frost/nixon
Posted: August 3rd, 2009 | Author: Kira | Filed under: Summer 2009 | No Comments »
A few days ago I finished the film Frost/Nixon, which I had naturally heard about late last year during the Oscar nom media frenzy, but never got around to sitting and watching until now. I loved it – to say the least. It’s great when you watch a film stunningly filmed, well-acted and just generally engaging without using too many of the Hollywood techniques. It was great watching it and thinking about all the things we’ve discussed in class – especially in prep for our video doc. The power of the image and what it can instill within the viewer. One of the characters in Frost/Nixon says, after David Frost nails Nixon in the last and final interview, almost heartbreakingly so:
“You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn’t understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon’s face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist.”
That image – wow. I like how it shows how the medium goes beyond research, interviews, countless other very serious academic ways of exploring the Watergate scandal – and how a single facial expression can really paint an entire picture. What can we aim, as filmmakers, to capture to stir similar, striking, “reductive” moments to prove our point?
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