As ‘All the President’s Men’ turns 40 today, Woodward and Bernstein share their favorite shots from the movie

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.