From John Doe to Lonesome Rhodes: Antifacism from the Archive

In his pamphlet On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century (2017), historian Timothy Snyder argues that as the “distant traumas” of fascism, Nazism and communism faded from generational memory, Americans began to believe that “history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.” The essential mission of any archive is to serve as a counterforce to such historical forgetting, to preserve the material artifacts of the past to ensure a continuity of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. In that vein, as we mark the 60th anniversary of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, this series presents a selection of American films restored by the Archive or held in its collection that were produced in response to the cataclysmic clash of ideologies that marked the mid-20th century. Whether romance, action film, spy thriller or family drama, they each reflect the urgency of the moment when fascism posed an existential threat to American democracy. Some of these films were born of an individual filmmaker’s desire to speak to the politics of their times, while others, as during the war years, were part of an unprecedented government-led effort to mobilize every aspect of American society for the fight against fascism underway. Of course, Hollywood’s response to Hitler’s rise in the 1930s was not uncomplicated and its explicitly antifascist films of the 1940s frequently ignored the systemic racial, gender and economic inequality of American society even as they extolled the virtues of liberty and equality. And for the privilege of defending American values on screen, many of the directors and screenwriters who made these films found themselves on the Hollywood blacklist after the war. Still, these films stand as stark reminders of what was at stake then and the urgent need to resist.

Series programmed and notes written by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm, except where noted.