Antifascism and the Avant-Garde

Radical Documentary in the 1960s

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by Julia Alekseyeva

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Documentary

Keywords

documentary, politics, 1960s

Publishing date

2025 (February 01, 2025)

Publisher

University of California Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-520-41567-6

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
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.

See the publisher website: University of California Press