The Point of Order

This last week we watched Emile De Antonio's documentary The Point of Order. This documentary was a phenomenal piece of filmmaking during this era. Emile took ever 200 hours of film and was able to cut it down into just over 90 minutes of film and still was able to relay the overall message of the hearings. This project took the better of a decade as Emile worked oin this piece from the fifties and not releasing the film until 1963. These hearings were the McCarthy vs. the United States army. The feud was about McCarthy and Kohn giving an army soldier special privileges, and they followed by counter suing the army saying there were communists inside of it. McCarthy got to power by accusing people of being communists, but he never revealed who these commies were.
The point of Emile's film was to show the hearings in general, but the way the editing was done made it seem much more than that. The film starts with McCarthy being extremely powerful, but progressively he loses all of his power and eventually is just dust in the wind, as shown by the last scene of everyone leaving McCarthy alone yelling into nothingness. This was not the intention of De Antonio. He simply put clips of powerful footage together to give his watchers the general idea of what took place over the thirty plus days of the debate.
Throughout the film there was minimal narration. Actually the only narration for this film was at the very start. It was a simple intro to let the viewer know what to expect for the following 90 or so minutes.