This article focuses on the documentary films made by Mexican film pioneers Adriana and Dolores Ehlers. The sisters made films on Mexican industries (such as on the drinking water infrastructure and the oil business) to promote Mexico’s modernity for Mexican and US audiences, as well as US investors. Cinema, I argue, was conceptualized by the Ehlers sisters as a cultural object that could incentivize industrial development and international exchange. Albeit immersed in postrevolutionary developmentalist ideologies, the Ehlers’ vision of and for a modern Mexico did not include identities and practices that signaled indigeneity and tradition. By analyzing one of the only extant primary materials on the Ehlers sisters’ careers, an interview that scholar Julia Tuñón did with Dolores Ehlers in the 1970s, I address how the written and mediated voice represents, without reconstructing, the Ehlers sisters’ cinematic project of Mexican modernity.
This article traces how the questions of gender inequality and developmentalism are staged in the official documentary film archive in India. I examine official films made in the wake of the International Women’s Year in 1975 as knowledge-making sites where discursive constructions around gender were being actively forged, debated, and reinforced in direct relation (or opposition) to the women’s movement and contemporary debates on development in India at the time. I argue that to rewrite official histories of gender, films, and development, we must unsee like a state and reveal the film archive as a site in flux to activate new meanings. And we must cultivate a feminist curatorial eye that proactively seeks films, sometimes only fragments of films, to open the possibility of identifying affective encounters and subjective experiences that exceed the bounds of the state’s developmental agendas.
Across newspaper stories, documentaries, and fiction films in early socialist China, women had an indispensable presence in the PRC’s geological exploration. This article examines how cinema constructs women’s roles in geological work and reveals a more complex engagement with “terra-developmentalism,” the mutating connotation of earthbound development, and the emergence of a masculinist-nationalistic framing of geological exploration in the first half of the twentieth-century. I argue that women’s appearances in geological films were less about challenging the patriarchal and ideological nature embedded within geological science. Instead, the cinematic portrayal of women geologists as imperfect and amateur technical subjects opens the possibility of redefining what constitutes “development” and of translating an embodied, gendered experience of how state developmental visions unfold on the ground. I analyze how the Chinese state perceived geology as a socialist developmental ideal that was anti-imperialist, nationalist, and, most importantly, gendered, through a close examination of the first socialist state documentary on geo-exploration, Treasure Seekers in the Mountains (Shen Shan Tan Bao, 1955). I then compare two fiction films made by the socialist female director Dong Kena, The Song of Baoshan (Baoshan Zhi Ge, 1958) and Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountains (Kunlun Shan Shang Yi Ke Cao, 1962). I present how women who devote their lives to geological work negotiate top-down state developmentalist ideologies on screen as well as Dong’s struggles as a woman filmmaker. Throughout the article, I weave in reflections on the mediated profile of China’s most renowned female geologist, Chi Jishang, and on how her scientific practices off screen resonate with those of women geologists on socialist screens.
This article examines women’s participation in the Miners’ Film Workshop, a countereducation project developed in Bolivia in 1983 by the Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers (FSTMB) and the French nongovernmental organization Association Varan. Drawing on feminist production studies, institutional ethnography, and critical fabulation, the article looks into the abundant archive of the Miners’ Film Workshop, preserved in the offices of what is now Ateliers Varan, to develop frustration as a key conceptual category in the understanding of the structural constraints and blockages that determined North–South cooperation for development projects and women’s involvement in these projects. Frustration also serves as a methodological tool used to shift the analysis away from an auteurist and film-centered historiography to focus on the social infrastructures and networks that sustained this project in a decade of militancy and NGO-ization of Latin American cinema.
Despite being a taboo subject, sex education has remained a fundamental part of international and local entertainment-education projects and a primary way through which development communication has shaped women’s roles in society. As development initiatives work to center women’s rights and freedoms over neocolonial or nationalist interests, it is essential to examine the mechanisms and storytelling modes designed to accomplish these goals. To contribute to our understanding of the changing approaches and ideologies that underlie contemporary development communication and its adaptation to the digital age, I analyze the entertainment educational web series Sex Ki Adalat (2017) or Court of Sex, created by the Population Foundation of India (PFI). I demonstrate how the series uses the genre elements of comedy and courtroom drama, as well as its online platform, to locate sexual and reproductive health within the public sphere and align it with notions of justice, human rights, and gender equality.
