Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America

Emile de Antonio (1919-1989) was an 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, WWII bomber pilot and failed professor, who lived a colourful life even before he joined the New York art world of the 1950s, where he worked with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg and John Cage. "Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De", Andy Warhol said about his friend, who famously drank himself unconscisous in Warhol's film "Drink". In 1959, de Antonio agreed to distribute the classic Beat film, "Pull My Daisy", and discovered filmmaking. Randolph Lewis traces the turbulent development of the filmmaker's career, following de Antonio's struggle to make films about Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI compiled a 10,000-page file on de Antonio) and to work with such political allies as Mark Lane, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Berrigan and the Weather 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.