Issue 34
Notebook

A Wandering Archive: Herbert Kline and the Transnational Itineraries of Anti-Fascist Filmmaking

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  • David Wood,
  • Sonia García López
David Wood
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Bio
Sonia García López
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.63700/983

Published 2022-07-01

Keywords

  • Herbert Kline,
  • Cinema,
  • Anti-fascism,
  • Internationalism,
  • Archive.

How to Cite

Wood, D., & García López, S. (2022). A Wandering Archive: Herbert Kline and the Transnational Itineraries of Anti-Fascist Filmmaking. L’Atalante. Journal of Film Studies, (34), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.63700/983

Copyright (c) 2022 L'Atalante. Journal of film studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article analyses the transnational and itinerant work of the US anti-fascist filmmaker Herbert Kline, whose career spanned five decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Kline’s urge to combat Nazism and fascism and to promote radical democracy through film took him to Europe, the US, Palestine and Latin America. Taking as our starting-point the theories by Naficy and Marks on diasporic and exilic cinemas, but avoiding an authorial approach, we take up Kline’s own self-definition as a film-gypsy to account for a highly heterogeneous and discontinuous oeuvre that comprises finished and uncompleted films as well as unmade film projects; and documentary, fiction and dramatised documentary films. Furthermore, the article proposes that the scholarly study of a filmmaker such as Kline calls for a multiple and complex research methodology in order to fully account for what we call the filmmaker’s gypsy archive.

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