When John Steinbeck turned his attention to filmmaking in 1941, just after publishing The Grapes of Wrath, he helped establish a visual language that would shape how Americans understood global poverty for decades to come.
In her new book, The Development Film in the Americas, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Molly Geidel examines an overlooked film genre that circulated widely in the Americas from the 1940s through the 1970s. These Cold War-era development films—often made by acclaimed artists like Steinbeck and Gordon Parks—presented poverty as something that could be overcome through education and a change in mindset, rather than as a structural condition produced by capitalism. These visually striking films became powerful propaganda tools that shaped everything from Peace Corps training to classroom education.
Geidel, whose research spans cultural history, visual media, and U.S. foreign policy, is also the author of Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties. In this Q&A, she discusses how these films were made, who paid the price, and what they reveal about narratives of inevitability today.
What first drew you to the world of development film?
While researching my first book on the 1960s Peace Corps, I was struck by a disconnect: volunteers arrived expecting to find isolated, technologically naive communities, only to discover societies already shaped by colonialism, organized labor movements, and hybrid practices blending local knowledge with modern tools.
Yet a powerful narrative persisted in the thinking of the volunteers, as well as other people the world over—one that saw “underdeveloped” people as dirty, superstitious, and resistant to change. I started to think about underdevelopment as a really visual concept—something that could be identified visually by ordinary people around the world, even though the reality was more complicated. This vision is deeply ideological: it implies that poverty comes from not knowing how to do things in the best way, rather than being a condition produced by capitalism.
In researching that book, I found short films, some shown in Peace Corps trainings, that hammered home these messages. While the message of the films was ideological and simplistic, the films are often visually appealing. What I found when I did a little research was that they were made by some of the great documentary and social-realist artists of the 20th century. John Steinbeck and Gordon Parks are the household names, but other very well-known artists were also involved. I started to think that maybe there was a book to be written about the films and how they were made.
What archival find gave you the biggest “aha” moment?
One thing I found early on was at an archive in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, at a UNESCO site where educators from all over Latin America came to learn filmmaking in the 1950s. Along with many films made at the site, I found this film, The Forgotten Village, which the archivists said was their film—so they classified it as made at Pátzcuaro in the 50s. Then I watched the film and I realized that this was not true; it was a U.S.-produced film from 1941. But at the same time, it made sense for them to classify it this way, since it visually resembled the UNESCO films to a remarkable degree. Like the UNESCO films, Forgotten Village closely follows a few characters in a small isolated village, depicting some clinging to indigenous practices while others embrace new technologies. The film got a lot of critical attention when it came out because it was the first thing Steinbeck did after publishing Grapes of Wrath, but it has since mostly been lost to history. But the aesthetics and the message and purpose of the film were new at the time, and then they helped to create a kind of template for other filmmakers to follow.
So I think that moment of seeing these films made by totally different people in different parts of Mexico across the 1940s and 1950s that looked so similar made me realize both that the development film is a genre, but also that it’s a genre that doesn’t announce itself, that instead aspires to fade into the background and become just neutral information about how people live. I think this aspiration of development films, that they try to be information as well as propaganda, means that they had an accretive effect where they blended together and it was hard for audiences who had seen them to remember a specific film, but together they created a credible perception of reality.
Development films blend striking, realist aesthetics with an omniscient voiceover. How did that visual style make the genre so persuasive?
Development filmmakers created really beautiful depictions of impoverished and working people, in part because most of them got their start in leftist milieus in the 1930s—the New Deal in the U.S., or the Mexican Revolution, or various other left and anti-fascist scenes. So in development films, the visuals often express an intimacy with the “underdeveloped” subjects of the films, and a real curiosity about them. This is in part because the filmmakers had practice in the 1930s representing workers and the dispossessed poor in this intimate way that often actually confers dignity on them rather than focusing on their abjection.
But over the course of the editing and production of development films, a formulaic narrative is imposed on these scenes: they are cut together into a “before” and “after” story that is generally fictional. And most importantly, an authoritative deep voiceover tells us that these people were abject and superstitious before, and that now they have transformed into capitalist strivers who embrace modern technology. The voiceover has the effect of standardizing the films, but also of silencing the characters. In most of the development films I found, the characters do not actually speak intelligibly. Instead they are shown speaking but their experience is translated or more often summarized by the voiceover into a generic narrative of progress.
The people who appear on screen are often called “non-actors.” What did you learn about their lives after filming, and what ethical dilemmas did you encounter while telling their stories?
These stories were maybe the most interesting thing I found. Development films are mainly scripted narrative films that are called documentaries because they are filmed on site in the global South. But the films are highly staged and often tell a story that is completely made up by the screenwriter and director, with local people hired to act out their scenarios.
Development film audiences—often in educational settings—were encouraged to believe that the films were not scripted at all, that the filmmakers were just shooting everyday life. This created dilemmas for the local “non-actors.” First, their work was devalued, and they were not paid much if anything. Second, the better their performances, the more these “non-actors” embodied untrue stereotypes about their own communities for urban and global audiences.
Ten-year-old Sebastiana Kespi’s story illustrates this tragedy. She starred in the 1953 Bolivian film Vuelve Sebastiana, gave a brilliant performance, and wanted to act again. But she never got another part because filmmakers considered her to be an ethnographic subject rather than an actor–she was completely conflated with her character.
What lessons do you think these Cold War development films hold for contemporary development narratives? How does this research shape your teaching at Dartmouth?
People idealize the development era that is now definitively over with Trump and Musk’s decimation of USAID. It’s easy to be nostalgic for a time when powerful people in the global North seemed to care about poverty and actually put resources into fighting it. However, this whole project was contradictory: the main reason the United States pushed development and modernization was to consolidate the global capitalist order, which needs poverty to function. So they were never going to give these countries what they promised them, and in making these promises they also attempted to head off self-determination and socialism in the Global South. Rather than being nostalgic for the development era, which is not coming back, it’s worth envisioning and fighting for a new order that might actually be fairer and better for life on this planet.
The other lesson is to be wary of narratives of inevitability. We see this now with AI. People defend AI not by saying it’s great but by saying “it’s not going away”—claiming without evidence that it’s inevitable. There certainly are tremendous forces attempting to impose it on us, as there were tremendous forces attempting to impose a particular vision of mechanized capitalist development on these societies no matter what they wanted. But that doesn’t mean these things are inevitable.
The failures of development show that people in power keep changing their vision of what’s inevitable—next year it’ll be something else. I generally encourage my students, as I would encourage people everywhere, to take back the power they have, rather than resigning themselves to the inevitability of a bad future.