“There is no other filmmaker in documentary that I respect more. I think he is one of the greatest filmmakers alive,” Ron Mann describes Emile de Antonio, whose radical documentaries include Milhouse: A White Comedy, Point of Order and In the Year of the Pig. “Emile is the inventor of non-narrative documentary.... He's in the tradition of Eisenstein montage and in the Marxist tradition. Breaking down the form of the film is what his principles were, and in turn he made a new form.” De Antonio's newest film, In the King of Prussia is a “polemical hybrid"--part documentary footage, part recreated events.
In September 1980, the Plowshares 8, a pacifist group which includes Philip and Daniel Berrigan, walked into a General Electric nuclear weapons plant in The King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, damaged two thermonuclear bomb nosecones with hammers, poured blood on secret documents, joined hands, sang songs, prayed and awaited arrest. When he was denied permission to film their trial, de Antonio decided to re-enact it, with the Plowshares 8 (“...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares...”) playing themselves, and Martin Sheen as Judge Samuel Salus. This “staged documentary” was shot in video over a weekend (the defendants had to report for sentencing and jail the following Monday) with little rehearsal time, a flimsy set, and a 70-page script based on 1300 pages of trial transcripts. Its resulting rough look and sound is a criticism of the “high tech", polished look of the evening news, Hollywood films, and nuclear missiles. “To me the thing that's inhuman about film is its essential lulling capabilities” de Antonio has commented. “....You surrender to it, you're passive about being worked over by the screen.” Instead, “I'd like them to argue about (In the King of Prussia), in public, in theaters... I want people to think it is absolutely insane to continue the nuclear arms race.”