Chris Knipp
07-25-2010, 01:46 AM
Emile de Antonio: MR. HOOVER AND I (1989)
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/537/kfGfmU.jpg
Films of the Radical Saint: Mr. de Antonio and I
by Chris Knipp
My father once taught at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. One night when I was eight or nine he gave a party at our house on Capital Landing Road and a young colleague got drunk and drove his car through the big piece of canvas stretched over our driveway that I used as a tent. His wife came back and got the canvas later and sewed it back together, but I always thought of that guy from my point of view as a little boy whose tent got wrecked as a very bad man. My father called him "de Antonio." His first name was Emile. It was an unusual name. I never forgot it. I gather that from my father's point of view, he was a good drinking companion.
Many years later I heard about an Emile de Antonio who had become a legendary radical leftist documentary filmmaker. To my surprise he was the same man. If you hunt around in his biography (http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Co-Du/de-Antonio-Emile.html) it's there: for a couple years he taught English and philosophy at William and Mary. In later years his friends and his six wives called him "De." In the last year of his life, 1989, he still said that he drank too much. He said that in Mr. Hoover and I, released in that final year, a kind of credo and brief autobiography along with a statement about J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and freedom and politics in the United States of America, a country for which he declares his love. If you watch this film you will understand what a sterling character this drunken driver was, and you'll understand why 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.
Mostly Mr. Hoover and I is de Antonio talking to the camera. He's also shown giving a large lecture at Dartmouth, having his hair cut by his wife Nancy, and chatting with John Cage ( dear friend and also a major influence) in Cage's kitchen in New York.
"De" made a whole string of films about the most important issues of his time as he saw them. He was a late bloomer: he didn't begin making them until he was 43 years old, but his twenty years of intensive film work created a lasting legacy about the central issues of American politics in the Cold War era. The most notable ones are: Point of Order (1964, about Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism), Rush to Judgment (1967, about the JFK assassination), In the Year of the Pig (1968, about the Vietnam War), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971, about Nixon), Painters Painting (1972, about the New York art scene), Underground (1976, about the Weather Underground), and the aforementioned Mr. Hoover and I (1989). These films are all readily available now on DVD, four of them in a set (see above), entitled "Films of the Radical Saint."
De Antonio went to New York after Virginia and got involved in various get-rich schemes. He also hung out with artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Cage, and with Jonas Mekas and avant garde filmmakers of the Fifties and Sixties. He came from an upper middle class background (and graduated from Harvard, where my father studied for a time; but de Antonio entered Harvard at sixteen) and consorted with wealthy people friendly to his leftist politics who became his patrons. "I came from a background of privilege, people with money. And people with money put up the money for my films. I never applied to the Foundations or the networks," he told Bruce Jackson in a running interview reproduced in Senses of Cinema. (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/emile_de_antonio.html) Toward the end of Mr. Hoover and I he eloquently explains with extraordinary clarity and eloquence why documentary filmmaking is a beautiful and important form in which to work -- and defines the word politics in his own special terms, as working for social change, a process he says was crushed at the end of the Sixties, but that he thinks then, in 1989, is going to come back, but in a new manifestation, because history never repeats itself in exactly the same form.
De Antonio almost got put in a detention camp in WWII because Hoover had been following him since he was sixteen at Harvard and joined three communist organizations. (That would have been in 1935.) He avoided detention, and served in the Air Force. Over the following years the FBI assembled ten thousand pages on "De." No wonder when he came to tell the story of his life and declare his principles on film, he called it Mr. Hoover and I. This is a simple film, without music, without illustrative clips, edited almost in free-association form. But it packs a wallop. This was a man of courage and conviction who made films that matter.
Glad to have met you, "De" -- even if the circumstances were unpropitious.
_________________________
There is a place online (http://www.buscatube.com/videos-1/emile-de/ihpi1H2D8gM?emile-de-antonio-on-the-making-of-mr-hoover-and-i-%28part-1%29") where you can watch de Antonio interviewed about Hoover and I, along with excerpts from the film.
According to Thomas Waugh, writing (http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC10-11folder/EmileDeAntonio.html) in 1976 ("Beyond verité: Emile de Antonio and the new documentary of the 70s"), "radical saint" was a title given to de Antonio by Rolling Stone. Waugh was writing on the occasion of a retrospective of de Antonio's "beyond vérité" documentaries at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in that year; de Antonio rejected the claims and mannerisms of "cinéma-vérité."
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/3069/96706242.jpg
Emile de Antonio with Jean-Michel Basquiat
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/537/kfGfmU.jpg
Films of the Radical Saint: Mr. de Antonio and I
by Chris Knipp
My father once taught at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. One night when I was eight or nine he gave a party at our house on Capital Landing Road and a young colleague got drunk and drove his car through the big piece of canvas stretched over our driveway that I used as a tent. His wife came back and got the canvas later and sewed it back together, but I always thought of that guy from my point of view as a little boy whose tent got wrecked as a very bad man. My father called him "de Antonio." His first name was Emile. It was an unusual name. I never forgot it. I gather that from my father's point of view, he was a good drinking companion.
Many years later I heard about an Emile de Antonio who had become a legendary radical leftist documentary filmmaker. To my surprise he was the same man. If you hunt around in his biography (http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Co-Du/de-Antonio-Emile.html) it's there: for a couple years he taught English and philosophy at William and Mary. In later years his friends and his six wives called him "De." In the last year of his life, 1989, he still said that he drank too much. He said that in Mr. Hoover and I, released in that final year, a kind of credo and brief autobiography along with a statement about J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and freedom and politics in the United States of America, a country for which he declares his love. If you watch this film you will understand what a sterling character this drunken driver was, and you'll understand why 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.
Mostly Mr. Hoover and I is de Antonio talking to the camera. He's also shown giving a large lecture at Dartmouth, having his hair cut by his wife Nancy, and chatting with John Cage ( dear friend and also a major influence) in Cage's kitchen in New York.
"De" made a whole string of films about the most important issues of his time as he saw them. He was a late bloomer: he didn't begin making them until he was 43 years old, but his twenty years of intensive film work created a lasting legacy about the central issues of American politics in the Cold War era. The most notable ones are: Point of Order (1964, about Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism), Rush to Judgment (1967, about the JFK assassination), In the Year of the Pig (1968, about the Vietnam War), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971, about Nixon), Painters Painting (1972, about the New York art scene), Underground (1976, about the Weather Underground), and the aforementioned Mr. Hoover and I (1989). These films are all readily available now on DVD, four of them in a set (see above), entitled "Films of the Radical Saint."
De Antonio went to New York after Virginia and got involved in various get-rich schemes. He also hung out with artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Cage, and with Jonas Mekas and avant garde filmmakers of the Fifties and Sixties. He came from an upper middle class background (and graduated from Harvard, where my father studied for a time; but de Antonio entered Harvard at sixteen) and consorted with wealthy people friendly to his leftist politics who became his patrons. "I came from a background of privilege, people with money. And people with money put up the money for my films. I never applied to the Foundations or the networks," he told Bruce Jackson in a running interview reproduced in Senses of Cinema. (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/emile_de_antonio.html) Toward the end of Mr. Hoover and I he eloquently explains with extraordinary clarity and eloquence why documentary filmmaking is a beautiful and important form in which to work -- and defines the word politics in his own special terms, as working for social change, a process he says was crushed at the end of the Sixties, but that he thinks then, in 1989, is going to come back, but in a new manifestation, because history never repeats itself in exactly the same form.
De Antonio almost got put in a detention camp in WWII because Hoover had been following him since he was sixteen at Harvard and joined three communist organizations. (That would have been in 1935.) He avoided detention, and served in the Air Force. Over the following years the FBI assembled ten thousand pages on "De." No wonder when he came to tell the story of his life and declare his principles on film, he called it Mr. Hoover and I. This is a simple film, without music, without illustrative clips, edited almost in free-association form. But it packs a wallop. This was a man of courage and conviction who made films that matter.
Glad to have met you, "De" -- even if the circumstances were unpropitious.
_________________________
There is a place online (http://www.buscatube.com/videos-1/emile-de/ihpi1H2D8gM?emile-de-antonio-on-the-making-of-mr-hoover-and-i-%28part-1%29") where you can watch de Antonio interviewed about Hoover and I, along with excerpts from the film.
According to Thomas Waugh, writing (http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC10-11folder/EmileDeAntonio.html) in 1976 ("Beyond verité: Emile de Antonio and the new documentary of the 70s"), "radical saint" was a title given to de Antonio by Rolling Stone. Waugh was writing on the occasion of a retrospective of de Antonio's "beyond vérité" documentaries at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in that year; de Antonio rejected the claims and mannerisms of "cinéma-vérité."
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/3069/96706242.jpg
Emile de Antonio with Jean-Michel Basquiat