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.