Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, takes up the contemporary issue of documentary “truthfulness” by returning to Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his agit-prop work. Here is a genealogy of cinéma-vérité (cinema-truth) for our time that helps us to understand the chaos and instability of the political moment.

This event kicks off “MoMentum: Documentary,” series. Click here for more info.

About the Speaker

Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies, and has taught at Harvard and Brooklyn College. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Prof. Alekseyeva is currently working on an academic monograph which explores the avant-garde documentary tradition in the 1960s. Specifically, this work argues that the critique of both capitalism and socialist realism resulted in highly experimental forms of politically engaged documentary filmmaking in the postwar era. She has previously written on topics such as Soviet avant-garde film, the semi-documentary in East Asia, Pink Film, transnational animation, and the French New Wave.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.