The Cropping of the Spectacle

In this live cinema essay, Ross Lipman investigates the birth of the Television Spectacle. Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary POINT OF ORDER! (a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary form), the performance integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange evolution of our understanding of McCarthy's America. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process begun with the original Army hearings which continues to the present day.