“The Cropping of the Spectacle” began as a live cinema performance investigating the birth of the Television Spectacle in 1954 McCarthy’s America. Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary “Point of Order” (Emile de Antonio/Dan Talbot, 1964); a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary strategies – “The Cropping of the Spectacle” integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange temporal evolution of our understandings of recent history. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process begun with the original Army-McCarthy hearings, which continues to the present day. This single-channel version includes footage of a live performance at Redcat, Los Angeles.
