UC Press Blog

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.

What motivated you to write Antifascism and the Avant-Garde?

About fifteen years ago, I saw films that changed the entire trajectory of my life: Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), Terayama Shuji’s Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets! (1971), Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1959) and Le Joli Mai (1963). I had already been an enormous fan of Agnès Varda, and an ardent fan-turned-critic of Jean-Luc Godard. I became fascinated with how these films made me feel—an extreme discomfort coupled with tremendous pleasure. 

These are all documentary or quasi-documentary films, and communist films. There was something that brought them together, and I spent the next fifteen years thinking through the how, and the why. Then I had a sudden ‘Eureka!’ moment: these were filmmakers that were attempting antifascism in both content and form. They are meant to stir up complicated feelings, sometimes joy, sometimes rage, sometimes an ambiguity and a sense of complicity. Yet these radical, militant, revolutionary films were never considered a part of the same political, ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical trajectory of antifascism. Thus the book was born.

What messages does your book carry for our current political moment?

On one level, the book is about political avant-garde documentary films in the 1960s, especially in France and Japan. On a deeper level, the book uses films, and the writings of filmmakers and their intellectual communities, as a lens to think through fascism and antifascism. If fascism is aligned with death, rigidity of thought, conformity, ethnonationalism, the police state, and global imperialism, how can art be used to counter these narratives? 

The works I describe in my book attempt to inculcate what I term a “radical media literacy”: they inculcate doubt rather than certainty. Importantly, they also guide the viewer to reckon with their own complicity in the horrors unfolding around them. In an era where American tax dollars are directly funding a fascist and ethnonationalist genocide, this question of complicity is paramount. It is not new, and it is deeply uncomfortable to consider, but that makes it ever more important, and ever more timely. When so many people are tempted to look away, how can the movie theater make us feel again, in the words of Walter Benjamin? To paraphrase Victor Shklovsky, how can we keep the fear of war alive, but also make life lively, and worth living? This is where the radical, revolutionary potential of aesthetic form comes in.

If fascism is aligned with death, rigidity of thought, conformity, ethnonationalism, the police state, and global imperialism, how can art be used to counter these narratives? 

What was something that surprised you as you were researching or writing this book?

I was very pleasantly surprised to learn about Agnès Varda’s strong connection to communist intellectuals! I had no idea Varda was so close with Georges Sadoul, the film editor of Les Lettres françaises, a cultural weekly for the Communist Party of France (PCF). Varda is so beloved these days, sadly much more so than when she was alive. She is often seen as a whimsical humanitarian sweetheart. But her fervent communist beliefs, and the fact that her filmmaking was really born in the milieu of communist intellectuals like Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, is so rarely discussed—probably because it was not politically expedient to do so, given Cold War politics. 

And, the more I delved into Matsumoto Toshio’s writings, the more I was surprised he used the language of “sado-masochism” to talk about aesthetic form. There’s so much about affect in his work, and I also see a lot of crossover with other people writing at the time in France—even if there was no possible way for him to have read their work. In fact, Matsumoto’s work predates a lot of French theory that grapples with some of the same themes, like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work. Some ideas were definitely circulating, but some ideas were really “in the air,” it seems. 

Why did you choose to focus on France and Japan?

Economically and aesthetically, there was a lot of overlap between Japan and France in the 1960s. For one, both countries were decimated in World War II. Both were either explicit imperial/fascist aggressors (Imperial Japan) or collaborated with the Nazis and similarly sent many Jews to death camps (Vichy France). Both then saw “swift and headlong” (Kristin Ross) economic growth in the 1950s which made the two countries some of the richest in the world. However, this was in large part due to their collaboration with imperial conquest (Japan’s connection to American imperialist warmongering through the US-Japan Security Treaty), or their own imperialist war crimes (Algeria). For both countries, economic growth was tied to oppression, empire, and militarism.

This is true for many countries, but what made France and Japan uniquely interesting from a documentary studies perspective was their long and rich history of documentary filmmaking which allowed for a thoughtful investigation of this complicated history. These countries had an enormous, and much-lauded, wealth of film production, and also—importantly!—a lively intellectual community that was constantly watching and making films. More films were made in Japan in 1960 than any other country. France and Japan are the countries for art film, and they retain that sensibility to this day, no matter the number of films or quality of films produced. They both also had very active leftist movements, which, while controversial, were not as suppressed as they would be in, say, Czechoslovakia post-1968, or Brazil, or Argentina. So, filmmakers in France and Japan had (relative) freedom and substantive resources compared with other countries.

What is one lesson you hope readers take away from your book?

This is perhaps a crude re-articulation of “the personal is political,” but: there is no revolution in the external world without a revolution in the internal world. Antifascism is not just an action or an ideology but a perpetual self-revolution. It isn’t ever comfortable and it is never meant to be.

Write a book for yourself—not for tenure, or prestige, or the thought that you “should.” Write to the you from the future: even if everything goes wrong, even if there are no guarantees, what book would you have been proud to write?

Do you have any advice for other first-gen authors who are hoping to publish a book? 

Write a book for yourself—not for tenure, or prestige, or the thought that you “should.” Write to the you from the future: even if everything goes wrong, even if there are no guarantees, what book would you have been proud to write? When you close your eyes, what kind of book do you see? Go towards that, regardless of consequences. I think first-gen authors often feel a lot more pressure from external circumstances because they (slash, I) don’t have the luxury of an economic backup plan or generational wealth. It is a luxury to write without fear, and yet fearless writing is the most beautiful and evocative, and courageous.