Our Nixon (2013)

Our Nixon attempts to sell itself as the big reveal of previously locked-away archival 8mm footage from Nixon’s presidency, filmed by Nixon’s closest advisors and trusted friends themselves. But the reality of the film is less startling: it’s a mixture of said 8mm footage, news footage, talking-head interviews, and audio recordings that the film pulls together in order to create a neat, chronological-order narrative of Nixon’s presidency.

I don’t know much about Nixon, so I found the film informative. But this is faint praise for a documentary that has potential to reveal—in all of its mundane detail—a purely Nixonian aesthetic. While this is a boring prospect, I would suggest that allowing the audience to experience such boredom would reveal more about the inner workings of the Nixon administration (evil as part and parcel with bureaucratic pencil pushing) than the faux-scandalous “top-secret” Nixon conversations about his homophobia and hatred for protestors that feature prominently in the film.

These conversations play for us—the dialogue spelled out in large subtitles—over footage of baby birds and rainbow hedges that we only halfway see. As one character in the film protests (and the 8mm footage confirms), the lives of politicians are more than just politics. But another way to put this is that politics extend beyond the narrow definition of politics on offer from Oval Office announcements and CBS Nightly News—even to the dusting of snow on some distracted child’s fur coat in the bitter cold of an exhausting day.

Two Drifters (2005)

It starts with an extreme close-up of two faces, enrapt and making out. The camera slowly pulls back to reveal that it’s two men, standing by the open window of a car, its radio the source of the music we’ve been hearing the whole time (Greg Brown’s “Banjo Moon”).

As I watched the beginning of this opening shot, I expected to see that the two characters were actually on a screen themselves, being watched on a cinema screen by a third figure—yet this did not occur. I’m wondering now why this was my expectation: Was it merely the slow, deliberate backwards movement of the camera (which in other movies results in a similar kind of disorienting mise-en-abyme)? Or was there something in the performance of the characters themselves, something put on, obviously artificial?

The same sort of camera movement concludes the film, moving back from the image of a fully clothed woman fucking (or appearing to fuck) a naked man from behind. But this time the backwards motion reveals a third character, watching the two characters in the strange throes of something like passion.

The two shots together affirm the sense of anticipation I felt while watching the first but at the same time disrupt this same anticipation. For what I understood as empty—the lips of living men—is revealed instead to be the source of fullness and the cause of fascination. That is, the emptiness exists on the other side of the image: me, dead, watching.