenshot is lightened up for printing purposes; video is much darker) (08:41)
3.2 Kissing scene with Professor University, Mr Pants and Monster (with camera) (29:46)
3.3 Discussion scene with nerdgirl, Hugh Jorgen, Muffy LaRue and Professor University (and Mr Pants’s knee) (1:20:43)
3.4 Manifesto scene with Monster (02:12)
4.1 Health Services in the Islamic State
4.2 One of the many charts in The Structure of the Khilafah
4.3 The title of Return of the Gold Dinar
4.4, 4.5 Return of the Gold Dinar mixes different kinds of source material
5.1 Landscape shots that emphasise the beauty of the Chilean coast and water’s role in shaping the bioregion
5.2 Supposed stars as they coalesce into waves
5.3 The archipelago of rain viewed from the troposphere
5.4 The stomach/bellybutton of one of the painted Selk’nam
5.5 Speculative rumination on what is ‘unreal’
6.1 TV music video clip during the Croatian military offensive
6.2 UN General Alain Forand recounts the situation
6.3 Žbanić talks to a Sarajevan resident
6.4 The street corner as a starting point for socio-political reflections
7.1 Steingraber speaking on the steps of the Capitol building
7.2 Steingraber being interviewed in Bârlad
7.3 Cheshire, Ohio and the Gavin Power Plant
7.4 Present-day Cheshire, Ohio
7.5 Community members attend a meeting with the Ohio EPA
8.1 Torre David in Caracas
8.2, 8.3 Inside Torre David
8.4 to 8.6 Gran Horizonte
9.1 Home page for Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary
9.2 Navigation of images and videos in Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary
9.3 Home page for The Black Gold – A Web Documentary
9.4 Data visualisations in The Black Gold – A Web Documentary
Contributors
Jane M. Gaines is Professor of film at Columbia University and author of three award-winning books. In 2018 she was given the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Marcy Goldberg is a freelance film historian, media consultant, university lecturer and translator based in Zurich.
Matthew Holtmeier is Assistant Professor and Co-director of the film studies minor at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Contemporary Political Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Dale Hudson is Associate Professor in the film and new media programme at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Susanna Layh is Senior Lecturer at the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou is a filmmaker and researcher based in Zurich, where he teaches urban research methods and film-making at ETHZ, and collaborates with the interdisciplinary design studio Urban-Think Tank.
Andrea Reiter is a film scholar and documentary filmmaker. Her book Kritik, Aktivismus und Prospektivit ä t , based on her PhD, was published in autumn 2019 with Schüren.
Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri-St Louis. He was the founding editor of Utopian Studies and author of Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) as well as over a hundred articles on various aspects of utopianism.
Daniel Schwartz is a filmmaker and artist from Atlanta, currently living in Zurich. His work focuses primarily on urban transformation from social, spatial and political perspectives.
Peter Seyferth is a political philosopher from Munich. From 2003 to 2016 he taught political science at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and Technische Universität Munich. He now works for FernUniversität in Hagen.
Simon Spiegel is a lecturer at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich and Privatdozent at the University of Bayreuth. He is the author of Bilder einer besseren Welt (Marburg: Schüren, 2019).
Chelsea Wessels is Assistant Professor and Co-director of the film studies minor at East Tennessee State University. Her research interests include local cinema history and the archive, global film genres and feminist film.
Acknowledgements
This volume has its origins in an international conference that took place at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in the autumn of 2016, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the original publication of Thomas More’s Utopia . This conference, titled Utopia and Reality , grew out of the research project Alternative Worlds: The Political-activist Documentary Film , which was generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The national doctoral programme Film, Photography, and Other Visual Media (Swissuniversities) co-funded the event, which brought together international researchers from two fields that normally see little exchange – utopian studies and documentary research. While some of the scholars who presented at the conference are part of this volume, the participants also included Jens Eder, Britta Hartmann, Dina Iordanova, Chris Tedjasukmana, Thomas Tode and Lars Weckbecker. The conference was accompanied by a film programme at the Xenix cinema curated by Thomas Tode.
The unusual encounter proved highly stimulating and confirmed our assumption that documentary and utopian studies have a lot to learn from each other. The publication of a collective volume that puts some of the insights from the workshop on record while also expanding on them was the logical next step. For this, we widened the focus and invited additional scholars to complement the original contributions.
We would like to thank Margrit Tröhler, professor at the University of Zurich, who led the original research project and without whose support both the conference and the ensuing volume would have remained utopian projects. We would also like to thank Barbara Bitterli for her tireless help in organising the conference, Viola Zimmermann for her beautiful artwork, Jenny Billeter and Reto Bühler from the Xenix cinema for their hospitality and Susie Trenka for her diligent proofreading. Patricia Zimmermann was instrumental in establishing contacts with additional authors who were not part of the original conference and whose articles complement th