In the 1960s, leftist filmmakers from France to Japan revolutionized the documentary. Anti-fascism was not just the heritage of past generations but a message carried forward by the avant-garde on-screen.

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 into 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.

Alekseyeva’s new book Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s thus provides a transnational ecology of anti-fascist art. Kristen Ghodsee interviewed her for Jacobin about her study and how this filmmaking profoundly resonates with our current age.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Although your book focuses on the 1960s, where a postwar generation of artists grappled with the mental legacies of World War II and the everyday manifestations of the conformity, rigidity, and civil hyperobedience that made Nazism possible, I couldn’t help but think about how relevant it is to our present-day politics, despite the historical differences.

Terminology is often of great interest to Jacobin readers, and you’ve chosen to use the word “anti-fascism” in your title. To some extent you are literally talking about mid-twentieth century fascism. But there are other terms that also might have worked: “anti-imperialism,” “decolonialism,” “anti-capitalism,” “socialism,” “communism,” etc. Why did you prefer the term “anti-fascism?”

Julia Alekseyeva

The very first few iterations of this project just described the documentaries I talk about as being “political.” It was a more amorphous label. But the more I started digging in the archives, the more I realized that all the people I was most interested in — Marker, Matsumoto, Hani, Varda, etc. — also considered themselves socialists or “unorthodox” communists, since most of them broke with traditional communist parties by the early to mid-1960s.

But this wasn’t the end of the story. I kept digging and discovered that all of the figures that created really radical (radical in the formal/aesthetic and political sense, as an uprooting) documentaries during the 1960s were grappling with a sense of complicity in the horrors of World War II. This was especially prevalent in Japan, where it was obvious that the Japanese were extreme aggressors on the geopolitical stage.

However, in Japan as in West Germany, there was a tendency to sweep any memory of World War II under the rug, as if everyday citizens wanted nothing to do with the shattered memories of their traumatized pasts. Leftists hated this. I can imagine it being extraordinarily disorienting, to have all of these complicated feelings and an inability to reckon with the things your parents’ generation did during the war.

This was also true in France, where the Vichy government sent over 75,000 Jews to death camps. General Charles de Gaulle was perceived as the liberator of France during this era and was always associated with resistance against the Nazis. Imagine, then, that you’re in the 1960s, it’s fifteen years after the war, and France is perpetrating horrible human rights abuses in Algeria. Imagine you’re in Japan, and fifteen years after Article IX of the new “democratic” constitution declares that Japan will always be a “peaceful nation,” and that outlaws war as a means of settling disputes, that this same government then signs a renewable treaty with the United States that ties Japanese military defense and economic success with the warmongering Americans, and forces the Japanese to accept American bases on Japanese soil. You can imagine that it would feel enraging, and disorienting, and horrifying for these filmmakers who were often young children during the war, and still remembered the effects of fascism on their everyday lives.

So, although all of them were profoundly socialist or communist in some way — they published in communist newspapers or journals, were part of political parties, and were very fluent in the language of Marxism — the root and impetus of their filmmaking practice was anti-fascist in nature. This is why I chose anti-fascism as an organizing theoretical principle for the book.

You can also imagine that this feeling of horror and complicity is very relevant to our own political situation — in the United States especially, but not only. And not just politics, but our own sense of ethics, and our psychologies. How does it feel to be complicit and even in some small way responsible for the death of others we will never meet? How does it feel for our own material comforts —our iPhones, our Teslas, our Amazon Prime accounts — to be inherently tied to the suffering of untold others? This was very much on the minds of artists and intellectuals in the 1960s, an era of sudden and swift economic prosperity for formerly war-torn nations like France and Japan.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Can you talk a little bit about what it means to have “a cop in your head?”

Julia Alekseyeva

This idea is so central for the psychological aspect of the book. This phrase, usually used as “kill the cop in your head,” became paradigmatic for the ethos of May 1968 in France, a true revolutionary moment although it is often considered a failure. In French the phrase was usually chassez le flic de votre tête! (literally: “get the cop out of your head”) and appeared on the cover of the January 1969 issue of the journal Action, drawn by Michel Quarez and Georges Wolinski.

For me, the phrase aligns with abolitionist practices: How can you work for the liberation of others if you do not liberate your own mind, your own individual psychology? It is a dialectical process in which the internal is constantly informing the external, and vice versa. I just love this image — the tiny French cops, so ’60s! — and am very grateful to the granddaughter of Wolinski for allowing the use of this image in the book.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

I was deeply moved by your discussions of those avant-garde filmmakers who celebrated both ambiguity and uncertainty while simultaneously nurturing the militant optimism necessary to carry on the fight for social justice. Why did you focus on 1960s Japan and France as case studies? What can your case studies tell us about the global reverberations of these national bodies of work?

The Soviet Union feels like an important undercurrent in the book, even if most of the case studies are from France and Japan. What is the importance of the USSR here? What about the wider context of the Cold War and East-West competition in the cultural sphere?

Julia Alekseyeva

A much longer — unfortunately too unwieldy — version of this project looked specifically at the influence of the early Soviet period on all these figures from the 1960s. It is obvious when looking at Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, both of whom constantly discussed their indebtedness to the Soviet avant-garde, and to filmmaker Dziga Vertov in particular. For filmmakers of the 1960s, the early artworks of the Soviet Union — generally up until [Joseph] Stalin took power, and especially until the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers, where socialist realism became the only method and form for revolutionary art — were enormous reservoirs of inspiration. The Soviet avant-garde was a failed moment of possibility in which intellectuals and artists were seen as engineers of the mind, integral in the creation of the new, liberated Soviet person.

Looking at the 1920s, the Soviet Union had tremendous accomplishments in art, literature, literary criticism, and of course film. One can argue that modern cinema is fundamentally indebted to Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov’s experiments with montage. These artists tried to liberate aesthetic and humanistic activity from stupefying bourgeois forces. They wanted their films to be as exciting and effective (and affective) for the Soviet mind as Hollywood films (D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was famously popular in the Soviet Union, and especially for Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein), but they also wanted to transform these powerful emotional effects into a socialist direction that was anti-capitalist, free-thinking, and empowered.

So, you can see how the 1960s anti-fascist filmmakers saw this potential of early Soviet film to use form to help liberate the mind — but in a way that was, dare I say it, exciting and disorienting and engaging. This was true in France and Japan, but it was also true in other parts of the world: for instance, Santiago Álvarez, Cuba’s “news-pamphleteer” whose work resonates strongly with Dziga Vertov, or Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and their Third Cinema manifesto.

However, I focus on France and Japan because I am very interested in this notion of complicity in particular, and how their geopolitical frameworks are especially conducive to thinking about the legacy of (anti-)fascism. What interests me about the leftist documentaries both countries produced in the 1960s was their emphasis on using the medium to critique truth-telling devices. They used documentary in a subjective mode and even used it to elicit a self-conscious, self-aware doubt in the medium itself — a radical project, especially in an era barraged by images, not too dissimilar from our own hypermediated lives. You see this all over the world during this period, but there are so many rich examples in France and Japan.

Perhaps most importantly, though, France and Japan are the countries of art cinema par excellence, arguably to this day. Japan held a very privileged position in the international art world from the mid-1950s on, especially compared to other non-European countries. France, of course, is central to film, art, philosophy, and cultural production writ large in the twentieth century (Fredric Jameson wrote about this in his The Years of Theory and I find it quite convincing). France and Japan are constantly interacting with one another on the cinematic stage, even to this day. And, because their economies were booming in the 1960s, they have a tremendous wealth of nonfiction filmmaking practice, a heavily engaged and political audience, and a prolific film journalistic output. These are people who have the luxury of talking about film all day every day, which is not something that many people have in the 1960s all around the world.

Also, I speak and read Japanese, French, and Russian. So there is also a pragmatic element to the comparison that allowed me to delve into largely unseen and undiscovered archives in their original languages.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

The avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s sought to create uncomfortable works that forced viewers to confront their own complicity in systems of hierarchy and oppression. Why did you choose the films you chose to discuss when many of them might be too complex or unpalatable to viewers today?

Julia Alekseyeva

I’m not sure if I agree that the films might be too complex or unpalatable to viewers. I think that was definitely the socialist-realist party line, so to speak — that films needed to be simple and easy in order to appeal to the masses. But if the recent deluge of heartwarming elegies on social media for David Lynch has anything to teach us, it’s that film doesn’t have to be simple or easy to be beloved. Heck, it doesn’t even have to make sense.

I think all the films in this book (with the possible exception of the films by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, which I consider fascinating avant-garde failures) are enjoyable to watch, even if they’re not easy; they’re weird and enchanting and scratch a very particular itch. Many of the films from the book changed my life completely, and I don’t say that lightly!

I believe, and many of the filmmakers I discuss believed, that the spectator is much smarter and more open-minded than we may assume. And they believed in the power of film — even film the spectator might not immediately understand — to cause profound changes in consciousness. All this is to say, they may be complex, but they’re not unpalatable. I think most of the films discussed are quite fun and mysteriously captivating, even for a non-cinephile!

As an example: Terayama Shūji’s 1971 Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets features (and this is not an exhaustive list): a musical number where high school girls suddenly take off their clothes, Japanese hippies (fūten) huffing paint thinner, an interview with a nonplussed sex worker who has never heard of Marx’s Capital, and footage of a woman using an enormous rubber penis as a punching bag. They’re a kind of serious play.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Your book is broken up into five main chapters, centering around the years 1960, 1962, 1964, and with two chapters on the year 1969. Why are these specific years so important?

Julia Alekseyeva

These years are like fulcra around which a certain mode of experimental documentary revolves. They are based on cataclysmic and era-defining events that transformed society in France and/or Japan, and therefore transformed the way film looked and what it said. The year 1960 in Japan is known for the ANPO (anti-US Japan Security Treaty) protests, in which thirty million people, almost a third of the population, was protesting, on strike, or otherwise supporting the protests in some way. That’s a huge number; it’s more than May 1968 in Paris. It was Japan’s most political year in modern history.

In Paris in 1962, you have the end of the Algerian War. It was the first time in a long time that France wasn’t involved in a war, and yet there is a certain anxiety around Algeria and decolonization that creeps in. But there’s also a lifting of censorship around Algeria, at least to an extent. A few years later, in 1964, you have the Tokyo Olympics, in which Japan was gripped by a kind of neo-nationalist fervor. The city-space of Tokyo was completely transformed, and it was a period of swift and often violent modernization.

And then, the last two chapters look at responses to 1968 in both France and Japan. It does not necessarily look at films made during the heat of the protests, but films that reflected a new, post-1968 outlook that was still developing. In France, there is a sense of despondency and of course militancy in the Dziga Vertov Group films. In Japan, there is something quite different: a rebellious, anarchic, and exuberantly queer (!) cinema of youthful abandon. It doesn’t last very long, just about four years until it ends around 1973, but it is a very exciting period.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

I have only yet to see a few of the films you discuss, but you pay close attention to both visual style and cinematographic technique in the book. Why is the specific aesthetic form of these films important?

Julia Alekseyeva

For the filmmakers I discuss, the form and content were not just interwoven or supportive of one another. The films are usually about leftist political issues, yes, but their style is their politics. Like the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, Japanese and French filmmakers of the 1960s saw cinema as uniquely capable of transforming the way people feel, think, and act. For many of these artists, especially Matsumoto Toshio (but all of them to an extent), the language of film can produce a rupture of consciousness that would lead to increased political awareness.

Many of these filmmakers were inspired by surrealism or were surrealists themselves. Surrealists saw their art as leading the viewer or reader from the familiar to the unfamiliar through unforeseen pathways — from the status quo, from things-as-they-seem, to an unveiling of mysterious truths, to things-as-they-are, or things-as-they-could-be. This is the true goal of politics.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Anti-fascist movements have historically been Popular Front–type movements that allow for activists with many different agendas to work together. Where do the women’s rights activists fit in your story? Can you speak a little bit about the sex and gender aspects of your larger argument?

Julia Alekseyeva

This is such an important and complicated issue. Neither France nor Japan was particularly great at the gender question in the 1960s. Very few countries were. There were many women that were indispensable for revolutionary movements in both countries, although women’s lib movements were more popular at the tail end of the ’60s. That said, in terms of women filmmakers: Agnès Varda is an extremely important figure in the book. I chose to analyze a wonderful short film of hers called Salut les Cubains, which also features the black Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez as a young film student.

Varda’s writing and art are foundational for my book. In my research, I’ve discovered that she was much more respected in journals affiliated with the Communist Party than those of the cinephilic, much more politically conservative Cahiers du cinéma. There’s a lot more that one can say about her work in terms of politics that I had to cut largely for length. Yet Varda consistently pushed against the idea of herself as a “woman filmmaker,” even as her films, such as L’opéra-mouffe, a playful and tender documentary short that features her naked pregnant body, are often explicitly about women and her own experiences as a woman. But in interviews she is so feisty and dynamic, and it is clear that she is really tremendously respected and appreciated in the communist press.

Japan, however, certainly has a dearth of women filmmakers compared to Europe, although there were many well-known women who were editors and producers. But the Japanese cinema of the 1960s that I describe is very masculinist, sometimes even misogynist, and I discuss this difficult history in my third chapter, on 1964 in Tokyo. Even as directors like Imamura Shōhei feature strong and powerful women protagonists, these directors also tended to allegorize Japanese history through the body of a woman.

This is a problematic tendency. Jean-Luc Godard, likewise, has been rightfully criticized for his misogyny, most famously by Laura Mulvey. My fourth chapter takes him to task for what I consider an ascetic and punishing approach to women’s sexuality. But these chapters don’t aim to cancel these filmmakers or to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Their films are tremendously powerful texts. But nor should we ignore their problematic discourse of sex and gender.

The last chapter on queer Japanese cinema opens another pathway for this question of sex and gender. These films are light-years ahead of their time, and they seem fresh and exciting even today. So, even if the book isn’t explicitly about sex and gender, these elements are integral to the argument.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Matsumoto Toshio is a name that comes up again and again in your book. Dziga Vertov does, too. Can you tell us more about these radical filmmakers?

Julia Alekseyeva

Vertov and Matsumoto are foundational pillars for the ethos of the book and the argument as a whole. I believe many Jacobin readers might be more familiar with Vertov, who, along with Eisenstein, was one of the most important filmmakers in the history of Soviet cinema, and the history of film more broadly. Vertov is probably best known for the 1929 experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera; it is often described as one of the best films ever made. Its fast-paced, virtuosic, and astonishing editing and cinematography consistently makes it a favorite of any student I have ever taught.

Matsumoto is less well-known, which is truly unfortunate, and something I am attempting to rectify with my own translations of his work. Both Vertov and Matsumoto published widely and were immensely prolific. Matsumoto, being of a younger generation, developed his film-philosophy in the context of de-Stalinization. Vertov died a year before Stalin, and before he was able to see his films receive any lasting fame. So there is a certain theoretical sophistication to Matsumoto’s texts that one doesn’t really see in Vertov.

But I think there is something profound that links the two figures, especially in the way they both theorized film as uniquely capable of transforming the sensorium. They were extremely interested in the way film can (re)animate, in Vertov’s words — to bring the viewer “back to life” through “cinematic sensation” (kinooshchushchenie, an extremely important word for the Soviet 1920s). Matsumoto, similarly, is interested in the mienai mono, those “unseeable things” that film can uniquely unveil. Both Matsumoto and Vertov are writing theories that are explicitly about the psychologically transformative power of film form. And they’re making some of the most interesting and powerful films I’ve ever seen.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

If there were three 1960s antifascist films you wanted every Jacobin reader to watch, what would they be and why?

Julia Alekseyeva

Oh gosh. So many! If I absolutely had to choose: Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1962), which had a lovely restoration about a decade ago; Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) (well, his whole documentary oeuvre, but this one has English subtitles); and probably The Hour of the Furnaces by Solanas and Getino (1968). Also, every single film by Varda, but it would take too long to list them all. Just throw a dart at a board and go where it lands!

Great Job Julia Alekseyeva & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.