Leftist filmmakers of the 1960s revolutionized the art of documentary. Often inspired by the radical art of the Soviet 1920s, filmmakers in countries like France and Japan dared to make film form a powerful weapon in the fight against fascism, weaving fiction into nonfiction and surrealism with neorealism to rupture everyday ways of being, seeing, and thinking. Through careful readings of Matsumoto Toshio, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Hani Susumu, and others, Julia Alekseyeva shows that avant-garde documentary films of the 1960s did not strive to inoculate the viewer with the ideology of Truth but instead aimed to unveil and estrange, so that viewers might approach capitalist, imperialist, and fascist media with critical awareness. Antifascism and the Avant-Garde thus provides a transnational ecology of antifascist art that resonates profoundly with our current age.
Julia Alekseyeva is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author-illustrator of the award-winning graphic memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.
"Sweeping in scope, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde is a major contribution to both film studies and fascism studies. Julia Alekseyeva is singularly positioned to undertake a comparative study that moves with ease between decolonizing France, postimperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. Her insightful analysis reveals how filmmakers of the antifascist avant-garde undertook formal experiments and created affective atmospheres that subverted the positivism and rationality of traditional documentary, grounding their work in an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, between perception and antifascist consciousness."—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
"As the clouds of right-wing populism gather on the horizon of late capitalism, Alekseyeva's brilliant and accessible study of experimental documentary filmmaking deftly argues for the value of art that celebrates ambiguity and uncertainty while simultaneously nurturing the militant optimism necessary to carry on the fight for justice."—Kristen R. Ghodsee, author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us about the Good Life
"Antifascism and the Avant-Garde explores the important and timely question of antifascist aesthetics—how antifascism can look and how it can operate. From a deep grounding in French and Japanese documentary film of the 1960s, Alekseyeva weaves a fascinating picture of echoes, resonances, and conflicts among filmmakers concerned with the use of cinema to counter fascism."—Jennifer Coates, author of Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945–1968: An Ethnographic Study
"A tour de force of genuinely global film studies. Alekseyeva maps out a fascinating net of site-specific but deeply interconnected cinematic quests for radical media literacy that spans the Soviet Union, Japan, and France—quests that only gain more burning significance in our current media situation. Astonishing in its breadth, and essential reading for anyone truly invested in global film dynamics."—Alexander Zahlten, author of The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies
"With an extraordinary depth of expertise in French, Japanese, and Russian film, theory, and history, a political commitment to an internationalist approach and revolutionary phenomenology, and the curious eye and heart of a close reader of Marxist culture and avant-garde documentary, Alekseyeva introduces us to the critical tradition of antifascist documentary. Here we learn of a range of films and theories, all aligning the political and the psychological, pain and liveliness, pleasure and discomfort, subjectivity and objectivity. Alekseyeva compellingly argues that their shared antifascist aesthetic forefronts epistemological inquiry. While rooted in films from the 1960s, she demonstrates how this approach is and must be part of an ongoing and responsive project against power, one that teaches us how to see—a radical media literacy for radicals! In this critical contribution to documentary studies most broadly, Alekseyeva establishes how this tradition of engaged documentary contributes to a daily and human antifascist project, abetted by cinema: one of passion, critique, ambiguity, complicity, and disruption."—Alexandra Juhasz, producer of The Watermelon Woman and coauthor of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production
264 pp.6 x 9Illus: 30 b/w figures
9780520415669$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Feb 2025