Michael Cavna reports for WaPo:
CARL BERNSTEIN has a favorite shot — a powerful, wordless visual within a film rippling with verbiage. It is the moment when everything elevates as metaphor.
It is, Bernstein says, “the Library of Congress shot.”
The film is “All the President’s Men,” Alan J. Pakula’s classic journalism procedural, which today celebrates the 40th anniversary of its release. And the shot in question begins with a tight overhead of The Washington Post’s Watergate reporters, Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), as they painstakingly thumb through thousands of the library’s circulation file cards.
The vantage point “progresses from floor/desk-level to the rotunda of the library,” Bernstein tells me. “The shot, and the scene itself, as the overwhelming number of card-files are brought to the reporters — they got a bit more than they bargained for in all their cleverness — brilliantly illustrates both the monumental and granular challenges of real reporting, as well as the context of what is going on at the time in our own [Woodward and Bernstein’s] situation at that juncture.”
Below, the matchless Jason Robards as WaPo editor Ben Bradlee.