Screening Room with Emile de Antonio

2015

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Summary

Emile de Antonio (1919-1989), one of America's most influential political and avant-garde filmmakers, started making documentary films in the mid-1960s, and all his work had wide success in theatrical release. His often-controversial work focuses on the United States during the Cold War and sharply criticizes American institutions and government officials. Films on Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the conduct of the Vietnam War led to de Antonio's becoming the object of FBI surveillance. De Antonio was also involved with the New York art world of the 1960s, which he documented in Painters Painting. Along with visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, Emile de Antonio appeared on Screening Room in June 1973 to screen and discuss excerpts from his films Point of Order, Rush to Judgement, In the Year of the Pig and Millhouse: A White Comedy. About the Screening Room series In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980. Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).