Utopias in Nonfiction Film

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by Simon Spiegel

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Keywords: documentary
Publishing date: 2022
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Collection: Palgrave Studies in Utopianism
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 340 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)

ISBN

978-3-030-79822-2

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Book Presentation:
'Comprehensive and thorough, Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new direction in its surprise application to documentary that has the potential to shake up the field.'- Jane Gaines, Columbia University, USA
'Spiegel has introduced a new sub-genre to utopian studies, the documentary film. The book covers an impressive range of films, making the book one of the few truly international and comparative works in utopian studies.'- Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA

"Simon Spiegel’s magisterial overview of utopian documentaries and nonfiction films is a treasure trove of information and unearths many forgotten and half-forgotten films, providing perceptive discussions of sidelined movies that deserve his (and our) critical scrutiny.“

- Eckart Voigts, University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology, Germany

This book is the first major study on utopias in nonfiction film. Since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia more than 500 years ago, countless books have been written which describe a better world. But in film, positive utopias seem to be nonexistent. So far, research has focused almost exclusively on dystopias, since positive outlooks seem to run contrary to the media’s requirement. Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new approach; starting from the insight that literary utopias are first and foremost meant as a reaction to the ills of the present and not as entertaining stories, it looks at documentary and propaganda films, an area which so far has been completely ignored by research. Combining insights from documentary research and utopian studies, a vast and very diverse corpus of films is analysed. Among them are Zionist propaganda films, cinematic city utopias, socialist films of the future as well as web videos produced by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS.

About the Author:
Simon Spiegel is Research Manager at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Privatdozent at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. From 2014 to 2018 he was a collaborator in the research project ‘Alternative Worlds: The Political-Activist Documentary Film’. He is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung.

Press Reviews:
"Utopias in Nonfiction Film as a book is accessible to all kinds of readers with its clear, engaging, and authentic style of writing. The book is presented in a logical format, and its organization is easy to follow. Overall, the reader gets the impression that Spiegel’s book is a significant step towards untying and unraveling the numerous and multifaceted strands and implications of utopias in nonfiction films. The book educates the reader through its analyses of unexpected genres … ." (Hoor ElShafei, Science Fiction Film and Television, Vol. 16 (3), 2023)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan

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