Nixon's White House – caught on Super 8

An administration under fire over covert wiretapping, whistleblowers hailed as heroes and lambasted as traitors, a president's reputation on the line … You could be excused for detecting a whiff of Nixon-era sulphur in the US political atmosphere these days. With the trial of Bradley Manning, the Department of Justice's pursuit of journalists who use national-security sources and, of course, Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA data harvesting filling the headlines, state-sanctioned subterfuge and divisive whistleblowing dominate US politics more than at any time since the days of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

It's an opportune moment, therefore, to re-examine the surveillance culture of the Nixon administration. A timely new documentary allows us to do so from a unique perspective: from the men closest to Nixon during his time in office, through the lenses of their own cameras. Our Nixon, showing this month at Open City Docs Fest in London, draws on almost 30 hours of unseen Super 8 footage shot inside the White House, and on international state visits, by Nixon's chief of staff HR Haldeman, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and special assistant Dwight Chapin....