Point of Order

Rejected by the 1963 New York Film Festival because it wasn't 'a real film', de Antonio's debut feature is perhaps the purest expression of his analytical approach to documentary and the 'media-event'. To the raw material of hours of video footage of the 1954 US Army-McCarthy hearings, he brought a radical collagist's technique: constructing an inquiry into the phenomenon of McCarthyism without moving from his editing bench, taking up a camera, or adding a word of commentary; re-democratising the historical documents once dominated by the authority of McCarthy's 'performance'; and opening up an early oppositional direction to cinéma-vérité.