Now that the Bush regime has helped terrorism fully replace communism as our official national diversion, there is no better American filmmaker than Emile de Antonio to show us how our cinema responded to the Cold War. (And there is no better venue for this near-complete 10-film retrospective than Anthology Film Archives, which continues to have NYC’s most radical programming.) Imagine an earlier Michael Moore more sincere about agit-prop than focused on self-promotion.
Emile de Antonio, who died in 1989, began his directing career as any good Marxist should—making a film on the 1954 trial where McCarthy was discredited once and for all. The 97 minutes of Point of Order! are made up entirely of edited kinescopes from CBS’ original 36-day broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Already 44 at the time of its release in 1963, and having never worked in film before, de Antonio demonstrated a surprising skill at crafting a dynamic and captivating narrative out of raw archival footage. This early example of appropriation was, however, rejected by the first New York Film Festival on the grounds that it wasn’t a film. Which leads me to mention that May 12, Anthology will be hosting a free panel discussion on “D,” as he was affectionately known, featuring the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kent Jones, as well as Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki and Beat-classic Pull My Daisy co-director, Alfred Leslie.
D’s most famous work, In the Year of the Pig, is a blatantly anti-war film made during the height of Vietnam in 1968. It is a less manipulative and more courageous version of Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds. The 1976 Weathermen documentary, Underground, the most unmissable film of the series, was shot by Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler in a “safe house” in Los Angeles. The film interviews five members of the radical activist group, fugitives then wanted by the FBI. (Like many of the films to be shown, it is currently available only on worn-out VHS tapes that you may not be able to find.)
Also not to be missed is 1972’s Painters Painting, D’s documentary on New York’s art scene of the 1960s. Perhaps the best of its kind, the film features candid interviews with, among others, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Motherwell, Johns and dealer Leo Castelli, and shows a real care and interest when shooting their work—rarer than it might seem.
