Antifascism and the Avant-Garde

Download or read book Antifascism and the Avant-Garde written by Julia Alekseyeva and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2025 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.