Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America [Hardcover]

Randolph Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2000

    Emile de Antonio (1919–1989) was the most important political filmmaker in the United States during the Cold War. Director of such controversial films as Point of Order (1963), In the Year of the Pig (1969), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), and Mr. Hoover and I (1989), de Antonio lived a remarkable life in dissent.
    De Antonio was a womanizing raconteur, upper-class Marxist, Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy, World War II bomber pilot, and failed English professor, who lived a colorful life even before he stumbled headfirst into the New York art world of the 1950s. "Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De," Andy Warhol said about his friend, who famously drank himself unconscious in Warhol’s film Drink. De Antonio also was important to the early careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, and John Cage. Then, in 1959, de Antonio took on the chance to distribute the Beat film, Pull My Daisy, and discovered filmmaking.
    In the first book on de Antonio’s life and work, Randolph Lewis traces the turbulent development of the filmmaker’s career. Lewis follows de Antonio’s struggle to make films about Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover (under whose direction the FBI compiled a 10,000-page file on de Antonio) and to work with such political allies as Mark Lane, Martin Sheen, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Berrigan, and members of the Weather Underground, whose activities he documented in the film Underground. Blending biography with critical insights about art, literature, and film, Lewis offers de Antonio as a lens to focus on the complex terrain of post-World War II America.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is the first book-length study of an important filmmaker whose "compilation documentary" technique offered a critique of U.S. policy during the Cold War. Splicing archival footage to contemporary interviews, de Antonio created a dialectical tension between past and present. To make sense of these films, Lewis analyzes them in terms of production, reception, text, and context. A professor of American studies, he effectively synthesizes cultural history with film analysis. The result helps readers to understand why the FBI felt it necessary to compile a 10,000-page file on de Antonio and in so doing, adds to our knowledge about both American documentary film and U.S. history. Recommended for libraries that offer strong film collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Except for Robert Flaherty, the anthropologically minded creator of Nanook of the North and Louisiana Story, de Antonio (1919-89) is almost certainly the greatest American documentary filmmaker. Like Flaherty, he declined to film raw reality. But whereas Flaherty re-created events in his subjects' lives, such as the whale shark hunt in Man of Aran, de Antonio's contribution to documentary technique was the manipulation of preexisting footage. He would buy, beg, or "liberate" (i.e., swipe) film from the TV networks, mostly, and either edit it into a new form, as in Point of Order, his deconstruction of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, or marry it to newly made interviews, as in the anti-Vietnam War film In the Year of the Pig. Lewis details how each de Antonio film was made, from finding funding to repaying it from proceeds, which, given the films' radical politics, were often the hardest parts of the process. Yet de Antonio, an honorable blend of art connoisseur, angry leftist, and headstrong individualist, always repaid the loans. A biography worthy of its nonpareil subject. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (October 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299169103
• ISBN-13: 978-0299169107
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,509,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars de Antonio Rules!, May 10, 2001

By 

Thomas Keck (Norman, OK USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Paperback)

I had never even heard of de Antonio, but Randolph Lewis has now sparked my interest in his films, and in American documentary filmmaking more generally. A truly masterful work!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breakthrough book in media studies--loved reading it!, September 15, 2005

By 

Grad student Phil (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Paperback)

It's easy to forget the importance of alternative media figures like de Antonio, but he was Michael Moore before there was Michael Moore (and he did it with an intellectual seriousness that MM can't touch). I read this book in a college class and was blown away: the author writes beautifully (how many academics do that?), he really brings the 60s and 70s alive as we read about Nixon, Ho, Weatherman, the Berrigans, and he shows the importance of using media creatively/politically for cultural critique. If this isn't relevant in the age of Bush, when every media appearance is stage managed like a puppet show, I don't know what is. A must read for anyone interested in the noisy intersection of media and politics. Well done.