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Documentary Lens
This film uses archival clips and documents to examine the way climate change evolved from nonpartisan topic to divisive issue.
A scene from “The White House Effect,” built largely on moments from the 1970s through the 1990s.Credit... Netflix
Oct. 31, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The White House EffectDirected by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, Jon ShenkDocumentaryNot Rated1h 34m
A lot of documentaries about social issues lean on the same basic structure: interviews with experts, footage demonstrating the problem at hand, animated graphs and a narrator, often a celebrity, tying it all together in voice-over. These films can be effective, to be sure. But they can also feel like multimedia magazine articles. Or like the movies y…
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Documentary Lens
This film uses archival clips and documents to examine the way climate change evolved from nonpartisan topic to divisive issue.
A scene from “The White House Effect,” built largely on moments from the 1970s through the 1990s.Credit... Netflix
Oct. 31, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The White House EffectDirected by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, Jon ShenkDocumentaryNot Rated1h 34m
A lot of documentaries about social issues lean on the same basic structure: interviews with experts, footage demonstrating the problem at hand, animated graphs and a narrator, often a celebrity, tying it all together in voice-over. These films can be effective, to be sure. But they can also feel like multimedia magazine articles. Or like the movies your social studies teacher might have shown, maybe on a TV wheeled into the classroom.
**“The White House Effect” **(streaming on Netflix) takes a different approach. Save for a few minutes at the end, the film is made up almost entirely of archival footage from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: clips from news programs and talk shows, White House video, film shot at political and academic summits, congressional testimony and more. Occasionally, memos and other internal government documents appear with phrases and sentences highlighted. A couple of charts are used. But the rest is archival footage — whenever expert commentary appears, it’s mostly from the past, rather than newly filmed and spliced in.
This is a smart move: The thesis of “The White House Effect” — directed by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, a seasoned team of social-impact documentarians — is that climate change was not always treated as a partisan issue in American politics, and that making it partisan was a deliberate act on the part of some people who stood to gain from the division. The film mostly centers on George H.W. Bush’s presidency (1989-93) and traces the evolution of his rhetoric, from a campaign focus on the greenhouse effect and widespread drought to a shift away from the environment as the economy went downhill in the early 1990s. The film also shows politicians and executives publicly downplaying events like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, as well as minimizing the role of corporate responsibility in shifting to more sustainable ways of creating energy.
Of course, you could argue that any documentary tells its story as much with what it omits as with what it includes. But by letting the news footage, speech clips and documents “speak,” the transformation of the rhetoric is undeniable, as are some of the causes. The tale is not flattering, but it is illuminating.
There’s another reason this kind of archival documentary works so well. Because there aren’t extra voices from the present directing the audience in how to think about what we’re seeing, we become invested in making meaning from these clips ourselves. So, although the film clearly has a point to make, any conclusions we reach feel like our inferences, not as though we’ve just taken dictation.
It’s not easy to make an archival documentary. Sifting through all that footage takes a lot of time, and finding just the right clips is a lot of work. But “The White House Effect” is a good example of why it’s worth it, and why it’s worth preserving our archives, too. So much of our history is sitting on film reels and videotapes and hard drives. Looking back reminds us who we’ve been, who we are now and, sometimes, who’s responsible.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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