When he was a young man, Emile de Antonio was once asked what he would like to be when he grew up. "An eggplant," quipped de Antonio, not imagining that he would be able to read this joking response in print about fifty years later, in 1975: in a secret file that the FBI had kept on him since he went to college in Harvard – coincidentally together with John F. Kennedy. In his last film "Mr. Hoover and I" (1989), during a lecture the documentarist Emile de Antonio recalls the slanderous remarks in the FBI records, in which he appears as a veritable Soviet spy. There is little of reconciliation to be found in this autobiographical document, which was made shortly before his death and has an exceptional position in de Antonio's work in several respects. Here the director himself is at the center for the first time, speaks directly into the camera, becomes his own interview partner, the witness questioned on a political life. Even the title »Mr. Hoover and I« articulates de Antonio's involuntarily close relationship to the US power and surveillance apparatus and its protagonist J. Edgar Hoover. Without making use of a blatant power of suggestion on his part – as the current docu-star Michael Moore likes to do, for instance – de Antonio thinks back with a cool, yet bitter distance on his lifelong antagonism towards official US politics and its organs. Matter-of-factly, chronicling, and most of all – not reconciled. This same stance is also found in the nine works before this legacy film, but without ever revolving centrally around their "author" or his signature.

Emile de Antonio, born 1919, is considered one of the most important independent filmmakers in Cold War America, one of the most radical critics of the US establishment, and an incorruptible documentarist of imperialist power politics, which reached a climax in the Vietnam War. ¹ Almost all his films center on an intellectual analysis of the "arrogance of power", as J. William Fulbright, Vietnam War opponent and US senator, phrased it in de Antonio's famous documentary film on the Vietnam War, "In the Year of the Pig" (1969), in light of the US involvement in Indochina. The arrogance of the power of an empire and its elite, which does not shrink from civil rights violations or political murder, neither in domestic nor in foreign politics, remains de Antonio's theme in almost all his works. He dismantles such outstanding personalities as Senator Joseph McCarthy, the infamous communist witch hunter ("Point of Order", 1963), or the later US president Richard Nixon ("Millhouse: A White Comedy", 1971). With a meticulous questioning of witnesses in conjunction with the Kennedy murder, de Antonio takes the official dossier of the US government, the so-called Warren Report, to the point of absurdity ("Rush to Judgment", 1967). The FBI found it a particular provocation when de Antonio made a film with the Weather People, who had been underground as wanted terrorists for five years. Although they continued to elude the police, they gave long interviews to de Antonio, his colleague Mary Lampson and the cameraman Haskell Wexler in the middle of Brooklyn ("Underground", 1976).
"Point of Order", de Antonio's controversial and much discussed debut, was the first cinema film in history that consisted exclusively of a collage of television images. De Antonio used television recordings from 1954, which were made at the pinnacle of the communist witch hunt and were made available – after protracted negotiations – by the CBS broadcasting corporation. Via public media over twenty million Americans witnessed the hearings, in which McCarthy accused members of the army of being communists. The homemade paranoia reached a first historical peak in these hearings, which also marked the turning point of McCarthy's power. About ten years later and after McCarthy's death, de Antonio decided to make a film about the man, whose machinations had laid the foundation, in his opinion, for a politics of intolerance, of lies and of terrorism.

"Point of Order" is strongly obliged to a specific, historical-political context, which presupposes a good deal of background knowledge on the part of the viewers. It only explains at the beginning and very cursorily what exactly was treated in the hearings. Subtitles such as "Charge – Countercharge" or "The Files" structure a trial, the seemingly chaotic course of which is sometimes difficult to follow for those uninitiated. During long-winded speeches by McCarthy, de Antonio cuts to Joseph Welch, defense counsel for the army, who stares off into space bored, his irritated expression undermining the authority of the speech. Welch was increasingly able to establish himself as a Hollywood-compatible "good guy", clearly fated to be a figure of identification for the public. On the other hand the filmmaker lets a sequence run so long that the people appearing in it have enough time to reveal themselves. At the end of the film McCarthy ends up alone, while his associates leave the hall one after another. This scene did not take place at the end of the hearings at all, but at some point in between; however, de Antonio fades his film out with this scene to end it symbolically. De Antonio said later that he could also have allowed the senator to get off lightly, if he had wanted to.

With "Point of Order" de Antonio created an interventionist, or in the words of the film studies theorist Bill Nichols ², an "interactive documentation", which makes use of the images of the mass medium of television in a media-critical way; it dispenses with explanatory voice-over commentaries and offers a reinterpretation solely through the compilation of existing material. Both the temporal distance and the alienation effect resulting from the projection of television pictures on the cinema screen support the critical analysis of a media event originally obliged to power. The method of the montage of existing footage places the film in the tradition of the Soviet documentary filmmakers of the twenties, specifically the filmmaker Esfir Schub and her compilation film "The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty" from 1927. This film consisted exclusively of a collage of film documents from the period before the revolution and was celebrated as a milestone of the so-called second period of Soviet documentary film. ³

De Antonio's proximity to the Soviet filmmakers and, not least of all, to Eisenstein's principle of montage is self-evident. At the same time, though, his affinity to the contemporary New York art scene takes on an aesthetic form in his films. De Antonio, who was to portray this milieu later in the interview film "Painters Painting" (1973) and here particularly the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, was well able to take recourse to their modernist techniques. The exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" was shown in 1961 at the New York MoMA, containing primarily art from prefabricated or found materials. De Antonio also made use of the technique of assemblage, the recombination of found objects, by compiling his raw material - mostly television recordings from the networks - in the cutting room and inscribing it with new, contrapuntal meanings. ⁴

In the article "Beyond Vérité: Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies", published in 1975, the film critic Thomas Waugh presented de Antonio's work as a new development within the American documentary tradition, a movement that he euphorically called the "New American Documentary". ⁵ Waugh contrasted this new form of documentary film polemically with the Cinema Vérité tradition of a Richard Leacock, whose aesthetic, according to Waugh, remained stuck to a radical subjectivity while purporting to be an objective observation of pure, spontaneous, unmediated life. De Antonio on the other hand, he asserted, was an outstanding example of a new sensitivity in the area of the dissident documentary film, for which the historical film document becomes a "genuine instrument of historiography". ⁶ No finished solutions are offered here, but at least the right questions are asked and a target audience - in de Antonio's case an urban, liberal or intellectual middle class - is still kept in mind. Waugh argues that de Antonio is a "contentist", one who always places the intelligibility of his statements above technological innovation and whose integrity in dealing with historical material makes him a "democratic educator" in the truest sense of the word. In fact, the filmmaker functions as the organizing principle in the arrangement of his material, yet he avoids patronizing strategies such as the voice-over, for example, which suggests to the listeners what they should think. Waugh claims that this documentary argument of the perspectival "see for yourself" method is the exact opposite of a commenting "see it my way" method. ⁷

In addition to the montage of found footage, the interview is one of the most important elements in de Antonio's work. Unlike a typical TV network interview, where brief comments are intended to illustrate a topic, he edits endlessly long interview passages together in such a way that the statements can unfold their significance because of the amount of time given to the interview partners. In "Rush of Judgement" (1966) de Antonio films the New Yorker defense attorney Mark Lane as he questions witnesses of the Kennedy assassination and compares their statements with the official crime report. It is almost breathtaking the way contradictions to the official history emerge in arduous, long-winded conversations. The classic question "Where were you on November 22, 1963?" is answered meticulously. Witnesses remember thinking they heard shots from various guns, but following interrogations by the FBI and in light of the comprehensive media coverage of the one-man assassination theory, they changed their minds ("They reminded me that I was no expert and I had to agree"). Antonio unfurls this process of re-writing perception by confronting the historical television broadcasts with interview passages and Mark Lane's commentaries. Yet it is especially the duration of the interviews, the changing facial expressions of the witnesses, who remember what the FBI has forbidden them to remember, and the accounts from ordinary people filmed in their meager homes, which imbue the document with the quality of a "visual history" that rebels against the official decree and poses resistance where the power apparatus appears to be strongest and most invulnerable.

It is often the voices and their montage with images that provoke the greatest contradictions, achieving new significance with their historical evidence. "In the Year of the Pig" (1968), which was nominated for an Oscar and was one of de Antonio's most commercially successful films next to "Point of Order" and "Painters Painting", is less an emphatic film speaking out against moral wrong, but rather a collaged discourse film. In this film (French) experts expound the colonial history of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh's biography is told, and American politicians are unmasked as false "peacemakers". "The prisoners are not mistreated," claims one US politician, while images are played over this soundtrack that tell exactly the opposite. "In the Year of the Pig" is an analytical view of the Vietnam War, which once again challenges - again through the use of American television images - the authority of the mass medium. As in other films by de Antonio, the arrogance of power is countered by a multitude of voices, whose polyphony decisively contradicts every monolithic or imperial performance of world-political sovereignty.

In 1987, two years before his death, Emile de Antonio faces his audience directly for the first time in a film. He does so for the video re-release of his film "America is Hard to See", which was originally made in 1970, and which he explains and comments on himself seventeen years later. The documentarist speaks directly to the camera: "Now that my own life is nearing its end, I ask myself what has really become of America's liberal spirit?" The film follows the election campaign of Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1968. De Antonio admired McCarthy as a liberal intellectual, who opposed the Vietnam War and promised a new kind of political leadership with his integrity. Needless to say, he ultimately lost against Richard Nixon. Emile de Antonio, however, who was not only a staunch critic but also a patriot and nostalgic for the American spirit of freedom, linked figures like McCarthy to the - ultimately failed - hopes of a "different America". This was not to make the image of America that had become hollow palatable for the rest of the world; instead, it was to insist on a left-wing American self-understanding that has always existed, even though it is often difficult to see both inside and outside America.

 

Translated by Aileen Derieg

 

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