Utopias in Nonfiction Film

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.


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.