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Antifascism and the Avant-Garde Radical Documentary in the 1960s (Julia Alekseyeva) Campus Book Release and Reception

  • Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

English Department Faculty Lounge


Campus Book Release & Reception for Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s

By Julia Alekseyeva, English/CIMS

Tues March 18, 5-8 PM

 

With comments from:

Ayako Kano, EALC

Bakirathi Mani, English

Kevin Platt, REES

   

Book copies for sale and snacks provided

5:00: doors

5:30: discussion

6:30: reception

   

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About the Book

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.