FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT

 IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG was a film that was generated by anger at our war. All of my work together is an attempt to deal with the history of the United States in the days of the Cold War.

Film history is, by its own nature, sui generis, it's of its own kind, it's not like nice linear written history where you go from point A to point B to point C. Because film jumps, it's episodic by nature. You wouldn't want to make a film history that was like a book, because one image truly stands for 10,000 words.

The major influence in IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG and in many of my other pictures was the theories of John Cage and of some of the painters, because it was visual images that stood for a much higher frame of reference than they ordinarily did in film.

And then, I just liked the idea of doing a long history of a war of justice… All my work is like art brut. It's savage, brutal work in the sense that I don't really care too much for great shots because Hollywood produces all those great shots and makes empty films, films that have no meaning.

The very idea of cinema verite is repugnant to me. It is as if the filmmaker owned truth of some kind. I have never felt that I owned truth. I tried to be as truthful as I can but I know I am a man of deep-seated prejudices and many assumptions about the nature of society which colour all my thinking and feeling and the work that I do. For me there is no concept of objectivity. Objectivity is a myth...

The censorship was the most interesting censorship because it destroyed the theatrical release. When IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG was about to open in California in L.A., people broke into the theatre at night and with a tarbrush painted the word “Traitor” six feet high on the screen. That's a very effective form of film criticism. It's probably the most effective form because theatre owners are in business to make money. Bookings were cancelled. That was the end.

-Emile de Antonio (in conversation with Bruce Jackson, published in Senses of Cinema, Issue 31 Apr-Jun 2004)