Emile de Antonio and 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 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, nor would de Antonio and Talbot claim it to be. Working with editor Robert Duncan for a period of two years, they boiled forty days of televised footage down to a sizzling ninety-seven minutes; in the process, all sense of conventional chronology was dismembered. 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.

—Ross Lipman

• Written by de Antonio. (97 mins)

Preceded by short:
Sunday (Dan Drasin, U.S., 1961). A stunning document of the police crackdown on a peaceful demonstration of folk singers in Washington Square Park in 1961. (17 mins)

• (Total running time: 114 mins, B&W, 35mm. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.)