Matsumoto Toshio and the Antifascist Avant-Garde

This talk analyzes the film and philosophy of Matsumoto Toshio, an avant-garde documentary filmmaker best known for the queer, kaleidoscopic Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and a series of "neo-documentary" films from the early-mid 1960s. Specifically, it looks at his work through the overarching lens of antifascism. I argue that his writings describe 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.

Julia Alekseyeva is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a secondary affiliation with cinema and media studies. Her first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (UC Press, Feb. 2025), builds off of long-standing work analyzing the interaction between radical media and leftist politics, especially in Japan, France, and the Soviet Union. 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).

This lecture is made possible with the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.