Uma entrevista com
Julia Alekseyeva
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| A diretora francesa Agnès Varda. (Jacques Prayer / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) |
Entrevista por
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Os cineastas de esquerda da década de 1960 revolucionaram a arte do documentário. Muitas vezes inspirados pela arte radical da década de 1920 soviética, cineastas em países como França e Japão ousaram fazer do filme uma arma poderosa na luta contra o fascismo, entrelaçando ficção com não ficção e surrealismo com neorrealismo para romper com as formas cotidianas de ser, ver e pensar.
Por meio de leituras cuidadosas de Matsumoto Toshio, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Hani Susumu e outros, Julia Alekseyeva mostra que os documentários de vanguarda dos anos 1960 não se esforçavam para inocular o espectador com a ideologia da Verdade, mas, em vez disso, visavam revelar e alienar, para que os espectadores pudessem abordar a mídia capitalista, imperialista e fascista com consciência crítica.
O novo livro de Alekseyeva, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, fornece uma ecologia transnacional da arte antifascista. Kristen Ghodsee a entrevistou para a Jacobin sobre seu estudo e como essa produção cinematográfica ressoa profundamente com nossa era atual.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Embora seu livro se concentre na década de 1960, onde uma geração de artistas do pós-guerra lutou com os legados mentais da Segunda Guerra Mundial e as manifestações cotidianas de conformidade, rigidez e hiperobediência civil que tornaram o nazismo possível, não pude deixar de pensar em quão relevante ele é para nossa política atual, apesar das diferenças históricas.
A terminologia costuma ser de grande interesse para os leitores da Jacobin, e você escolheu usar a palavra "antifascismo" em seu título. Até certo ponto, você está literalmente falando sobre o fascismo de meados do século XX. Mas há outros termos que também podem ter funcionado: "anti-imperialismo", "descolonialismo", "anticapitalismo", "socialismo", "comunismo" etc. Por que você preferiu o termo "antifascismo?"
Julia Alekseyeva
As primeiras iterações deste projeto apenas descreveram os documentários sobre os quais falo como sendo "políticos". Era um rótulo mais amorfo. Mas quanto mais eu comecei a cavar nos arquivos, mais percebi que todas as pessoas em quem eu estava mais interessado — Marker, Matsumoto, Hani, Varda, etc. — também se consideravam socialistas ou comunistas "não ortodoxos", já que a maioria deles rompeu com os partidos comunistas tradicionais no início ou meados da década de 1960.
Mas esse não foi o fim da história. Continuei cavando e descobri que todas as figuras que criaram documentários realmente radicais (radicais no sentido formal/estético e político, como um desenraizamento) durante a década de 1960 estavam lutando com um senso de cumplicidade nos horrores da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Isso foi especialmente prevalente no Japão, onde era óbvio que os japoneses eram agressores extremos no cenário geopolítico.
No entanto, no Japão, assim como na Alemanha Ocidental, havia uma tendência de varrer qualquer memória da Segunda Guerra Mundial para debaixo do tapete, como se os cidadãos comuns não quisessem ter nada a ver com as memórias despedaçadas de seus passados traumatizados. Os esquerdistas odiavam isso. Posso imaginar que seja extraordinariamente desorientador ter todos esses sentimentos complicados e uma incapacidade de lidar com as coisas que a geração dos seus pais fez durante a guerra.
Por meio de leituras cuidadosas de Matsumoto Toshio, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Hani Susumu e outros, Julia Alekseyeva mostra que os documentários de vanguarda dos anos 1960 não se esforçavam para inocular o espectador com a ideologia da Verdade, mas, em vez disso, visavam revelar e alienar, para que os espectadores pudessem abordar a mídia capitalista, imperialista e fascista com consciência crítica.
O novo livro de Alekseyeva, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, fornece uma ecologia transnacional da arte antifascista. Kristen Ghodsee a entrevistou para a Jacobin sobre seu estudo e como essa produção cinematográfica ressoa profundamente com nossa era atual.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Embora seu livro se concentre na década de 1960, onde uma geração de artistas do pós-guerra lutou com os legados mentais da Segunda Guerra Mundial e as manifestações cotidianas de conformidade, rigidez e hiperobediência civil que tornaram o nazismo possível, não pude deixar de pensar em quão relevante ele é para nossa política atual, apesar das diferenças históricas.
A terminologia costuma ser de grande interesse para os leitores da Jacobin, e você escolheu usar a palavra "antifascismo" em seu título. Até certo ponto, você está literalmente falando sobre o fascismo de meados do século XX. Mas há outros termos que também podem ter funcionado: "anti-imperialismo", "descolonialismo", "anticapitalismo", "socialismo", "comunismo" etc. Por que você preferiu o termo "antifascismo?"
Julia Alekseyeva
As primeiras iterações deste projeto apenas descreveram os documentários sobre os quais falo como sendo "políticos". Era um rótulo mais amorfo. Mas quanto mais eu comecei a cavar nos arquivos, mais percebi que todas as pessoas em quem eu estava mais interessado — Marker, Matsumoto, Hani, Varda, etc. — também se consideravam socialistas ou comunistas "não ortodoxos", já que a maioria deles rompeu com os partidos comunistas tradicionais no início ou meados da década de 1960.
Mas esse não foi o fim da história. Continuei cavando e descobri que todas as figuras que criaram documentários realmente radicais (radicais no sentido formal/estético e político, como um desenraizamento) durante a década de 1960 estavam lutando com um senso de cumplicidade nos horrores da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Isso foi especialmente prevalente no Japão, onde era óbvio que os japoneses eram agressores extremos no cenário geopolítico.
No entanto, no Japão, assim como na Alemanha Ocidental, havia uma tendência de varrer qualquer memória da Segunda Guerra Mundial para debaixo do tapete, como se os cidadãos comuns não quisessem ter nada a ver com as memórias despedaçadas de seus passados traumatizados. Os esquerdistas odiavam isso. Posso imaginar que seja extraordinariamente desorientador ter todos esses sentimentos complicados e uma incapacidade de lidar com as coisas que a geração dos seus pais fez durante a guerra.
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Sill do Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) de Matsumoto Toshio. |
Isso também foi verdade na França, onde o governo de Vichy enviou mais de 75.000 judeus para campos de concentração. O general Charles de Gaulle foi visto como o libertador da França durante essa era e sempre foi associado à resistência contra os nazistas. Imagine, então, que você está na década de 1960, quinze anos após a guerra, e a França está perpetrando horríveis abusos de direitos humanos na Argélia. Imagine que você está no Japão, e quinze anos após o Artigo IX da nova constituição "democrática" declarar que o Japão sempre será uma "nação pacífica" e que proíbe a guerra como meio de resolver disputas, que esse mesmo governo então assina um tratado renovável com os Estados Unidos que vincula a defesa militar e o sucesso econômico japoneses aos americanos belicistas, e força os japoneses a aceitar bases americanas em solo japonês. Você pode imaginar que isso seria enfurecedor, desorientador e horripilante para esses cineastas que muitas vezes eram crianças durante a guerra e ainda se lembravam dos efeitos do fascismo em suas vidas cotidianas.
Então, embora todos eles fossem profundamente socialistas ou comunistas de alguma forma — eles publicavam em jornais ou revistas comunistas, faziam parte de partidos políticos e eram muito fluentes na linguagem do marxismo — a raiz e o ímpeto de sua prática cinematográfica eram antifascistas por natureza. É por isso que escolhi o antifascismo como princípio teórico organizador para o livro.
Você também pode imaginar que esse sentimento de horror e cumplicidade é muito relevante para nossa própria situação política — nos Estados Unidos especialmente, mas não apenas. E não apenas política, mas nosso próprio senso de ética e nossas psicologias. Como é ser cúmplice e mesmo de alguma forma responsável pela morte de outras pessoas que nunca conheceremos? Como é para nossos próprios confortos materiais — nossos iPhones, nossos Teslas, nossas contas Amazon Prime — estarem inerentemente ligados ao sofrimento de outros incontáveis? Isso estava muito presente na mente de artistas e intelectuais na década de 1960, uma era de prosperidade econômica repentina e rápida para nações anteriormente devastadas pela guerra, como França e Japão.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Você pode falar um pouco sobre o que significa ter "um policial na sua cabeça?"
Julia Alekseyeva
Essa ideia é tão central para o aspecto psicológico do livro. Essa frase, geralmente usada como "mate o policial na sua cabeça", tornou-se paradigmática para o ethos de maio de 1968 na França, um verdadeiro momento revolucionário, embora seja frequentemente considerado um fracasso. Em francês, a frase era geralmente chassez le flic de votre tête! (literalmente: "tire o policial da sua cabeça") e apareceu na capa da edição de janeiro de 1969 do periódico Action, desenhado por Michel Quarez e Georges Wolinski.
Para mim, a frase se alinha com as práticas abolicionistas: como você pode trabalhar pela libertação dos outros se não libertar sua própria mente, sua própria psicologia individual? É um processo dialético no qual o interno está constantemente informando o externo, e vice-versa. Eu simplesmente amo essa imagem — os pequenos policiais franceses, tão anos 60! — e sou muito grata à neta de Wolinski por permitir o uso desta imagem no livro.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Fiquei profundamente comovida com suas discussões sobre aqueles cineastas de vanguarda que celebravam tanto a ambiguidade quanto a incerteza, ao mesmo tempo em que alimentavam o otimismo militante necessário para continuar a luta pela justiça social. Por que você se concentrou no Japão e na França dos anos 1960 como estudos de caso? O que seus estudos de caso podem nos dizer sobre as reverberações globais desses corpos nacionais de trabalho?
A União Soviética parece uma importante corrente subterrânea no livro, mesmo que a maioria dos estudos de caso sejam da França e do Japão. Qual é a importância da URSS aqui? E quanto ao contexto mais amplo da Guerra Fria e da competição Leste-Oeste na esfera cultural?
Julia Alekseyeva
Uma versão muito mais longa — infelizmente muito difícil de manejar — deste projeto olhou especificamente para a influência do início do período soviético em todas essas figuras dos anos 1960. É óbvio quando olhamos para Jean-Luc Godard e Chris Marker, ambos discutindo constantemente sua dívida com a vanguarda soviética, e com o cineasta Dziga Vertov em particular. Para os cineastas da década de 1960, as primeiras obras de arte da União Soviética — geralmente até [Joseph] Stalin assumir o poder, e especialmente até o Primeiro Congresso de Escritores Soviéticos de 1934, onde o realismo socialista se tornou o único método e forma para a arte revolucionária — eram enormes reservatórios de inspiração. A vanguarda soviética foi um momento fracassado de possibilidade em que intelectuais e artistas eram vistos como engenheiros da mente, integrais na criação da nova e liberta pessoa soviética.
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| O diretor argentino Fernando Solanas no set do filme de 1985 Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (Tangos, o Exílio de Gardel). (Frederic Meylan/Sygma via Getty Images) |
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.
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!
Still from an interview with a nonplussed sex worker in Terayama Shuji’s Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971).
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.
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.
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Fotograma de Man with the Movie Camera (1929) de Dziga Vertov. (Bridgeman via Getty Images) |
Matsumoto é menos conhecido, o que é realmente lamentável, e algo que estou tentando retificar com minhas próprias traduções de sua obra. Tanto Vertov quanto Matsumoto publicaram amplamente e foram imensamente prolíficos. Matsumoto, sendo de uma geração mais jovem, desenvolveu sua filosofia cinematográfica no contexto da desestalinização. Vertov morreu um ano antes de Stalin, e antes que ele pudesse ver seus filmes receberem qualquer fama duradoura. Então há uma certa sofisticação teórica nos textos de Matsumoto que realmente não se vê em Vertov.
Mas acho que há algo profundo que liga as duas figuras, especialmente na maneira como ambos teorizaram o filme como unicamente capaz de transformar o sensório. Eles estavam extremamente interessados na maneira como o filme pode (re)animar, nas palavras de Vertov — trazer o espectador "de volta à vida" por meio da "sensação cinematográfica" (kinooshchushchenie, uma palavra extremamente importante para os anos 1920 soviéticos). Matsumoto, da mesma forma, está interessado no mienai mono, aquelas "coisas invisíveis" que o filme pode revelar de forma única. Tanto Matsumoto quanto Vertov estão escrevendo teorias que são explicitamente sobre o poder psicologicamente transformador da forma cinematográfica. E eles estão fazendo alguns dos filmes mais interessantes e poderosos que já vi.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Se houvesse três filmes antifascistas dos anos 1960 que você quisesse que todo leitor da Jacobin assistisse, quais seriam e por quê?
Julia Alekseyeva
Oh, meu Deus. Tantos! Se eu tivesse que escolher: Le Joli Mai (1962), de Chris Marker, que teve uma linda restauração há cerca de uma década; Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) de Matsumoto (bem, toda a sua obra documental, mas esta tem legendas em inglês); e provavelmente The Hour of the Furnaces de Solanas e Getino (1968). Também, todos os filmes de Varda, mas levaria muito tempo para listá-los todos. Basta jogar um dardo em um alvo e ir onde ele cair!
Colaboradores
Julia Alekseyeva é autora de Antifascism and the Avant-Garde e autora-ilustradora de Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.
Kristen Ghodsee é autora de Everyday Utopia, Red Valkyries e Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.
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