All the President's Men

Alan Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men met with immediate critical and commercial success on its release in 1976, earning eight Academy Award (TM) nominations, including for Best Picture, director, screenplay, supporting actor and actress, art direction, sound, and editing. Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs noise; stationary vs moving camera; dark scenes vs well-lit scenes, and shallow focus vs deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design that is crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood filmmakers 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 outstanding and impactful work of cinema.