Richard Cándida Smith on Julia Alekseyeva’s *Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s*

“This book did not emerge out of quiet thought and reflection,” Alekseyeva writes in the conclusion to her book (196).  She began writing while she had taken on conflict resolution responsibilities for the Democratic Socialists of America.  As she developed her arguments for the book, she was able to test her theoretical framework for “microfascism” at the “Rethinking Fascism” conference organized in 2023 by and for Los Angeles-area Jewish community groups. Participants Alekseyeva recalls,

… admitted that the idea of microfascism made them worried and uncomfortable—not because they didn’t think it was correct, but because they acknowledged the many times … they had engaged in behaviors that could conceivably be called microfascist: a drive for the punishment of others, a fear of acknowledging one’s own complicity, a mindset of perpetual victimhood that might excuse one’s own reactive or problematic behavior, a rigidity of thought, a judgmental and domineering ‘higher than thou’ attitude convinced of its own understanding of truth and reality.  To this I responded: sitting with this uneasy feeling, this discomfort, and reckoning with it, is, in fact, the point.  The battle against fascism is a battle that must be fought daily  … The work of antifascism is the work of untangling one’s own complicity, of recognizing ambiguity, and of engaging in the vulnerable work of reckoning and auto-critique. [198-199, 201]

The topic of the book, radical French and Japanese films from the 1960s, lies well outside U.S. intellectual history.  Alekseyeva, professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, examines how filmmakers in two countries with very recent fascist histories exploreed why despite the decisive global victory over fascism in 1945, its ghosts continued to shape the exercise of power at all levels.  The most successful films, Aleskseyeva argues, complicate the understanding of “fascism” by embedding state violence in the microaggressions of everyday life.

The postwar years in both France and Japan were marked by extraordinarily rapid economic growth that many associated with “Americanization.”  With wages rising, workers whose incomes had long been limited started to enjoy the benefits of broad-based consumer markets.  Politically, efforts by elites to maintain the domination they had long enjoyed made the postwar years exceptionally volatile and violent.  France’s determination to maintain its global empire led to two lengthy colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria that France could not win.  Japan no longer had an empire, and political struggle focused on expanding democratic rights as the foundation for redefining national identity.  After the end of the U.S. occupation in 1952, hundreds of thousands regularly demonstrated for Japanese neutrality in the cold war, the removal of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons, and popular control over the giant corporations dominating Japanese society.

To the degree that “fascism” is possibly more than a ghost, but a constituent force in modern politics, French history after liberation in 1944 is particularly instructive.  France had freely elected governments and fully functioning courts that, on occasion, curbed elements of government policy but more regularly facilitated government repression of its critics.   The fascist legacy hanging over France and every other country in Europe appeared most clearly in an attitude of public officials that could be summarized as, “I’m here to dominate, not to serve.” A succession of French governments, some led by the right, some by the left, embraced torture, expanded application of capital punishment, massacres, and extensive use of napalm and herbicides to destroy national liberation movements fighting French rule.  The French government reopened concentration camps, most from the World War II era, to house enemy combatants, colonial civilians the French government no longer trusted, and finally French citizens opposing a failing effort turning crueler the more evident it became that defeat was the only likely outcome.

The writer Charlotte Delbo, in her first book on her internment at Auschwitz, None of Us Will Return, advised her readers that the first challenge in confronting authoritarian rule was essayer de regarder, essayer pour voir—“try to look, just try and see.”  Delbo had been part of a group of 230 French women French police arrested for their activities resisting the German occupation who were transported to the death camps.  She was one of 49 who returned home at the war’s end.  She noted that in every moment of her imprisonment, she was never far from large population centers.  She and her companions suffered in the midst of French, German, and Polish citizens going about their everyday lives preferring not to see what was happening nearby, at times even, only a few feet away as internees frequently were sent to work in nearby towns.  When mass incarceration, torture, and summary executions are matters of government policy, state officials seek to impose silence upon anyone who might witness their crimes.  Awareness of who the victims are will be erased well before they are killed.  To reverse that erasure, a central and celebrated feature of Delbo’s accounts of her wartime experiences were dozens of detailed biographical accounts of fellow prisoners who never returned to their homes.  Delbo insisted on providing their full names and describing where they came from, why they were arrested, and what they hoped to do after they returned home.

In the mid-1950s while taking a walk near the transit camp outside Paris where she had waited to be transported to Auschwitz, she observed that the camp was once again full, this time with Algerians living in France suspected of supporting their homeland’s liberation movement.  She asked around, but everyone in the vicinity claimed not to have noticed that the camp was being used again.  Journalists and government officials she knew claimed no knowledge of any mass internment program.  In 1961, Delbo published Les Belles Lettres, a book that begins by examining how the French press reported the Algerian war from its beginnings in 1954.  She showed the various strategies journalists repeatedly used to downplay government violence.  They strove to present policies as within democratic norms, even when events reported were unusual and difficult to justify.  For those who refused self-censorship and rationalization, censorship laws expanded in the course of the war increasingly limited what could be said and made penalties harsher.

Delbo circumvented censorship laws by reprinting material French newspapers had published since the conflict began in 1954.  The assembly revealed the trajectory taking France increasingly towards methods most French knew were daily occurrences during the German occupation.  One Algerian prisoner’s letter to Le Monde described how “torture with electricity alternated with cigarette burns, punches, and ‘waterboarding.’”  Delbo recalled the torture she experienced when French police interrogated her before they turned her over to the Germans.  She wondered what could possibly be going through the minds of French officials as they started interning thousands of people.  They like her must live every day with difficult memories of the war years.  She wrote:

That the French authorities could open camps in Algeria already shows their scorn for public opinion. But Algeria, that’s far away. That they can open camps even in France shows that their scorn was well-founded. Deportees can tell you how heartbreaking the indifference of German civilians was when they passed in front of them in their striped uniforms, walking in rows while going to work outside the camp. . . . There are Algerians in camps in France, camps surrounded by barbed wire, camps surmounted by watchtowers where guards armed with machine guns keep watch. . . . Of course, it’s not Auschwitz. But isn’t it enough that innocents (a priori, people not condemned are innocent) are in camps for our conscience to revolt?^[1]

She reprinted the declaration of 121 intellectuals and artists the government convicted in 1960 for having signed a manifesto urging French soldiers to consult their consciences and refuse orders identical to what German officers had routinely given their soldiers during the occupation.  They asked, “Is it necessary to recall that, fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitlerian order, French militarism, by virtue of the demands of such a war, has managed to restore the practice of torture and to make it once again a European institution?”  As part of their conviction, all the signatories were banned from appearing on television and radio, nor could their names be mentioned in any public media whose operations required a government license.  Delbo could not name anyone involved with writing or signing the letter, but she could reprint their text in full because, having already been published in France’s daily newspapers, its words had become a matter of public record.

At the end of the declaration, Delbo briefly commented, “Composing radio and television programs has become a delicate task. Songwriters will have to submit their texts ten days before broadcast. It will be necessary to guard against citing either the names or the works of writers, musicians, and composers who have ‘signed,’ as it will be to re-watch films before broadcasting them to be sure that no banned actor appears so much as in silhouette.”  Delbo then writes about running into two fellow survivors from the camps.  The first tells Delbo that her television was bringing too many uniforms, soldiers, machine guns into her home so she gave it away.  Nor will she listen to the news on the radio.  She knows what is happening, but she cannot bear to hear the details.  The second speaks of all the questions children must be asking their parents about their youth that remain unanswered.  “Some things are very hard to say, but you cannot erase history,” the friend says to Delbo. “The day will come when we will have to answer our children’s questions.”  Delbo confesses she does not know what to say that could possibly give comfort to either of her friends, or to herself.  In a later book, Delbo returned to these two conversations, responding to the impossibility of consolation with a short prose-poem she set in italics:

Torture in Algeria.
Men have made of my tongue the language of torturers.

Villages burned by napalm in Indochina.
Algerians hunted through the streets by the Paris police one day in October of 1961.

Algerians whose bodies were fished out of the Seine.
How often I have thought of you …^[2]

The art of letter writing, which flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and fell into decadence during the nineteenth, practically died out in the twentieth century. In our days, marquises and Portuguese nuns do what everyone does: they telephone.

It was sufficient that Power take History backwards for the genre to become once again in fashion.^[3]

Delbo’s documentary “objectivity” juxtaposed against self-evidently “subjective” musings danced around censorship laws as applied to printed texts.  When nothing can be said directly, an explanatory argument will not suffice.  The challenge is to document in various ways the operations of unchecked state repression, whether by a dictatorship that took power by force or by a democratically elected government, inevitably make fear, anxiety, and denial fundamental aspects of everyday life.  Fear has been made the defining feature of governance, replacing the promotion of the public good.  The final section of Les Belles Lettres reprinted verbatim letters exchanged between Algerian prisoners of war and their families, including detainees condemned to death and soon to be guillotined.  Delbo’s goal was to restore individuality to Algerian victims whose presence the power of the state intended to erase for all time.

French filmmakers, including several whose works were indispensable staples of U.S. arthouse repertoires, faced considerably more stringent censorship laws than authors of books. The government banned screenings of films including any critical statements about the Algerian war or showing its effects inside France.  Because of scenes presenting torture and assassination as policies inherent to French colonialism, Jean-Luc Godard’s second feature film, Le Petit Soldat (1961), could not be screened inside France until censorship provisions were repealed in 1963, a full year after France recognized Algerian independence.  When Le Petit Soldat reached the public, the single most famous line in the film, “cinema is truth twenty-four frames per second,” had become a vague truism.  The challenge Godard intended for his audiences to see torture and assassinations as daily occurrences in wars to maintain colonial empires if they would only look around them was reduced to an abstract, even breezy cliché.

Godard’s aphorism referenced the term cinéma-vérité, coined in 1960 to describe the supposedly new approach to film-making that Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin had developed in their feature film Chronicle of a Summer 1960.  The film, cast entirely the film’s publicity proclaimed with “ordinary citizens of Paris” as they dealt with the problems of their daily lives, won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to be an international commercial success.

The film was also as an intellectual event.  In part because Rouch, director of research at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, was a surrealist veteran turned anthropologist, while Morin, co-director with Roland Barthes of the Center for the Study of Mass Communication at the École des Hautes Études, was a sociologist whose work on the functions of cinema in producing a new mythological universe for an industrial, urban consumer society was an important contribution to a broader effort in France to analyze and critique “everyday life.”  The positions that Rouch and Morin occupied in French intellectual life guaranteed that there would be extensive discussion of their film, which they intended as a direct challenge to commercial cinema.  The film was to demonstrate the possibility for alternative cultural expressions grounded in the unity of private concerns and public policy debates.

Unresolved legacies of World War II pervade the film.  A major character survived the German extermination camps, the only one of her family who returned home alive.  The actress wrote out a monologue on this part of her life that she read into a tape recorder.  She needed to remain in control of her emotions if she were to share her pain.  Her narration tells of the day when the French police loaded her family onto trucks in the center of Paris and they began their journey to Auschwitz.  She speaks of the conditions in Auschwitz when they arrived, of the work assignments that kept her from the gas chambers as long she could complete them; of people dying from illness, starvation, and overwork; of a guard brutally beating her father for stopping one morning to talk with his daughter through a fence.  She recalls returning to Paris totally alone in the world.  Nobody wanted to hear about what happened to her, nor how all the rest of her family died.  She learned that it was improper for her to share her story.  Everyone she knew told her to resume her life as a university student and put the past behind her.  She was to keep silent, and she did as she was told.

Sixteen years after she returned home, Rouch and Morin asked her to speak about the camps.  She struggled to find the words.  She would not talk directly to the camera.  While her story plays out as voice-over, the camera films her walking from the Place de la Concorde, the collection point where Parisian Jews assembled, towards Les Halles, an ancient, impoverished neighborhood then being torn down and replaced by modern buildings with shopping and apartments for the growing postwar middle class.  The walk she takes is staged.  In terms of filmic narrative it is left unmotivated.  As such it is a documentary record of her struggle to recover long suppressed memories.  The scene exists purely as symbol of a woman wandering through her painful past much as she might wander through the city when she is agitated and needs to get out and move.

The scene is a pivotal moment in the film.  It could remain in the film because it addressed an aspect of fascism in the past.  Rouch and Morin were forced to cut most of the material directly related to the Algerian war, material they believed necessary to see how private and public concerns intersected in Paris in the summer of 1960.  The students participating in the film had gone well beyond antiwar protest and were clandestinely providing financial and material support to the Algerian National Liberation Front, as well as sheltering French soldiers who deserted and helping them escape to other countries.  Scenes showing their activities were cut entirely. Their debates on how to make the antiwar movement more effective also had to be deleted.  The students’ activities as engaged citizens had been central to the film’s structure.  Love life, problems at work or school, along with other personal dilemmas and insecurities, naturally dominated the completed film once material related to the war in Algeria was excised from the rough edits of the film.

The Algerian War comes up briefly in an uncomfortably abstract discussion of “the situation of this summer of 1960” that the directors posed to the students assembled for dinner at Morin’s apartment.  The scene begins with Jean Rouch stating that student activism is a vital part of any functioning democracy.  He chides the students for letting the country down, complaining, “You don’t give a damn about this issue, about the war in Algeria, do you?”

The students assure him that, yes, they care.  Then they debate when and how the war might end as if the topic was merely an interesting political science problem.  Régis Debray is the most articulate of the students; the outtakes show him to have been the leader of their group and a demanding one.  One of the scenes removed from the film shows Debray chastising one of his comrades for spending too much time thinking about his girlfriend (who is the concentration camp survivor) instead of the political movement or finishing his thesis.  The student in this lost scene defends himself by arguing that how one handles one’s personal life shapes how one solves political and professional questions, not the other way around.  The relationship of the everyday to political and economic structures was a central question increasingly under debate in the late 1950s.  The student repeats new arguments theorists of the everyday were advancing that inverted traditional Marxist conceptions of the private and the public.

In the released film, Régis Debray responds to Rouch’s accusation of student apathy with dispassionate but bitter logic.  The Algerian War has forced most French citizens to see how powerless they are.  They have learned once again that their opinions have no effect whatsoever on what governments do.  No one in France likes the war, but it continues.  Cynical detachment is what happens when a nation lives in a state of absurdity.  Debray’s tirade is a fashionable echo of arguments often associated with Albert Camus, minus Camus’s injunctions that in such a state of absurdity, ethical choices are the only path available for returning to a state of reason, even when all choices appear ineffective.^[4]

The indifference the students perform in the film was of course camouflage.  Understandable given the seriousness of the charges prosecutors had been filing against those whose clandestine work against the war the police had uncovered.  At the same time, camouflage was incompatible with aspirations to make a film presenting the inner truth of the everyday lives of a cast of supposedly “ordinary Parisians,” almost all of whom are actually engaged activists.  The examination of resistance to war and repression as a moral duty in an ostensibly democratic country had gone missing.  The concluding scene shows Rouch and Morin pacing the galleries of the Musée de l’Homme discussing the limitations of what they had done. They speak of unspecified practical problems that created more obstacles than they had anticipated.

Because censorship had been more thorough in France than in other postwar “democracies” and involved harsher penalties, French filmmakers were pushed to search for new ways to present the arguments they wanted to make.  Two chapters in Alekseyeva’s book explore the trajectory of formal and political experimentation across the sixties, treating in addition to Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and Chronicle of a Summer 1960, the work of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Guy Debord, culminating in Jean-Luc Godard’s difficult anti-entertainments from La Chinoise (1967) to Tout va bien and Letter to Jane (both 1972), a series of films that were seen around the world because Godard was a celebrity auteur.  He had come to reject the “magic of movies” to examine whether didacticism and an aesthetics of “unpleasure” could force audiences to confront the inherent violence of modern liberal society.

The heart of this book are three chapters focusing on Japanese radical filmmaking in the 1960s.  Japanese filmmakers were particularly impressed with how French filmmakers had challenged the repressive and dictatorial measures constraining free expression during the Algerian war.  Alekseyeva examines the degree to which Japanese film journals discussed French movies and their applicability to documenting the antimilitarist, anticorporate, and antifascist struggles in their country.  A growing popular movement inspired filmmakers to explore what moved people into active resistance to Japan’s long tradition of militarism that had often brutally enforced subservience upon the governed.

Alekseyeva argues that through prioritizing gender fluidity and sexuality, radical Japanese films achieved a deeper, more truly transgressive critique of modern life than the French films she discusses.  Japanese radical filmmakers developed particularly inventive and challenging forms that explored possibilities for uncensored imagination and desire to reveal alternative realities.  Desire in Japanese films avoided the wish-fulfillment fantasies characteristic of class-based radicalism, such as still dominated European film making in the 1960s.  Alekseyeva clarifies that the Japanese films she discusses preceded queer theory by several decades.  They demonstrate that, by foregrounding the microfascism shaping personal relationships more than state violence, queer perspectives fostered a more effective antifascist politics.

Aleseyeva insists that her conception of queer theory in relation to film practice has nothing to do whatsoever with identity politics as it emerged and developed over the last three decades.  She argues that queerness is not in and of itself inherently political, but a mode of thinking inherent to a revolutionary life that grows out of choices to acknowledge the fluctuation of difference within each person.  To acknowledge queerness as a basic human attribute requires openness or availability to “self-investigation and experimentation.”  A person or group living as queer understands that identity as such, the “is” that usually consigns each person to a limited repertoire of roles, must be left unlimited.  What a person or a groups appears as in any given moment, the substance of identity politics, is an expression of the political and social relations in place in particular and transient circumstances.  Identity itself is part and parcel of microfascism, even when explicitly antifascist, because the safe space an identity offers is formally subsidiary to and logically deduced from the unbounded power of an oppressor whose eternity, like that of liberal universalism, has seemingly become the price exacted for being allowed to enjoy however momentarily dreams of liberation and fulfillment.  She argues,

Where straight and gay are inverses of one another, queerness becomes a space of space of radical possibility for the creation of other, unforeseen worlds, perhaps nonsensical or strange … While surely sexual preference varied in the late 1960s among the youthful, radical milieu, including straight and gay alike .. the (counter)culture was queer. … in art as in life, the body—its suffering, its pleasures, its animal ferality—became the locus of revolutionary activity and potential. [159]

The Japanese films she most admires “rupture” consciousness, making it impossible to perform habitual ways of thinking immediately to hand without viscerally feeling their arbitrary, constructed nature.  These films seldom provided a constructive image of a radical movement growing in force because proposing a path forward was secondary to using film techniques to expose the discomfort inherent to living as a queer person in the current moment.

The practical result Alekseyeva describes as a “revitalization of perception,” which leads to “availability” to more radical personal life choices, as well as to actions the social movement on the ground might bring propose to counter a culture predicated on repression and hierarchy (4).  Films could not determine what happened in the streets, but they could prepare soldiers of the revolution to be ready for what their cause might require from them.  The process prioritized affective processes rather than rational argument or policy (6).

The concept of “microfascism” is central to her analysis of the Japanese films.  Films can direct viewers how to look and see what is going on around them, but the knowledge gained from more insight is secondary to the internal ruptures a film provokes through recognition that many repressed desires are neither unwholesome nor dangerous.  Because desire indicates an absence requiring action or it will not be filled, this illumination can have profound public consequences, but that is the province of social movements, not of artists.

Left unanswered, in part because of the theoretical framing of “microfascism,” but also because as a contribution to film studies, films are necessarily  the center of the book and social movements occupy a heuristic background, there remains the  question of how self-reflection translates into coordinated action.  This book does not explore how the films discussed supported the construction of active counterpublics in either France or Japan.  Some readers might therefore find the author’s answers as to how films combat fascism less than satisfactory.  Even if a militant activist, Alekseyeva does not provide a road map for the antifascist struggle.  She is more concerned with how representation of past and present in books and films can most effectively prepare readers and audiences for difficult, fateful choices yet to be made.

^[1] Charlotte Delbo, Les Belles Lettres (Paris: Éditions Minuit, 1961), 66.

^[2] A reference to the events of October 17, 1961, when approximately 40,000 Algerians resident in Paris marched to protest a curfew requiring all Algerians in France to remain in their homes from sunset to dawn.  The police chief of Paris ordered a violent repression of the protest.  Several hundred were killed, from gunfire or from drowning in the Seine where police officers threw them, and 11,000 were arrested and placed in internment camps.  The news media were prohibited from reporting on the event.  Any one filming what happened was arrested and their equipment confiscated.  Until 1998, the government continued to maintain there had been no march, nor police action.

^[3] Charlotte Delbo, La Mémoire et les jours (Paris: Éditions Minuit, 1985), 133.

^[4] In a few years time, Regis Debray will become briefly if notoriously famous for his revolutionary work in Latin America and his theory that in the era of the mass media small armed groups of revolutionaries are more important to bringing about radical social change than the organization of the working class into a political force.  Symbolic violent actions were necessary to break the hold of the mass media on what the public knows and believes.