Aesthetics of Antifascist Film

<p>Through a series of detailed film case histories ranging from <em>The Great Dictator to Hiroshima mon amour</em> to <em>The Lives of Others</em> <em>The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection </em>explores the genesis and recurrence of antifascist aesthetics as it manifests in the WWII Cold War and Post-Wall historical periods.</p><p>Emerging during a critical moment in film history—1930s/1940s Hollywood— cinematic antifascism was representative of the international nature of antifascist alliances with the amalgam of film styles generated in émigré Hollywood during the WWII period reflecting a dialogue between an urgent political commitment to antifascism and an equally intense commitment to aesthetic complexity. Opposed to a fascist aesthetics based on homogeneity purity and spectacle these antifascist films project a radical beauty of distortion heterogeneity fragmentation and loss. By juxtaposing documentation and the modernist techniques of surrealism and expressionism the filmmakers were able to manifest a non-totalizing work of art that still had political impact. </p><p>Drawing on insights from film and cultural studies aesthetic and ethical philosophy and socio-political theory this book argues that the artistic struggles with political commitment and modernist strategies of representation during the 1930s and 40s resulted in a distinctive radical aesthetic form that represents an alternate strand of post-modernism.</p>