MR. HOOVER AND I
“Most American films were and are like Fords. They are made on assembly lines. John Ford is not an artist any more than Jerry Ford is a statesman. Harry Cohn said it all and the Capras jumped.
Seeing the fascinating and hugely entertaining Mr. Hoover and I at the Toronto film festival last fall, about three months before de Antonio died of a heart attack at age 70, made me seriously rethink my ideas about him. I’ve seen the film several times more recently, and encountered for the first time on tape some of the de Antonio films I had missed. In the Year of the Pig is the first and best of the major documentaries about Vietnam, infinitely superior to the better known Hearts and Minds–and perhaps the only one that’s truly about Vietnam, not this country’s national ego. I also saw the (to me) disappointing and relatively conventional Painters Painting. I can’t pretend to assess his career as a whole here because I’m still discovering or rediscovering parts of it, but I can at least say that Mr. Hoover and I, a singular and remarkable testament, has made me realize the importance of forming this acquaintance.
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The issue for me in de Antonio’s work has never been intelligence–his films are nothing if not intelligent–but filmic intelligence. The editing of Point of Order certainly has this filmic intelligence, and so does the powerful beginning of In the Year of the Pig, but in both instances it was a matter of creatively manipulating archival material. When it comes to shooting material of his own, de Antonio seems to regard the camera as a mechanism for recording talking heads rather than as an expressive tool in its own right; that is, his intelligence figures mainly in his decisions on what to shoot and how to edit, not in how to shoot.
For all its off-the-cuff appearance, Mr. Hoover and I had an unusually long gestation period. In an interview with Alan Rosenthal originally published in 1978, de Antonio alludes to “a fictional film I want to do about my own life. It began as an obsession and I started thinking about it before we did the Weather film [Un- derground]. It began with my suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act.” De Antonio then describes the experience of receiving the first installment, “almost 300 pages of documents collected by the FBI on my life up to my 24th year.” The file was “initiated by my applying for flying school and a commission” and went all the way back to the year he went away to prep school at the age of 12. De Antonio added that he was planning to tell this story “very dispassionately,” and that he was “doing it as a fiction because of the libel laws.”
(5) De Antonio chatting with his wife at home while she gives him a haircut.
Isolating these separate blocks is important because a central part of the film’s method is to make us aware of their distinctness from one another. At the same time, de Antonio freely cuts both within and between them in order to follow a single line of argument–a line that begins with the subject of himself and Hoover and then branches out to explore separate facets of each–and he doesn’t always respect the chronological progression of each sequence. Very long takes predominate at the beginning of the film; by the end, the cuts have become much more frequent.
