Lady Bird, as Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson was better known, is a nickname that conjures the frivolous and fanciful, but the fiftysomething woman from east Texas who emerges in Dawn Porter’s elegant documentary The Lady Bird Diaries was a paragon of substance. She was also a documentarian in her own right, chronicling her time in the White House over 123 hours of audio recordings that were released after her death in 2007.
Apart from the footage of wildflowers that Porter shot on the Johnson family ranch in Texas, the film entirely relies on archival audio and video recordings from the time of Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, from the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy to 1969. Building on an ABC News podcast, Porter’s work is a visually mesmerizing collage of mid-century America and one of its most fascinating characters.
