Collections/April 2026

Emile de Antonio’s Cold War Counterculture

A self-described “Marxist among capitalists,” documentarian Emile de Antonio wielded the camera as a weapon in his fight against America’s corrupt power structures and the Cold War establishment elite. Unabashedly aligning himself with the leftist movements of the 1960s and ’70s in contrast to the “objective” style of the then-dominant cinema verité movement, he made his films with raw, blunt force, deploying impactfully edited archival footage to examine everything from the assassination of John F. Kennedy ( Rush to Judgment ) to the horror of America’s war in Vietnam ( In the Year of the Pig ) to the radical ideology of the Weather Underground ( Underground ). Stark, uncompromising, and timely, de Antonio’s films question everything, digging into official narratives to reveal the hidden agendas and systemic rot lurking below.

8 films