Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order! (1963)

Floor Three, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Directed by Emile de Antonio (1919–1989), 16mm, b/w, 97 minutes. This screening will be introduced by Donna De Salvo, Deputy Director for International Initiatives and Senior Curator.

After its successful debut at the first New York Film Festival, Point of Order! got a distribution deal (and an exclamation point). Rookie director de Antonio and his producer abstained from watching CBS' one hundred and eighty-eight hours of kinescopes showing the 1954 Army–McCarthy senate hearings, and then spent three years culling the footage down to ninety-seven minutes. A too-conventional cut narrated by Mike Wallace was junked, and de Antonio supervised the innovative final version edited by neophyte Robert Duncan in his East Village apartment. Best known for its shunning of voice-over narration, the film actually begins with a minute of nothing but a narrator's voice (de Antonio himself) explaining: "Everything you are about to see actually happened."

This three-day screening series highlights the films of Emile de Antonio, one of the most important political filmmakers in the United States during the Cold War. The program is co-organized by Donna De Salvo, Deputy Director for International Initiatives and Senior Curator, and Laura Poitras as part of a series of public events, lectures, and talks organized in tandem with ​Laura Poitras: Astro Noise​. All notes and descriptions are adapted from Anthology Film Archives program notes, written by Dan Streible, co-editor of Emile de Antonio: A Reader.

Tickets are required ($10 adults, $8 members, students, and seniors). Capacity is limited; visitors are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance.