E-Mail This Article to a Friend Before Michael Moore (continued)

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.