Before Michael Moore The timely tracts of Emile de Antonio at the Harvard Film Archive BY A. S. HAMRAH
	"Cold War Chronicles: The Films of Emile de Antonio" At the Harvard Film Archive September 10 through 29.

This country has recently suffered through the national conventions of both parties, so it’s worth quoting at length something the playwright Arthur Miller, who was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, says in Emile de Antonio’s documentary about Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the Democratic nomination that year, America Is Hard To See (1968; September 24 at 9 p.m. and September 26 at 9:30 p.m.). "No human voice could be raised against this successfully. It is a show. It’s a piece of theater. It’s rehearsed in advance and it takes place in time. There is no place in the convention system for a real discussion of anything. The convention became the farce that it was, namely an elongated stretch of boredom such as I never believed a human being could sustain and still live."

That quote captures much of what de Antonio thought about American politics. For more than a quarter of a century, through 10 documentaries, nine of which play starting Friday at the Harvard Film Archive in a series called "Cold War Chronicles: The Films of Emile de Antonio," he worked doggedly to expose the system’s lies and the emptiness of its rhetoric. Even his film on the Abstract Expressionists and the Pop artists, Painters Painting (1972; September 25 at 7 p.m. and September 29 at 9 p.m.), does that by providing examples of Americans who lived in the same world as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover but lived in it as human beings instead of martinets.

In America Is Hard To See, de Antonio found one politician, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who wasn’t like the others. Initial enthusiasm for McCarthy among the young briefly changed the party. His early success prompted Robert Kennedy to enter the race; Kennedy was assassinated and another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice-president, got the nomination. Humphrey barely lost to Nixon in November.

Since the film also is hard to see (it’s rarely screened), one hopes that John Kerry might take time out from his schedule of windsurfing and not defending himself to watch it in his home town before he becomes the next Hubert Humphrey. De Antonio makes the point that Humphrey was a 1940s-style politician in a 1960s world, a radio performer in a TV age, pre-McLuhan all the way. After you see the movie, you realize that Kerry is a ’60s politician trying to win in the 21st century.

Anyone who longs for change in this country, not just John Kerry, should want to see de Antonio’s films. It’s impossible to dismiss his work the way tonier liberals dismiss Michael Moore. De Antonio made a film about the war in Vietnam while it was raging — In the Year of the Pig (1968; September 10 at 7 p.m., September 12 at 9 p.m., and September 13 at 7 p.m.) — and one about Nixon — Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971; September 24 at 7 p.m. and September 26 at 9 p.m.) — during Nixon’s first term, before the Watergate scandal. "Dee," as his friends called him, was a kind of cinematic early-warning system all his own. His films do without Moore-style stunts and eschew voice-over (which he called "fascistic"). Instead, they put their subjects on trial, using archival footage and the subjects’ own words as witnesses for the prosecution. He doesn’t hang the subjects of his films; he lets them hang themselves.

De Antonio is not afraid to let scenes run much longer than today’s documentarists would. His first film, Point of Order! (1964; September 11 at 7 p.m., September 13 at 9 p.m. and September 14 at 7 p.m.), is a prime example. The public figure is Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it’s one of the most damning portraits of a public figure ever put on film. In 90 minutes, without voice-over, Point of Order! culls the 200 hours of network-television footage shot during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings into a chamber play as morbidly fascinating as the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens. In fact, with its decayed black-and-white kinescope look, the film might be called Gray Ghosts. Under de Antonio’s gaze, McCarthy struts and frets his TV hours until his face becomes a book wherein you can read strange matters. Paranoiac, delusional, McCarthy becomes increasingly macabre. He is defeated by the senators examining him and by Joseph Welch, the Boston lawyer acting as counsel for the US Army, but de Antonio identifies his defeat as the moment in our history when deranged McCarthy-style offensives became part of the Republican Party’s DNA.

Mr. Hoover and I (1989; September 11 at 9 p.m. and September 15 at 9 p.m.), de Antonio’s last film and an eloquent summation of his life and work as seen through the file J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept on him, ends with some words about George H.W. Bush, who was president when the film was made. This message to the future reminds us that de Antonio’s films are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and ’70s, and just as needed. Today’s Republicans go out of their way to insist that the GOP is the party of Ronald Reagan, but after seeing de Antonio’s films, you realize that it’s the party of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover — de Antonio’s obsessions, his main villains. He has located the end of American democracy in these three figures. Sneaks, liars, and hypocrites who would be at home in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, all three were smear specialists. They owed what power they had to their ability to make the population as paranoid as they were, to their ability to instill fear — of pinkos, the Vietnamese, the Russians, "subversives," anyone who didn’t see things their way.

In Millhouse, de Antonio states explicitly that President Nixon was a wax figure, a stiff. To him, Nixon is a bad actor, someone who owes his success to an incident from a fairy tale, the discovery of microfilm in a pumpkin during the Alger Hiss case. Like Joe McCarthy, Nixon was willing to smear his opponents, even his Republican opponents, by implying that they were Communists. Many of Nixon’s weird speeches are included in Millhouse. "I have never canceled a subscription to a newspaper," he bizarrely tells reporters after his defeat in a California election. "Haven’t we got a wonderful candidate for the presidency of the United States," he says about Eisenhower, sucking up to his boss while running for vice-president by putting an emphasis on the word "wonderful" that makes the skin crawl. Apropos of God knows what, Nixon says somewhere else, "We must do everything we possibly can to preserve humor." De Antonio includes a Bob Hope tribute to Nixon that includes footage of an uncomfortable president on the receiving end of a what amounts to a lap dance from one of Hope’s go-go dancers. It’s a scene that depicts the awkward, repressed sexuality of the de Antonio villains, a subject never far from his vision of them.

Watching Nixon deliver a heartfelt tribute to bandleader Guy Lombardo makes people’s reasons for supporting this kind of politician more understandable. De Antonio’s subjects emerge out of a gray murk, a desperate America, like the people in Robert Frank’s photographs. It makes sense that de Antonio got his 1958 start in filmmaking as the distributor of Frank’s movie Pull My Daisy. He’d been an artist’s representative for painters in New York before that. Interviewed in Painters Painting, Warhol claims that de Antonio got him to abandon commercial illustration and take up painting, and elsewhere Warhol has claimed that de Antonio gave him the idea to make films himself (which he began doing before de Antonio did).

The eyewitnesses to John Kennedy’s assassination in Rush to Judgment (1967; September 10 at 9 p.m. and September 12 at 7 p.m.) could be the subjects of either Frank’s photos or Warhol’s mug-shot paintings. De Antonio films people the way Warhol paints electric chairs and traffic accidents. His style is the arty-meets-pulpy style familiar from Warhol, a kind of National-Enquirer-on-16mm look that denudes both the medium and its subjects. People in his films are drained of their personalities so that de Antonio can get to the truth of their character. It’s a cheap look, and as de Antonio reminds us in Mr. Hoover, cheap to artists means freedom.

Sometimes this approach backfires. In the King of Prussia (1982; September 28 at 9 p.m.) is de Antonio’s experimental video about the Plowshares Eight, a group led by Father Daniel Berrigan who broke into a GE plant in Pennsylvania and poured either blood or red paint (it wasn’t clear from the film) on nuclear warheads; it comes off more as a criticism of Berrigan than as a testament to his ideas. Stripped by the camera, Berrigan is reduced to Nixon level. De Antonio inadvertently shows him as a guy with a bad haircut, a slight, fey combination of Boris Karloff and Tony Perkins, self-righteous and self-consciously gentle. When he’s given a harsh, unjust prison sentence for what he did, it seems more as if the judge (played by Martin Sheen in re-enactment) were punishing him for being annoying.

Painters Painting offers up words and images that counter the society of de Antonio movies like In the Year of the Pig. If the war in Vietnam was started for reasons as bogus as the excuses that started the war in Iraq, it’s because American power no longer has any sense of scale. The painters de Antonio interviews, and whose work he shows leaning against walls in their studios, all testify to the primacy of content and meaning and of things placed in environments. Barnet Newman tells de Antonio that though his paintings may be large, it’s scale and not size that counts. The paintings aren’t decorations, they have to be encountered the way one encounters people. De Antonio’s films are shot through with this idea. He deplores altered photographs introduced as evidence, he hates people who have been "absorbed by the medium." In Mr. Hoover and I, which he made a year before his death, he implies that he ("I talk too much, I drink too much, I’ve been married six times") knows how to live and that J. Edgar Hoover forced a way of life on this country that was akin to death. It’s hard to argue with that now.