Emile de Antonio

Emile de Antonio (1919 – December 16, 1989) was a director and producer of documentary films, usually detailing political or social events circa 1960s - 1980s. He was born in 1919 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended Harvard with John F. Kennedy and would later go on to make a film about Kennedy's assassination called Rush to Judgment. After serving in the military during World War II, de Antonio frequented the art crowd, often associating with such Pop artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, in whose film Drink de Antonio appears. De Antonio chronicled this art scene in his documentary Painters Painting (1972).

In 1959 de Antonio developed G-String Productions in order to distribute the Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy. It was at this time that de Antonio discovered filmmaking. His first film, Point of Order, a compilation film made in 1964, regards Joseph McCarthy and the Army-McCarthy hearings.

De Antonio went on to make many politically motivated films that attracted a substantial amount of controversy and also tended to align himself with Marxist thought. Most, if not all, of his films criticize aspects of American culture or politics or reflect a certain degree of political dissension, because of which, along with his Marxist affiliation, the FBI documented 10,000 pages of de Antonio's activities.

Filmography

• Point of Order (1964)
• McCarthy: Death of a Witch Hunter (1964)
• Rush to Judgment (1967)
• America Is Hard to See (1968)
• In the Year of the Pig (1968)
• Charge and Countercharge (1969)
• Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971)
• Painters Painting (1972)
• Underground (1976)
• In The King of Prussia (1982)
• Mr. Hoover and I (1989)

Discography

• Underground (1976) with Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler with the Weather Underground on Folkways Records
• Millhouse (Original Soundtrack of Film on Richard Nixon) (1979) on Folkways Records

Further Notes

The book Necessary Illusions (1989) by Noam Chomsky and the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick are dedicated to Emile de Antonio.

Further reading

• Kellner, Douglas and Dan Streible, eds., Emile de Antonio: A Reader (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
• Lewis, Randolph. Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Madison, WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

External links

• An interview with Emile de Antonio conducted by Bruce Jackson
• Emile de Antonio's IMDB page
• Charge and Countercharge (1969) for educational purchase
• Reverse Shot interview with Emile de Antonio conducted by Sam Szurek
• Discography of Emile de Antonio