Event

Julia Alekseyeva

The Anti-Fascist Aesthetics of Dziga Vertov, from the 1920s to the 1960s

The films of Soviet avant-garde documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov are well-known, but their influence in global filmmaking practices after his death in 1954 is largely understudied. This talk explores how Vertov’s films, with their experimental montage and abundance of editing tricks, served an inherently counter-hegemonic and antifascist function through their desire to liberate human perception. I explain, first, how Vertov’s theory of filmmaking practice could be interpreted as revolutionary phenomenology. The talk then shows how his films began to influence filmmakers in the 1960s, especially outside of Europe. In particular, this talk will highlight filmmakers in Japan, such as Matsumoto Toshio, Hani Susumu, and others, whose films use Vertovian aesthetics as antifascist ethics.

The Japanese 1960s are well known for being a “season of politics.” Fittingly, the films of this era are revolutionary in form as well as content: they are extremely stylistically varied, revealing a wealth of experimentation unmatched since then in Japanese film history. The rejection of Stalinist socialist realism resulted in a renewed interest in pre-Stalinist artistic experimentation of the 1920s-- especially one which rejects both the melodramas associated with Stalinist art-making and appeals to strict objectivity in documentary practice. In this talk, I argue that this experimentation was partially inspired by contact with other global film traditions, especially Soviet revolutionary films of the 1920s. This talk unveils how Vertov’s particular avant-garde documentary style, largely unseen in Japan until the 1960s, spoke to the zeitgeist of the counter-cultural and anti-Stalinist Japanese decade. Because Vertov’s films interweave Marxist dialectical materialism with formal experimentation, integrating subjectivity and reflexivity within the documentary medium, they coalesced ideally with a new Japanese aesthetic sensibility prioritizing surrealism, the questioning of assumed truths, and a reinvigoration of leftist thought.