Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labor in All the President’s Men

Nathan Holmes

doi:10.17742/IMAGE.p70s.9.1.7

Authors

Nathan Holmes Cinema Studies, SUNY Purchase College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.p70s.9.1.7

Keywords:

Alan J. Pakula, All the President'sMen, 70s, workspace

Abstract

Although commonly understood as journalistic thriller tied to the historical realities of the Watergate investigation, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men is deeply imbricated in contemporaneous ideas about office design and white collar labor. Drawing on the film’s production history, as well as discourses around knowledge work, office furnishings, and the changing role of paper in office work, this essay places All the President’s Men along a different historical trajectory, one in which Hollywood cinema elaborates, expressively re-stages, and fantasizes the white-collar workspace.

Author Biography

Nathan Holmes, Cinema Studies, SUNY Purchase College

Nathan Holmes is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College. His research and writing focuses on urban visual culture and history, the political imagination of mass culture, and film/media and the environment. He is the author of Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018) and has essays published or forthcoming in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory Practice (Rutgers 2016), and Race, Ethnicity, and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Press). He is currently an editor at Mediapolis: Journal of Cities and Culture.

Nathan Holmes est professeur adjoint attaché au département d’études du cinéma au Purchase College de SUNY. Ses recherches et ses publications se concentrent sur la culture et l’histoire visuelles urbaines , l’imagination politique de la culture de masse et la relation entre le film, les média et l’environnement. Il est l’auteur de Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018). Il a également des essais publiés ou sur le point de paraître dans la New Review of Film and Television Studies, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory Practice (Rutgers, 2016) et Race, Ethnicity, and the Suburbs in American Films (SUNY Press). Il est à présent éditeur à Mediapolis: Journal of Cities and Culture.