Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Mr. Hoover and Mr. de Antonio
Emile de Antonio's 1989 film Mr Hoover and I is a highly personal one. All of de Antonio's documentaries are filled with personal conviction. Yet this one feels like a last opportunity of a seventy year old man in late Winter to talk about issues which are most important to him: his life experience, the constitution, free speech, and the likes of those who trod on the constitution and ignore its rights--Richard Nixon, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and, most of all, J. Edgar Hoover.
The FBI amassed a 10,000 page dossier on de Antonio because he was a radical who spoke out both voice and film. He talked about how his file treated him as if he was a spy. He says he couldn't be a very good spy. "I talk too much, drink too much and was married six times." True, he joined the Communist Society and John Birch Society at 16 years old when he went to Harvard. But more threatening to Hoover it seems is that he was a radical. De Antonio's scathing indictments of the McCarthy hearings Point of Order, his reportage on the Weather Underground and 1968 indictment of the the Vietnam War, In the Year of the Pig, were passionate with a strong point of view anathema to the man he calls the biggest villain in our country's history, J Edgar Hoover.
In the many stand up head on sections of the film where de Antonio lambastes Hoover he explores his duplicity, treachery, and contradictions of the head of what he calls our secret police. One of the key ways he did this was by his bureaucratic genius for changing and blunting the language of what he was up to. Early files on those Hoover determined as detrimental to the US were known as "Custodial Detention" files. When these were outed by Congress, the files became "Security Matters." And when that operation was uncovered the information was placed in "Do Not File" files.
"I am the ultimate document and the ultimate test for the Constitution of the United States." says de Antonio of this files and the harassment he faced over the years. He talks about how In the Year of the Pig was the subject of bomb threats and theater vandalism, painting Traitor in tar across the theater screen when the film was to premiere in San Diego. He states they tried anything short of killing him.
Besides de Antonio's talking head there are a couple of contrasting sequences that are intercut throughout. One is him getting his hair cut by his last wife. ("Short or a trim?" she acts. "Short. No, just a trim. I just changed my mind.") Even sweeter is a sequence where he watches his friend, Avant-garde composer John Cage bake bread in his kitchen. He credits Cage with giving him "his education" including a zen koan he tells that changed his life and attitude. I have always enjoyed listening and watching Cage speak. There is such a lovely childish and gentle aspect to him that I find fascinating and kind of relaxing.
De Antonio was obviously weak when the film was made. There are times his voice is slight and wavering. He was able to do something with this film that maybe everyone should be able to do: leave a document of their passion, their intelligence and their life. Included are the sometime random asides about his own life such as his discovery of the artists who were in the fifties the new American cinema: Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas, Alfred Leslie and others. He talked about how he was impacted by Pull My Daisy, a piece of film art made by artists of the likes of Frank and Jack Kerouac. "I didn't know what to do with it." But somehow you know it impacted the evolution of his own work.
Mr. Hoover and I's current role is as one of the films in the box set Emile de Antonio: Films of a Radical Saint. In the final months of the last eight years of a regime where many of our essential constitutional rights have been trod-down with obfuscatory slight of hand, his tales of Nixon, McCarthy, and Hoover as well as observations of Oliver North and Reagan seem eerily contemporary indeed. Bless you Dee.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:41 AM
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