Update: The film Our Nixon, directed by Colgate professor Penny Lane, premieres August 30 in select U.S. cities. Since its premiere on CNN earlier this month it has drawn a lot of attention, including a Daily Beast commentary by Ben Stein, the economist known to many as a movie and television personality. Lane responded to Stein here.
The Atlantic Magazine has reviewed the film, which will be shown on campus 5 p.m. Friday, September 13. Lane also will offer a lecture about the film on September 11.
Original story: Colgate professor Penny Lane has a new documentary called Our Nixon, which was recently featured by major news media including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Beginning as a Kickstarter campaign, Our Nixon was shown at South by Southwest (SXSW) in January 2013. The documentary will air Thursday, August 1, at 8 p.m. on CNN Films.
The Kickstarter campaign helped Lane and co-producer Brian Frye pay for the transfer of thousands of hours of audio, and hundreds of hours of Super 8 video shot by Dwight Chapin, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, members of Nixon’s team.
Lane said that using archival material was “the best way to experience history as it was lived.”
According to the New York Times: “The film makes use of hundreds of reels of home movies shot by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin, some of which had been confiscated by the F.B.I. during the Watergate investigation. The footage remained largely unseen for 40 years.”
In describing the footage, Lane told the Times: “They weren’t being hidden. They were being ignored.”
Here is a preview of the documentary.
Lane is a new assistant professor of art and art history and will teach Introduction to Studio Art, Video Art, and Film Screening at Colgate in the fall.
She has been making award-winning documentaries, video art, and essay films since 2002. Our Nixon is her first feature-length documentary, which premiered at Rotterdam, had its North American premiere at SXSW, won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival” at Ann Arbor, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films.
For more details, visit Lane’s page on colgate.edu.