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 vivant: 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 Millhouse: 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 Antonio: 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.

Emile de Antonio (1919–1989) was the most 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, World War II bomber pilot, and failed English professor, who lived a colorful life even before he stumbled headfirst into the New York art world of the 1950s. "Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De," Andy Warhol said about his friend, who famously drank himself unconscious in Warhol’s film Drink. De Antonio also was important to the early careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, and John Cage. Then, in 1959, de Antonio took on the chance to distribute the Beat film, Pull My Daisy, and discovered filmmaking. In the first book on de Antonio’s life and work, Randolph Lewis traces the turbulent development of the filmmaker’s career. Lewis follows de Antonio’s struggle to make films about Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover (under whose direction the FBI compiled a 10,000-page file on de Antonio) and to work with such political allies as Mark Lane, Martin Sheen, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Berrigan, and members of the Weather Underground, whose activities he documented in the film 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.

Artists including Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell discuss the postwar art scene.

Discussions of “committed” documentary by a “committed” historian of film.

Publisher Description

A rare look at Spike Lee’s creative appropriation of the documentary film genre. In this groundbreaking book, Delphine Letort sheds light on a neglected part of Spike Lee’s filmmaking by offering a rare look at his creative engagement with the genre of documentary filmmaking. Ranging from history to sports and music, Lee has tackled a diversity of topics in such nonfiction films as 4 Little Girls, A Huey P. Newton Story, Jim Brown: All-American, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Letort analyzes the narrative and aesthetic discourses that structure these films and calls attention to Lee’s technical skills and narrative-framing devices. Drawing on film and media studies, African American studies, and cultural theories, she examines the sociological value of Lee’s investigations into contemporary culture and also explores the ethics of his commitment to a genre characterized by its claim to truth. “The Spike Lee Brand makes a very important contribution to scholarly studies on the film-work of Spike Lee [and] places Lee in the pantheon of important social political documentarians such as Claude Lanzmann and Emile de Antonio.” — from the Foreword by Mark A. Reid

Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introductory essay that explains its design and provides critical context. Painstakingly selected from the archives of more than a hundred years of cinema practice and theory, the essays, reviews, interviews, manifestos, and ephemera gathered in this volume suit the needs and interests of the beginning student, the advanced scholar, the casual reader, and the working documentarian.

In more than twenty powerful films, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has waged a brilliant battle against the ignorance and stereotypes that Native Americans have long endured in cinema and television. In this book, the first devoted to any Native filmmaker, Obomsawin receives her due as the central figure in the development of indigenous media in North America. ø Incorporating history, politics, and film theory into a compelling narrative, Randolph Lewis explores the life and work of a multifaceted woman whose career was flourishing long before Native films such as Smoke Signals reached the screen. He traces Obomsawin?s path from an impoverished Abenaki reserve in the 1930s to bohemian Montreal in the 1960s, where she first found fame as a traditional storyteller and singer. Lewis follows her career as a celebrated documentary filmmaker, citing her courage in covering, at great personal risk, the 1991 Oka Crisis between Mohawk warriors and Canadian soldiers. We see how, since the late 1960s, Obomsawin has transformed documentary film, reshaping it for the first time into a crucial forum for sharing indigenous perspectives. Through a careful examination of her work, Lewis proposes a new vision for indigenous media around the globe: a ?cinema of sovereignty? based on what Obomsawin has accomplished.

VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. -- Publisher description.