Point of Order! + Sunday

Point of Order!
USA 1963. Director: Emile de Antonio 
With: Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy, Joseph Welch

“Emile de Antonio and producer Dan Talbot’s Point of Order! is at once a landmark in political cinema and an incendiary aesthetic statement. Constructed entirely from CBS kinescopes of the controversial 1954 U.S. Army-McCarthy hearings, the film famously used neither expert testimony nor narration. In characteristically blunt fashion, de Antonio called narration ‘inherently fascist and condescending.’ Yet the film is far from objective; like the best of the concurrent Direct Cinema works, which also eschewed narration, Point of Order!’s attitudes are constructed in its edit: a surface-level ‘objectivity’ that is, in reality, brilliantly fabricated. Working with editor Robert Duncan for a period of two years, Antonio and Talbot boiled forty days of televised footage down to a sizzling 97 minutes; in the process, all sense of conventional chronology was dismembered. Included along the way are many of the hearings’ signature moments. The result is not just a searing indictment of McCarthyism, but an exposé of the fissures in American democracy as filtered through the new medium of television. Ironically, much of our collective memory of the hearing today stems not so much from the broadcasts themselves as from Point of Order!’s reframing” (Ross Lipman). B&W, 35mm. 97 mins. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.

Sunday
USA 1961. Director: Dan Drasin

A stunning document of a police crackdown on a peaceful demonstration of folk singers in New York City’s Washington Square Park in 1961. B&W, 35mm. 17 mins. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.