A philosophical exploration of how modern global cinema represents everyday means of resisting authoritarianism and totalitarianism

Václav Havel’s concept of “living within the truth” in an authoritarian regime frames Marguerite La Caze’s readings of international cinema, highlighting forms of resistance in which seemingly pre- or nonpolitical aspects of life—such as professional labor, exile, and truth telling—can be recognized as political when seen against a backdrop of general acquiescence. La Caze’s case studies cross genres, historical eras, and national contexts: the apartheid regime in South Africa, in A Dry White Season; post-Suharto Indonesia, in The Look of Silence; 1980s East Germany, in Barbara; the Chilean military dictatorship, in No; contemporary Iran, in A Separation; and current-day Saudi Arabia, in Wadjda. This book explores the films’ use of image, sound, narrative, and character in dialogue with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Cesaire, Hannah Arendt, Sara Ahmed, and W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal how cinema depicts ordinary people enacting their own philosophies of defiance.

During the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944, Resistance fighters, Parisian youth, and French prisoners of war mined a vast repertoire from a long national musical tradition and a burgeoning international entertainment industry, embracing music as a rhetorical resource with which to destabilize Nazi ideology and contest collaborationist Vichy propaganda. After the Liberation of 1944, popular music continued to mediate French political life, helping citizens to challenge American hegemony and recuperate their nation’s lost international standing. Ultimately, through song, French dissidents rejected Nazi subordination, the politics of collaboration, and American intervention and insisted upon a return to that trinity of traditional French values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. Strains of Dissent recovers the significance of music as a rhetorical means of survival, subversion, and national identity construction and illuminates the creative and cunning ways that individual citizens defied the Occupation outside of formal resistance networks and movements.