The Cultural Vanguard Is Antifascist

Paula Rabinowitz

Antifascism and the Avant-Garde:br>
Radical Documentary in the 1960sbr>
by Julia Alekseyevabr>
University of California Press, 2025. 270 pages. $29.95 paperback.

THIS EXUBERANT BOOK reveals, or in a favorite word of film critic and historian Julia Alekseyeva, “unveils,” the deep connections among three seemingly disparate times and places of radical documentary filmmaking.

The scenes range from the 1920s Soviet Union (primarily the films of Dziga Vertov and the criticism of Viktor Shklovsky); 1960s Japan (the films and writings of Matsumoto Toshio and Hani Susumu, among others); and 1960s France (especially the writings of George Sadoul, and films by Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, and others).

Alekseyeva reads through a comprehensive archive of obscure left-wing journals and film manifestoes produced within the orbits of dissenting communist filmmakers and critics during the turbulent years of the 1960s.

The afterlife of the immediate postwar period in both France and Japan extended into the 1970s as societal resistance to coming to terms with the nations’ fascist pasts, as well as the emerging consumerist economies — made possible in part by continuing collaboration with the neo-imperialism of the United States — contributed to the refusal to admit the end of their respective empires in Algeria and the Pacific.

All this paradoxically fostered a thriving community of antifascist, skeptically communist and decidedly avant-garde and experimental filmmakers and their critics and audiences.
This collective work burst the seams of traditional documentary forms. But more than that, the varied approaches to a new form of filmmaking remade the “media ecology” of both national cultures, extending their influence internationally.

In their focus on exploring how the present state of capitalism infected daily life after America emerged as the global hegemony following World War II, the filmmakers and critics writing in Kiroku eiga and other film periodicals in Japan, and Cinéthique, among others in France — a rich counterculture to even the rebel Cahiers du Cinéma — expanded and interrogated the dominant practices of cinematic reportage.

Both deep links and casual connections between French filmmakers (Alain Resnais was key) and those in Japan, especially Matsumoto Toshio — whose films and writings were guided by his insistence on recognizing the twin origins of film history coming from France: enchantment (Georges Méliès) and actuality (Lumière Brothers) — contributed to developing documentary forms that could challenge the emerging common sense of postwar consumer capitalism and its attendant violence.

These filmmakers explored the full range of cinematic “tricks” as Alekseyeva calls them, translating Vertov.

Future-oriented Antifascist Filmmaking

The apparently elongated triangulation of prewar Soviet Russia and postwar Japan and France was actually in close temporal and spatial proximity. Particularly in the queer films coming out of late 1960s Japan, which culminates the book’s exploration of radical documentaries, Alekseyeva finds a “filmmaking as a future-oriented antifascist revolutionary phenomenology” by mining an archive of “heretofore untranslated writings by these directors [Matsumoto, Terayama and Hani] gleaned from published interviews, articles, and autobiographies.”

Within the films that conclude her study — Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō (Throw away your Books, Rally in the Streets, 1971) and Gozenchū no jikkanwari (Morning Schedule, 1972) — Alekseyeva locates “the antifascist and anti-imperialist aesthetics as defined in this book:” “media literacy via epistemological struggle (the stability of truth is always fervently questioned) and […] an emphasis on affective, sensorial liveliness.” (163)

Interleaving chapters — Japan, France, then Japan, then France and ending in Japan — allow Alekseyeva freedom to demonstrate that even without the easy availability of means of international communication and circulation of media marking our 21 st century, film practices and criticism were marked by closely watched experimentation across cultures.

Beginning with Matsumoto’s ANPO Jōyaku, a “response to the ANPO struggle of 1960” — an enormous Japan-wide protest against the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security — Alekseyeva charts the development of “allegorical documentary” (29, emphasis in original).

Its form and content slide between capturing reality and rupturing it by tracing the truth in fiction, while exposing the fiction in/of documentary. Matsumoto’s film reaches back to Vertov’s experimental Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and to Alain Resnais’s more recent Night and Fog (1956), a film which looks at the past — France’s complicity in the Holocaust, in the midst of its violent response to Algerian anticolonialism in the present.

ANPO Jōyaku condemns the violence of empire: both Japanese in Asia through the 1940s and that of the United States since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This and other films spurred a rich critical response in small leftist film journals.

Through various experimental techniques — animation, jump cuts, superimpositions, reversals, and more — radical documentary destabilizes viewers as cinema is uniquely able to fracture what movies themselves have historically constructed as reality using self-reflexive devices. These short films call into question dominant political narratives by expressing themselves against dominant aesthetics, by insisting that audiences work to comprehend the films’ logic and in so doing, pushing viewers to a “coming to terms with one’s past.” (39)

When most effective, they do so not only didactically but with a certain spontaneous outbreak of joy and excitation along with agitation. Radical, allegorical, neo-, sur- documentaries unravel the viewing self as the films spool through their projectors.

From this excavation of early 1960s Japanese cinematic radicalism (which was unknown to me), the more familiar militancy of Chris Marker’s Le Jolie Mai (1963) and Agnès Varda’s short documentary, made entirely from still photographs, Salut les Cubains (1963) seems less shocking.

These were films circulating internationally. They were touchstones and, along with Resnais’s and Godard’s films from Breathless (1959) on, came to represent what politically aware, avant-garde filmmaking could be.

Again, Aleskeyeva chooses three films, unpacked in close readings of shots and scenes, and contextualizes them through the responses they provoked in Miroir du Cinéma and other small Left Bank periodicals.

Problems of Nationalism and Women

Another leapfrog back and forth to Japan and France looks at the movies made in the context of the rising nationalism during 1964 Tokyo Olympics and a Paris exulting in its postwar cultural scene.

Godard’s and Jean-Pierre Morin’s Dziga Vertov Group (DVG) made controversial documentaries — often funded by national television companies (BBC in the UK, RAI in Italy) and just as often censored and suppressed by them.

Within a “critique of ‘truth’-telling” (133), coupled with a push for audience engagement through affect, these films challenge the emerging consumer culture sweeping the non-Communist globe with America’s neo-imperialist ideology and products.

In all cases, Alekseyeva finds variations on the trope of woman as nation. The “allegorical semi-documentary,” Nippon konchūki (the utterly weird 1963 Insect Woman by Imamura Shōhei) and Godard and Gorin’s British Sounds, for instance, both use the figure of the woman as symbolic of the body politic.

But the DVG films in their “formal asceticism” (138) manage to demean women, equating them as had earlier generations of leftist critics with bourgeois tendencies dampening the masculinist vigor of revolutionary men, while the Japanese versions verge on the fantastic through recourse to bizarre allegory suggesting playfulness.

There is so much to learn from this book. I merely scratch the surface of the engagement with contemporary scholarship on the two, really three, film cultures, as well as the historical writings buried in archives and needing a multilingual critic and theorist like Julia Aleskeyeva to unearth them.

Reality Matters

Antifascism and the Avant-Garde sits alongside earlier books charting the political and aesthetic revolutions documentary filmmaking made possible around the globe.
These include Jonathan Kahane’s Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (2008), Luke Robinson’s Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (2013), Alice Lovejoy’s Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (2014), Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory by Christina Gerhardt (2018), her co-edited collection with Sara Saljouli, 1968 and Global Cinema (2018), Jill Godmillow’s Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars (2022) and Shirly Bahar’s 2023 Documentary Cinema in Israel and Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home, to name a few.

But there are a few caveats to note. In our moment of so-called “truths” posted almost hourly on Donald Trump’s platform Truth Social and the incursion of AI deepfakes into almost every facet of life — just yesterday, for example, I received another email request to “quietly” join, i.e., fund, someone’s book club to promote Writing Red as “urgent […] inconveniently alive” — we need to make sure Kellyanne Conway’s declaration that the Trump administration creates “alternative facts” is not allowed to pass.

We must insist on a reality that can be documented for the future. Yes, there are multiple experiences within any given event which generate a kaleidoscope of memories, but something objective happened on February 28, 2026. A girl’s school was bombed by a U.S. Tomahawk missile in Minab, Iran, on February 28, 2026, killing more than 180 people, most of them young girls. It wasn’t the Iranians and it wasn’t an AI-generated fake.

The United States has not made an “excursion” into Iran; it is making war. Israel is not “mowing the grass” in Gaza; it committed genocide. Russia invaded Ukraine; that’s war, not a “special military operation.” Moreover, it’s an uncomfortable fact that both sites of these radical documentary productions were liberal, capitalist democracies.

In 1973, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il published (and it appeared in English from Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House) On the Art of Cinema with its detailed exposition of “humanics” and “seed theory” to develop cinema as “a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction.” (2)

But these films, Communist, with a capital C, were not those borrowing from dissident leftists: Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (Alienation Effect) or Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie (estrangement) or the Situationists’ détournement (hijacking) aiming to bare the cinematic device and unsettle audience expectations. Kim’s vision of revolutionary filmmaking sought to “model” correct thought and actions within the “worker’s state.”

“Ecstatic Self-Revolution”

At the very end of the final chapter, Alekseyeva describes her experience watching Sho o suteyo at a screening at Harvard where she was a graduate student.

Her visceral response — ecstatic self-revolution (192 in her italicized words) — sent her on a new trajectory that resulted in helping organize a union, moving across country, writing her memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, and, ultimately, this book.

Throughout Antifascism and the Avant-Garde, her method elegantly moves between historical contextualization, close reading of contemporaneous critiques and, most important, looking closely at the films themselves. Thus she allows us to fully appreciate how the circulation of ideas and aesthetics and politics was coextensive with a developing leftist film community. She captures some of the heady experiences of the 1960s as sex and movies and happenings and demonstrations filled our days and nights.

We were all reading some of these journals, watching some of these films and marching in the streets — and then talking, talking, talking about them. It was all of a piece for those of us in the United States, and elsewhere too.

Revolution was in the air. In his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Rainer Maria Rilke concludes: “for here there is no place /that does not see you. You must change your life.” The films discussed in this book give a glimpse at how this might be accomplished.

July-August 2026, ATC 243