Emile de Antonio: A Reader

by Douglas Kellner, Daniel G. Streible

Innovative documentary filmmaker; friend of Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other leading figures of the New York art world; radical leftist critic of the Establishment; and legendary bon Emile de Antonio (1919-1989) was a larger-than-life personality and a key figure in the development of post-war American cinema. The films de Antonio made between 1963 and 1989 -- including Point of Order, Rush to Judgment, In the Year of the Pig, Painters Painting, and A White Comedy -- revolutionized the documentary format and inspired a generation of artists and filmmakers. A decade after his death, his cinematic legacy -- ranging from the brilliantly edited compilation of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that helped construct Senator Joseph McCarthy's reputation as a rogue demagogue (Point of Order) to a meditative juxtaposition of documents about F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and intimate footage drawn from the filmmaker's own life (Mr. Hoover and I) -- remains unparalleled in American documentary film. Emile de A Reader is the first full-length volume devoted to this major American filmmaker. It collects interviews with and writings by de Antonio; reviews and other critical material that detail the genesis, production history, and reception of his films; a comprehensive filmography; and an in-depth biographical essay. Offering a long overdue assessment of de Antonio's career, this indispensable book also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of American independent cinema at its most politically engaged.

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Douglas Kellner is a "third generation" critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally.[citation needed] In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society.

Kellner has written with a number of authors, including (with Steven Best) an award-winning trilogy of books on postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and in science and technology. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Previously, Kellner served as the literary executor of the famed documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is presently overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. At present, Kellner is the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.