All the President’s Men: BFI Film Classics
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Overview
Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller All the President’s Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.
Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film’s achievement.
They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President’s Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
A study of Alan Pakula’s 1976 political thriller All the President’s Men in the BFI Film Classics series.
First focused study of a key film of the New Hollywood
The film’s story of how two journalists uncovered the Watergate scandal has contemporary resonances in an era of political corruption, conspiracy narratives, and Russian interference in US elections
Authors are both distinguished and widely-published scholars
Draws on original research into the development of the film’s screenplay through an analysis of early drafts of the script
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1.Who’s in Control?
2.The Scripts and Their Ellipses
3.Cast Performance Styles
4.Découpage and Dialectics
Conclusion
Notes
Credits
An exemplary analysis of the workings of Pakula’s film, a truly insightful study of the way it has been put together and of the sense that its formal details make … I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This stealthy dissection of Alan J. Pakula’s seminal political thriller promises to “imitate” reporters Bernstein and Woodward by "asking questions and taking notes and making connections". Job Done. Strong on context, the book really takes flight with its often shot-by-shot analysis, which places everything from bicycle wheels to banjos under the microscope.
- Title: All the President’s Men
- Authors: Robert B. Ray, Christian Keathley
- Series: BFI Film Classics
- Publisher: British Film Institute
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 112
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781839024054, 9781839024047, 1839024046, 1839024054
- Resource ID: LLS:9781839024054
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T12:16:02Z
Christian Keathley is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA. He is author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2005) and co-author of The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound & Image (2016). His writing has been published in journals such as Screen and MOVIE.
Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (1985), The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008), Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau (2012) and The Structure of Complex Images (2020).