As home to a thriving community of documentary filmmakers, the Bay Area is ideally situated for a revival of the work of Emile de Antonio, a towering figure in the field who brought a new level of artistry to compilation filmmaking with his classic Point of Order. This reworking of the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954 kicks off the film series, which runs through February 28, 2008 at the Phyllis Wattis Theater at SFMOMA.
The vigorous and often vicious pursuit of suspected Communists in the 1950s has turned into the stuff of legend in the US — meaning, of course, that it has spawned countless books, plays, and films. Most creative explorations of these fevered investigations fueled by fear, uncertainty, and paranoia have focused on the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), particularly since HUAC was responsible for hounding Hollywood into blacklisting over 300 artists. But that junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was the public face of the hunt for Communists for many Americans, and he remains an enduring symbol of smear tactics and fear mongering in a nation whose political scene has come to be largely dominated by those tactics.
In 1954, the McCarthy machine came head to head with the US Army, when the Army charged that McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn had tried to pressure the Army into giving preferential treatment to a former aide-turned-private, G. David Schine. McCarthy responded that the Army was holding Schine “hostage” to keep his committee from exposing Communists within the military. The Senate hearings on the charges opened on April 22, 1954 and lasted for 36 days, televised in their entirety to a national audience. In Point of Order, de Antonio takes the nearly 190 hours of footage produced from the hearings and distills them into 93 minutes.
Presented without voiceover or commentary, Point of Order gives form and perspective to what could be called the greatest courtroom drama caught on film. De Antonio opens the film by introducing us to the colorful cast of characters in the room representing the Army and the Committee, showing a freeze frame of each individual accompanied by a speech demonstrating their contribution. Fascinatingly, he does not introduce McCarthy — this is a man who needs no introduction — and his arrival on screen elicited actual hissing from the audience at the screening I attended last Saturday. De Antonio shows each argument from the hearings organized by topic, presenting each one as if it is an uninterrupted conversation. It is amazingly seamless to watch, despite subtle changes in outfit and atmosphere as the conversation leaps from day to day within seconds.
