In 1965, the longest farm workers’ strike in US-American history unrolled in Delano, California. Led by Cesar Chavez, the as yet unorganised Mexican seasonal labourers fought successfully for better working conditions and the right to found a union of their own, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). “¡Huelga!” is the partisan portrait of an emerging solidarity group that not only stood up against the unregulated capitalism in the agricultural sector but also declared war on the racism of the white landowners. In addition to depicting the mechanisms of the strike, the mobile camera also makes a point of documenting the degrading living conditions of the people who kept one of the most powerful industries in the country going.

“Shall we submit or shall we say to them: First kill me before you take possession of my fatherland.” “A Song for Dead Warriors” opens with these words by Sioux chief Sitting Bull from 1877 – a programmatic choice, because the film revolves around a current event which shows that even a hundred years later the conflict between the US administration and the Native Americans is far from resolved. On the contrary: In 1973, there was a clash between the police and a militant group of Sioux who occupied the Wounded Knee Memorial together with the American Indian Movement (AIM). The case is to be investigated by a hearing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the fronts are hardened. AIM activist Russell Means is the spokesman of the defiant group and protagonist of this film.

Using original sound and war images, this film documents the rise of the anti-war movement within the US military. Soldiers talk about their growing anger. We see them being drilled and indoctrinated – with the consequence that the atrocities they were later responsible for during the Vietnam War were justified by military obedience. The sometimes brutal montages show that both the Vietnamese people and the American soldiers were victims of a ruthless military machine whose true profiteers, the film argues, are the arms industry and military administration. It closes with an appeal of a member of the National Guard on domestic duty to his fellow soldiers to fraternise with the protesters they are meant to keep down.

One of the first productions of San Francisco Newsreel, a local offshoot of the nationwide network of Newsreel collectives, demonstrated solidarity with the Black Panther Party against the ghettoization of Black Communities in the cities and against police violence. “Off the Pig! – Death to the cops!” is the battle-call of the militarily organised protesters in the streets of Los Angeles. They demand the release of imprisoned Black Panther founding member Huey Newton. The latter speaks at length in a prison interview, as do his co-fighters Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. What they say and read out is aimed at nothing less than a revolution, a violent overthrow that is to liberate the Black US population from white supremacy.

“Why should I move? I was born here.” While a senseless war is waged in Vietnam and million-dollar rockets are shot to the moon, there is not enough decent housing in New York – and worse, the poor are being forcibly evicted from their homes, says an angry protagonist of this activist film which introduces the New York squatter movement. Latin Americans in particular are forced to leave the lucrative Manhattan housing market, but the protesters do not accept this without putting up a fight. “Break & Enter” is a spontaneous and encouraging film document about self-organised communities based on solidarity.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the House of Representatives, was founded in 1938 to crack down on sympathisers of Nazi Germany in the US. In the post-war period, the Committee dedicated itself to anti-communism, interrogating countless individuals it regarded as “oppositional” or found guilty of “subversion” because of left-wing views. Robert Cohen’s film both chronicles and dismantles HUAC, working with a collage of archive material, interviews passionately spoken into the camera and scenes of satirical re-enactment. He makes no secret of his criticism of this symbol of an authoritarian power structure that committed injustices under the pretext of freedom.

On 4 September 1970, a group of Vietnam veterans set out on a long march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Their goal: to convince the local population along the way of the injustice that has been going on in Vietnam for years. They did this not just with speeches by the wayside, but with shocking, unannounced and publicly performed re-enactments. Complete with uniforms and plastic machine guns, supported by extras, they thus draw attention to their own war crimes in Indochina. Both camera and tape recorder stay close to all this, capturing the reactions of passers-by and city residents. Solidarity on the one hand, vicious insults on the other. A deep divide runs through the “home front”.

How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.

“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

To put it bluntly, one could say that most of de Antonio’s films are courtroom dramas. In this sense, “In the King of Prussia” is typical – and at the same time unusual, starting with the title. King of Prussia is a small town in Pennsylvania which became the scene of an action by radical Christian pacifists in September 1980. They broke into a factory where, unbeknownst to the public, parts of the nuclear missile Mark 12A were produced, and held a happening inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and Fluxus. The film is a re-enactment, but not of the action, rather of the trial against the so-called Plowshares Eight. In de Antonio’s first video production, shot in the trial breaks, the defendants played themselves. The role of the judge was played by New Hollywood star Martin Sheen.

The film opens with an image of the statue of Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette who fought on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence (1775–1783), to which is added a diffuse soundscape in which one can distinguish the extremely slowed down noise of helicopter rotors. “The music of America today is the helicopter in Vietnam. That’s ‘musique concrète’,” de Antonio explained in 1969. By recalling a time when the so-called New World was a British colony itself, the US invasion of Vietnam is put in the context of a long history of liberation whose contemporary heroe is the Vietnamese people. “In the Year of the Pig” remains one of the most unusual and illuminating films about this war and others that followed.

Three years before the Watergate affair brought down Richard Nixon, de Antonio exposed the President as a charlatan in this cruel and funny material montage. From an interview in the “Minutes” of the 1972 Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche: Question – “In each of your films, you expose a major American institution […]. Which did you choose for ‘Millhouse’?” De Antonio’s answer – “Nothing less than the traditional political process as a whole. The film is by no means a personal attack on Nixon. To expose a political opponent, all you need to do is rent a hall for him. The film attacks the American system, the credibility of this system, by turning on the perfect symbol of this system, the President.”

Set to high-contrast series of images in black and white that sometimes come to a standstill, the female first-person narrator recites an emphatic speech about her political awakening: her development from an exploited day-worker to a guerrillera fighting against the political and economic influence of the USA on Latin American states, in this case the globally active United Fruit Company and its dominance in Guatemala. “My Country Occupied” is a film in search of a political form, oscillating between rapidly edited agitprop in the spirit of Latin-American Third Cinema, polemically used found footage and rather catchy, folkloristic-looking passages about the country and its people.

In the 1970s, whole streets went up in flames in New York. Nonetheless, the city decided to make massive cuts to the firehouse budget. No fewer than six stations were closed in Brooklyn’s Northside, a neighbourhood dominated by Polish immigrants. Protest forms in these poor neighbourhoods of warehouses and factory chimneys – precisely what made them lucrative for real estate speculation and profitable redevelopment. “Planned shrinkage” is what the locals call this practice that is intended to drive them to the periphery. Their resistance pays off: After two and a half years of protest, the Engine Company 212 reopens as the “People’s Firehouse”. The camera is present throughout, capturing tears, laughter, anger, and pride.

De Antonio was already forty when he became involved in filmmaking. He produced two early films of the New York Beat movement, “Pull My Daisy” (1959, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie) and “Sunday” (1961, Dan Drasin), the latter also featuring in the 2025 Retrospective. He was also one of the founding members of the New American Cinema Group, along with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. “Point of Order!” became his directorial debut, the first cinema film compiled exclusively from television images. From 188 hours of material of the “Army–McCarthy hearings”, a tribunal broadcast live from the Senate in 1954 in which the notorious communist hunter Joseph McCarthy had to face an investigative committee, de Antonio distilled a farcical show trial at the end of which everyone involved looked like a convicted criminal.

This critical analysis of the final report of the Warren Commission, who investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is based on research by lawyer Mark Lane. Lane co-authored this film and published his eponymous book at almost the same time. De Antonio had studied with Kennedy at Harvard, which gave his film a personal dimension, despite his political distance to Kennedy. This may account for the argumentative, occasionally factual rigour that he and his editor Dan Drasin brought to the film. Ultimately, “Rush to Judgment” is a piece of belated legal assistance for Lee Harvey Oswald, who was declared to have acted alone and shot only two days after the assassination while in police custody, and whose legal interests were not adequately represented before the Warren Commission.