Event

This talk analyzes fiercely political filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio through the lens of antifascism and unorthodox communist politics. Matsumoto Toshio was an avant-garde documentary filmmaker best known for the queer, kaleidoscopic Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), a series of "neo-documentary" films from the early-mid 1960s, and expanded cinema practices in museums and gallery spaces. He was also a prolific film theorist, with hundreds of articles to his name, and served at the helm of the journal Kiroku eiga (documentary film). This talk articulates Matsumoto's philosophical stance and argues that Matsumoto's complex writing describes avant-garde documentary as a privileged art form, uniquely capable of battling against everyday fascist ideology-- both fascism in the streets, and in our mindset and everyday behavior.

Dr. Julia Alekseyeva is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a secondary affiliation with Cinema and Media Studies. She also serves as affiliate faculty in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC), Russian and East European Studies (REES), Comparative Literature, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE). Her first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (UC Press, Feb 2025), builds from longstanding work analyzing the interaction between radical media and leftist politics, especially in Japan, France, and the Soviet Union. Other upcoming publications include the second-ever English translation of an article by Matsumoto Toshio, forthcoming in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (May 2025). In addition to her academic work, she is also a practicing cartoonist and author-illustrator of the award-winning graphic memoir, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm, 2017).