EMILE DE ANTONIO
Radical American Filmmaker
Online
Articles and Resources
"An
Interview with Emile De Antoino"/ reverseshot.com
Emile de Antonio as a role model? Yeah. He was and remains so. This dawned on me as I was getting ready to interview him for an article I wrote in the late Eighties. I met him over 20 years earlier in Boston at a screening of his film, Point of Order. After the obligatory Q&A before a crowd of assorted disaffected pinkos from Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis, I gave him a ride to the airport. In the course of a fortuitous traffic jam I was dazzled by his articulate soliloquy on film, politics, and art.
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"A Conversation with Emile de Antonio" / Sense of Cinema
My films are a kind of history of the United States in the days of the Cold War. They are episodic disjunctive histories. They're not like a written history which moves magisterially from the beginning to the end. They're chaotic; they're made by a chaotic person and his interests. You have McCarthy, you have the death of Kennedy, you have the war in Vietnam, you have Nixon, you have the Weather Underground, you have the Christian Left.
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"Nixon's Michael Moore" / Slate.com
De Antonio's name has barely been uttered in the clangor surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11, but from 1964 until his death in 1989, he made some of the left's most important political documentaries—including a 1971 film that took direct aim at a sitting chief executive, Richard Nixon. Millhouse: A White Comedy attacked Nixon as a red-baiter, a warmonger, and a phony who deviously manipulated his way into the White House. (De Antonio said he deliberately misspelled Nixon's middle name, Milhous, to make a pun, suggesting that a millhouse sounds heavy and burdensome, like the Nixon presidency.) The film was the Fahrenheit 9/11 of its day: delightful to the president's sworn foes, troubling to the White House, but in all likelihood bound, ultimately, for the status of historical curiosity.
Continue reading...
SFMOMA's "The Films of Emile de Antonio"/ sf360.org
Once in a while, history shuffles the deck of reputation and deals out a hand that revises the outcome of the game entirely. And if ever a filmmaker deserved a new deal, it's the late great Emile de Antonio, whose documentary legacy has been unjustly overshadowed by current genre approaches. As an SFMOMA retrospective (opening on Jan. 5) makes clear, de Antonio's documentaries are a different species entirely from the kind of celebrity-driven, headline (or animal) chasing theatricals now in favor. De Antonio favored argument, instead, along with logic, research, and intelligence; and he trusted his audience to think the right thing. How quaint: He's the OG of documentary.
Continue reading...
"Shooting to Kill"/ Village Voice
A self-described "anarchist" and proto-YouTuber, a khaki-clad confidant of the Weather Underground and a buddy to New York modernists from Warhol to Rauschenberg, Emile de Antonio loved American culture; he also lived to distrust American history. Still, blessed with a healthy measure of bravado, the filmmaker wouldn't likely dispute the more or less official story—at least among cineasts—that he remains the boldest documentarian the U.S. has ever produced. To his credit, this radical auteur, who died along with the Cold War in the late '80s, never came close to winning an Oscar; instead, de Antonio's awards include a District Court subpoena, the title role in Warhol's unscreened Drunk, and a high-ranking spot on J. Edgar Hoover's shit list.
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"Emile de Antonio and John Cage Interview"/ Poetry in Motion (Out-takes)
John Cage: One of the things I am kind of sad about living in the city is that I don’t get to hunt mushrooms the way I did out in Rockwood county.
Emile de Antonio: And that was a dangerous sport, wasn’t it?
John Cage: Yes, but delightful.
Emile de Antonio: I remember taking you to the hospital.
Continue reading...
Emile de Antonio as a role model? Yeah. He was and remains so. This dawned on me as I was getting ready to interview him for an article I wrote in the late Eighties. I met him over 20 years earlier in Boston at a screening of his film, Point of Order. After the obligatory Q&A before a crowd of assorted disaffected pinkos from Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis, I gave him a ride to the airport. In the course of a fortuitous traffic jam I was dazzled by his articulate soliloquy on film, politics, and art.
Continue reading...
"A Conversation with Emile de Antonio" / Sense of Cinema
My films are a kind of history of the United States in the days of the Cold War. They are episodic disjunctive histories. They're not like a written history which moves magisterially from the beginning to the end. They're chaotic; they're made by a chaotic person and his interests. You have McCarthy, you have the death of Kennedy, you have the war in Vietnam, you have Nixon, you have the Weather Underground, you have the Christian Left.
Continue reading...
"Nixon's Michael Moore" / Slate.com
De Antonio's name has barely been uttered in the clangor surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11, but from 1964 until his death in 1989, he made some of the left's most important political documentaries—including a 1971 film that took direct aim at a sitting chief executive, Richard Nixon. Millhouse: A White Comedy attacked Nixon as a red-baiter, a warmonger, and a phony who deviously manipulated his way into the White House. (De Antonio said he deliberately misspelled Nixon's middle name, Milhous, to make a pun, suggesting that a millhouse sounds heavy and burdensome, like the Nixon presidency.) The film was the Fahrenheit 9/11 of its day: delightful to the president's sworn foes, troubling to the White House, but in all likelihood bound, ultimately, for the status of historical curiosity.
Continue reading...
SFMOMA's "The Films of Emile de Antonio"/ sf360.org
Once in a while, history shuffles the deck of reputation and deals out a hand that revises the outcome of the game entirely. And if ever a filmmaker deserved a new deal, it's the late great Emile de Antonio, whose documentary legacy has been unjustly overshadowed by current genre approaches. As an SFMOMA retrospective (opening on Jan. 5) makes clear, de Antonio's documentaries are a different species entirely from the kind of celebrity-driven, headline (or animal) chasing theatricals now in favor. De Antonio favored argument, instead, along with logic, research, and intelligence; and he trusted his audience to think the right thing. How quaint: He's the OG of documentary.
Continue reading...
"Shooting to Kill"/ Village Voice
A self-described "anarchist" and proto-YouTuber, a khaki-clad confidant of the Weather Underground and a buddy to New York modernists from Warhol to Rauschenberg, Emile de Antonio loved American culture; he also lived to distrust American history. Still, blessed with a healthy measure of bravado, the filmmaker wouldn't likely dispute the more or less official story—at least among cineasts—that he remains the boldest documentarian the U.S. has ever produced. To his credit, this radical auteur, who died along with the Cold War in the late '80s, never came close to winning an Oscar; instead, de Antonio's awards include a District Court subpoena, the title role in Warhol's unscreened Drunk, and a high-ranking spot on J. Edgar Hoover's shit list.
Continue reading...
"Emile de Antonio and John Cage Interview"/ Poetry in Motion (Out-takes)
John Cage: One of the things I am kind of sad about living in the city is that I don’t get to hunt mushrooms the way I did out in Rockwood county.
Emile de Antonio: And that was a dangerous sport, wasn’t it?
John Cage: Yes, but delightful.
Emile de Antonio: I remember taking you to the hospital.
Continue reading...