In February of last year, Elon Musk the then unofficial head of Donald Trump’s inanely named, AI-guided DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), boasted that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”
The United States Agency for International Development’s vaccination programs, experimental medical trials, “job and democracy training programs,” and food aid distribution programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (otherwise known as the Global South) soon ground to a halt. Commentators warned that the withdrawal of these programs would cause many thousands of deaths globally while reducing U.S. influence and power. They saw USAID’s dismantling as a catastrophe.
The truth is more complicated.
USAID’s decimation symbolically ended the development era, a period roughly dating from the 1940s, in which the United States dominated the world by convincingly positioning itself as the pinnacle of modernity. The core idea of development pushed by the United States in those years was that increased capitalist activity would make life better for everyone. This logic ignores how rich countries got rich (slavery, empire), the negative consequences of extending capitalism everywhere (dispossession, environmental devastation, repetitive and dangerous work, the uprooting of indigenous communities), and any possibility for demanding the fairer distribution of resources. The Global North acquired a benevolent veneer while actually draining resources from the Global South that amounted to trillions of dollars.
A key means by which development became the new universal common sense was a genre of documentary film I call the “development film.”
Development films created iconic images and narratives of disorganized, superstitious people in the Global South being transformed into modern capitalist workers and citizens. Filmmakers, working in collaboration with one another, and generally at the behest of state agencies, media outlets, foundations, oil companies, and global organizations like UNESCO and the World Bank, made hundreds of these documentary-style films from the 1940s through the 1970s. These films, and the stories behind their production, demonstrate how the logic of humanitarian development was constructed to cover up exploitation and rationalize the United States’ constant, deadly military incursions into the “developing” world.
Development films often begin with badly lit scenes of hostile, sleepy “villagers” who don’t know how to feed, cure, or educate themselves. These villagers stubbornly persist in folk medicine and laziness until the arrival of a white, Western outsider, who persuades them to embark on self-help projects such as building pipelines and spraying pesticides. As they chronicle these narratives of transformation, development films do not usually let their villagers speak, but instead tell viewers in voiceover that said villagers are finally thinking for themselves after centuries of silent stagnation.
Screened throughout the mid-to-late 20th century across the globe, in cinemas, in schools, in university classrooms, on television, and in mobile film units that toured rural Latin America, these films convinced scholars and ordinary viewers alike that this was the truth: “traditional” folk practices and a lack of ingenuity and initiative were all that stood in the way of a prosperous life for impoverished people.
However, while development films purported to offer an unmediated glimpse into the lives of underdeveloped communities, the reality development films presented was actually meticulously crafted. Development filmmakers, often trained in the burgeoning documentary and social realist scenes of the 1930s and 1940s, collaborated with unpaid or underpaid “non-actor” villagers, primarily in various locales in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Filmmakers scripted dialogue and coached these “non-actors” to embody ignorance and hostility in a way that convinced audiences that their performances were not performances at all.
If the United States characterized itself as the epitome of modernity during and after the Cold War, this illusion has now been shattered.
Take, for example, the early 1941 development film The Forgotten Village, scripted by novelist John Steinbeck and directed by Herbert Kline, who had made a name for himself shooting anti-fascist films in Europe. The film’s villain is a malevolent medicine woman named Trini who persuades her fellow villagers to reject the modern medicine that would save their children; a montage shows Trini guiding the women to slam door after door on the doctor, plunging the villagers into darkness. Trini is triumphant in this early development film, and enterprising young protagonist Juan Diego must leave with the doctor to find modernity in the city.
Despite being marketed as a documentary, like many development films, The Forgotten Village is a scripted work of fiction, as is clear from Steinbeck’s script and Kline’s writings. Kline wrote in his shooting diary that he drove “10,000 miles” around Mexico in a failed attempt to find an untouched village, settling finally on a composite of villages in central Mexico. In one of these villages, Kline wrote in another entry, medicine woman Trini welcomed the film crew to town and “broke the ice” between them and the villagers, who then agreed to act in the film. While shooting the film, Kline coached Trini to re-enact folk-medical practices which had long since fallen out of favor in rural Mexico.
However, when film critics and social scientists watched The Forgotten Village, they understood it to be a true-to-life account of life in a Mexican village. Influential University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote that the film was “faithful to ethnological fact.” Ironically, then, Trini’s generous decision to welcome the film crew resulted in a document that proved to the social scientists, students, and government officials who watched the film that she and people like her were hostile and superstitious—that their poverty and health problems stemmed from their habits and outlook rather than from systemic factors.
In the 1960s, termed the “development decade” by the Kennedy administration, development filmmakers perfected their form. Renowned American artist Willard Van Dyke teamed up with Bolivian virtuoso filmmaker Jorge Ruiz to make So That Men Are Free for CBS, in which trusted newsmen Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt assured viewers that the Peruvian village they depicted was “just 10 years out of the 16th century”; it had been yanked forward in time, the voiceover explained, by a Cornell University-led development project.
When he arrived in Peru to shoot the film, Kuralt worried that he could not see any difference between the villagers who had been subject to the development scheme and those in the surrounding areas who had not. However, the magic of Ruiz’s camerawork and Van Dyke’s direction depicted the villagers’ total transformation. The film moves from shadowy scenes of ragged women and children cowering in doorways to well-lit shots of men lined up to receive diplomas, cooperating to build a school, speaking with self-assurance, and spraying pesticides on neat potato rows.
Lately, the common sense of development these films instilled has come under pressure, and not only by the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. If the United States characterized itself as the epitome of modernity during and after the Cold War, this illusion has now been shattered. Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide has for many commentators obliterated what was left of the rules-based international order led by the United States, while the U.S.’s brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, for which it did not even try to seek international or domestic consent, constituted the nail in the coffin for others. Meanwhile most people do not perceive technological “progress” in the West to be improving their lives anymore, as they suffer from a general sense of “enshittification,” intensified by the AI boom. This situation has contributed to the growing sense on both the left and the right that progress is not real, that it is not synonymous with economic growth, and the United States may not be the pinnacle of human achievement.
It is understandable to be nostalgic for an era when the center seemed to hold, a time when the United States made sophisticated propaganda to convince the world of its benevolence. But calling for the restoration of USAID’s paltry, patronizing, and propagandistic humanitarian and development assistance, as some have done, seems both naïve and inadequate, knowing as we do now the world U.S. hegemony made. Dispensing with the illusions of development is a necessary step in the battle for a more humane world.
Molly Geidel teaches at Dartmouth College. Her new book is The Development Film in the Americas.
Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard
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