E-Mail This Article to a Friend Before Michael Moore The timely tracts of Emile de Antonio at the Harvard Film Archive BY A. S. HAMRAH
	"Cold War Chronicles: The Films of Emile de Antonio" At the Harvard Film Archive September 10 through 29.

This country has recently suffered through the national conventions of both parties, so it’s worth quoting at length something the playwright Arthur Miller, who was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, says in Emile de Antonio’s documentary about Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the Democratic nomination that year, America Is Hard To See (1968; September 24 at 9 p.m. and September 26 at 9:30 p.m.). "No human voice could be raised against this successfully. It is a show. It’s a piece of theater. It’s rehearsed in advance and it takes place in time. There is no place in the convention system for a real discussion of anything. The convention became the farce that it was, namely an elongated stretch of boredom such as I never believed a human being could sustain and still live."

That quote captures much of what de Antonio thought about American politics. For more than a quarter of a century, through 10 documentaries, nine of which play starting Friday at the Harvard Film Archive in a series called "Cold War Chronicles: The Films of Emile de Antonio," he worked doggedly to expose the system’s lies and the emptiness of its rhetoric. Even his film on the Abstract Expressionists and the Pop artists, Painters Painting (1972; September 25 at 7 p.m. and September 29 at 9 p.m.), does that by providing examples of Americans who lived in the same world as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover but lived in it as human beings instead of martinets.

In America Is Hard To See, de Antonio found one politician, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who wasn’t like the others. Initial enthusiasm for McCarthy among the young briefly changed the party. His early success prompted Robert Kennedy to enter the race; Kennedy was assassinated and another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice-president, got the nomination. Humphrey barely lost to Nixon in November.

Since the film also is hard to see (it’s rarely screened), one hopes that John Kerry might take time out from his schedule of windsurfing and not defending himself to watch it in his home town before he becomes the next Hubert Humphrey. De Antonio makes the point that Humphrey was a 1940s-style politician in a 1960s world, a radio performer in a TV age, pre-McLuhan all the way. After you see the movie, you realize that Kerry is a ’60s politician trying to win in the 21st century.

Anyone who longs for change in this country, not just John Kerry, should want to see de Antonio’s films. It’s impossible to dismiss his work the way tonier liberals dismiss Michael Moore. De Antonio made a film about the war in Vietnam while it was raging — In the Year of the Pig (1968; September 10 at 7 p.m., September 12 at 9 p.m., and September 13 at 7 p.m.) — and one about Nixon — Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971; September 24 at 7 p.m. and September 26 at 9 p.m.) — during Nixon’s first term, before the Watergate scandal. "Dee," as his friends called him, was a kind of cinematic early-warning system all his own. His films do without Moore-style stunts and eschew voice-over (which he called "fascistic"). Instead, they put their subjects on trial, using archival footage and the subjects’ own words as witnesses for the prosecution. He doesn’t hang the subjects of his films; he lets them hang themselves.

De Antonio is not afraid to let scenes run much longer than today’s documentarists would. His first film, Point of Order! (1964; September 11 at 7 p.m., September 13 at 9 p.m. and September 14 at 7 p.m.), is a prime example. The public figure is Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it’s one of the most damning portraits of a public figure ever put on film. In 90 minutes, without voice-over, Point of Order! culls the 200 hours of network-television footage shot during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings into a chamber play as morbidly fascinating as the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens. In fact, with its decayed black-and-white kinescope look, the film might be called Gray Ghosts. Under de Antonio’s gaze, McCarthy struts and frets his TV hours until his face becomes a book wherein you can read strange matters. Paranoiac, delusional, McCarthy becomes increasingly macabre. He is defeated by the senators examining him and by Joseph Welch, the Boston lawyer acting as counsel for the US Army, but de Antonio identifies his defeat as the moment in our history when deranged McCarthy-style offensives became part of the Republican Party’s DNA.

Mr. Hoover and I (1989; September 11 at 9 p.m. and September 15 at 9 p.m.), de Antonio’s last film and an eloquent summation of his life and work as seen through the file J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept on him, ends with some words about George H.W. Bush, who was president when the film was made. This message to the future reminds us that de Antonio’s films are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and ’70s, and just as needed. Today’s Republicans go out of their way to insist that the GOP is the party of Ronald Reagan, but after seeing de Antonio’s films, you realize that it’s the party of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover — de Antonio’s obsessions, his main villains. He has located the end of American democracy in these three figures. Sneaks, liars, and hypocrites who would be at home in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, all three were smear specialists. They owed what power they had to their ability to make the population as paranoid as they were, to their ability to instill fear — of pinkos, the Vietnamese, the Russians, "subversives," anyone who didn’t see things their way.