Radical Scavenging: An Interview with Emile de Antonio

Abstract

Emile de Antonio is a former longshoreman, art impresario, and college philosophy professor who, at the age of 40, began to produce and direct some remarkable American political films: Point of Order, about the Army-McCarthy hearings of the mid-fifties; Rush to Judgment, on the assassination of President Kennedy and the subsequent Warren Report; America Is Hard to See, about the Eugene McCarthy campaign; and In the Year of the Pig, on America's involvement in Vietnam. His new film, Millhouse: A White Comedy, is about a man named Nixon. In many ways, de Antonio has created a whole new genre of political documentary films-halfway between objective history (whatever that is) and propaganda-and a whole new style he describes as radical scavenging: searching through hundreds of hours of television out-takes, say, in order to locate the one short sequence necessary for the development of the didactic message. In the interview below, which was stitched together from several hectic days of conversations in Bellingham, Wash., and to which he has added a few later remarks, de Antonio discusses his work, his politics, the American documentary, the dilemma of the revolutionary artist, and some future projects.