Biography for
Emile de Antonio More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

1920, Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA

Date of Death

15 December 1989, New York City, New York, USA

Mini Biography

The son of a wealthy physician, Emile de Antonio's childhood in the tough coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, nevertheless made a deep impression on him. His sympathies were always with working-class people (although he was a Harvard graduate, he was at times a dock worker, a peddler, the captain of a river barge and a broker in war-surplus equipment), and his documentaries are decidedly Marxist in philosophy. His most famous film is probably Point of Order (1964), about the Army-McCarthy hearings ten years previously, but his most controversial films would be Millhouse (1971), a scathing indictment of then-President Richard Nixon, and In the Year of the Pig (1968), a radically left-wing perspective on the Vietnam War.

IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com

Spouse

Nancy de Antonio

(? - 15 December 1989) (his death)

Trivia

His film In the King of Prussia (1983) was about the Plowshares Eight, a group of Christian anti-war activists on trial for breaking and entering into a weapons plant, where they damaged missile nosecones, poured vials of their own blood onto missile plans, and burned other files. The film starred the actual defendants as themselves.

Personal Quotes

I know that a lot of people who fought in Vietnam are very angry with me because in the sequence that had something to do with Search and Destroy, there is a Marine Corps Colonel, a young rather good looking man, standing there smiling, and the village is being burned and old women are crawling away and there is an expression of a woman in fear and terror and then you are back to that Colonel. And people have said to me, 'Those images didn't really occur that way.' My answer to that is, it makes no difference if they really occurred that way, because they did occur that way in a moral sense. But then I end up by saying, 'In fact, those images did happen in precisely that way.' It is that we were conditioned to believe that they could not happen that way, so that we chose not to believe that those images happened in that way, but indeed they did. [referring to a sequence in his 1968 film, In The Year Of The Pig]

Anyone who looks through the eyepiece of a camera is already tampering. Because as she or he looks through that eyepiece, she or he brings to that eyepiece a whole life, a whole existence, a whole artillery of prejudice and assumption about the nature of society, about the nature of what is out there that I am filming. And, more importantly, once we have filmed, and we put the film on the editing table and start cutting, we bring to that structure, to that editing, what we feel about anything. I could make an absolutely objective film about my drinking a glass of water...I think. As long as the film was terribly brief, because I do not like water. Maybe I could, I could not, I mean I had this argument once in Eastern Europe and someone said, 'Well, you could surely make an objective film about glass-blowing in Czechoslovakia'. And I said, 'Don't be ridiculous, that's a very important subject, because it is loaded with the following questions: conditions of work, the conditions of pay, what the workers feel about all the rest of this, what the decision of the manager is, what the function of the glassware when it is finished...Almost anything you do, no matter how simple it is, a kiss under documentary conditions brings all of our prejudices to that kiss. Who is kissing? Why are they kissing? Which sexes? For what reason? You know, I mean, objectivity simply doesn't exist. [defending the argument above 'it makes no difference if they really occurred that way']

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