Governing Visions of the Real

Governing Visions of the Real traces the development, governmentality and techniques of Griersonian documentary in Aotearoa/New Zealand throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the productions of the National Film Unit in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as ambient discourses and practices of government related to film and state publicity, Lars Weckbecker traces the shifting dispositive of documentary’s "visions of the real" that strategically rendered New Zealand and its population visible for an ensemble of political, pedagogic, and propagandistic purposes.