Abstract
Documentary film is a favourite tool of agencies that strive to take forward the development project to far-reaching corners of what is known to be the third world. Documentary filmmakers present issues ranging from population, poverty, health, gender to social movements in the form of moving and provocative stories that work not only to incite concern but also channelise more funds towards these topics. Accordingly, we find ourselves in the realm of Foucauldian regularities, where we are no longer dealing with what documentaries have said about the developing nations, but rather what they can say. Given this background, the present essay situates itself within the making of such documentary films in India, showing the consistency one finds in descriptions about the film location and those who will be filmed. These descriptions allow us to address the making of development documentaries that thrive on rampant discursive constructions about the field.
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Ghosh, N. (2019). Documentaries and the Development Project: Filmmaking as a Discursive Practice. In: Pathak, D., Das, A. (eds) Investigating Developmentalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17443-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17443-9_6
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