Director Laura Poitras
CITIZENFOUR B+
Germany USA (114 mi)
2014 d: Laura Poitras Official
site
This is as much a glimpse into the future as anything you’re
likely to see at the movies, where honestly, this will play just as well on a
laptop or any sized computer screen as a theater experience, as what we’re
dealing with here is coded in such technical terminology. Perhaps this is the 21st version of Coppola’s The
Conversation (1974), only with more chilling implications. While the whole concept of Windows computer
technology was supposedly to open doors and avenues into new terrain that was
previously unavailable and off limits, creating a multitude of endless
possibilities where curiosity would only be rewarded, the idea of looking out
into open cyberspace also allows other unnamed entities, otherwise known as
governments, to look in at you, since the computer is the device that keeps us
all connected. It’s a hard to conceive
idea, but this is a film that specializes in the latest, most sophisticated
surveillance techniques ever devised by humankind, where this window into each
person’s personal identity and information is just like wiretapping every
citizen without a warrant. Perhaps the
strangest piece of sci-fi in this film is the extent to which these individuals
protect their secrecy, where literally any and all electronic gadgetry can be
used as an eavesdropping device, where rarely has paranoia been elevated to
this level of counter sophistication in order to prevent detection. The third film in a post 9/11 Trilogy,
following MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY (2006), about life for Iraqis under American
occupation, which follows a Sunni Arab doctor as he prepares to run for the
early 2005 elections in Iraq, a film that got the director placed on watch
lists at airports when entering the country, where she has been stopped and
detained regularly ever since, but was also nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Documentary, also THE OATH (2010), which documents the legal ramifications
of an Iraqi detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as an
enemy combatant, the first to be tried by U.S. military tribunals, eventually transferred
to Yemen, as the case was appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled the
military charges that led to his arrest were not war crimes by international
law at the time he committed them, making the detention and subsequent
prosecution unconstitutional.
What do we know about this filmmaker? She
comes from a wealthy background, where her parents donated $20 million dollars
in 2007 to found The Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research at the McGovern Institute for Brain
Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while being raised
at an experimental private school in Massachusetts, the Sudbury Valley School. While she planned to be a chef, spending
several apprentice years at a French restaurant in Boston, she changed her
mind, moving across the coutry to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she
studied with experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, eventually moving back to New York
where in 1996 she graduated from The
New School in Greenwich Village.
Bearing the distinction of being a 2012 MacArthur Fellow which partially
funded her work on this film, she is part of a new social movement rising out
of the ashes of a dying newspaper business that challenges conventional
language of media, which limits the idea of personal freedom of expression, as
the communications industry itself has become a protected corporate interest
that sets its own standards of acceptability that are rarely challenged. For instance, in the use of drone “signature
strikes,” conventional media through international wire services have settled upon
the supposedly acceptable terminology of “targeted
killings” as opposed to calling the actions “assassinations,” a term most
all newspapers would simply not print. However,
Journalist Glenn Greenwald in Salon articles
as early as America's
drone sickness - Salon.com, April 19, 2012, suggest drone attacks kill far
more civilians than reported, as the government maintains a policy of secrecy,
suggesting assassination is a more apt term for what’s going on, further
elaborated upon by Erik Wemple from The
Washington Post, February 10, 2014, "Glenn
Greenwald and the U.S. 'assassination' program, where Greenwald’s
explanation is “the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the
government wants us to use…I’d say anyone who is murdered deliberately away
from a battlefield for political purposes is being assassinated.” The broadened position used by governments is
that the battlefield in the War on Terrorism exists everywhere, where this
expanded definition intrudes upon the lives of literally everyone. Enter Edward Snowden.
In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was still in the
process of developing a final chapter in her film trilogy about abuses of
national security in post-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted
emails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to
blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and
other intelligence agencies. Apparantly
motivated by the stream of lies and denials from upper echelon military brass
and intelligence officials to various congressional inquiries asking about the
extent of the government’s reach into the private lives of ordinary citizens,
extending the reach of the USA
PATRIOT Act, implemented immediately after the devastating effects of 9/11,
designed to prevent terrorists from striking again on American soil. However, Poitras began receiving highly
detailed yet secretive information that would implicate the White House, the
NSA, tech companies, and a variety of other American institutions in a
broadranging initiative of illegal wiretaps, computer access and listening
devices to spy on every American citizen as well as government officials abroad
without any of them ever knowing of it.
While the Act itself requires judicial overview, where wiretaps and
various other surveillance methods require court approval, this rapidly
developing surveillance phenomena was already having a massive impact on the
rights of privacy while taking place without any apparent oversight or
accountability. This not only captured
the attention of the filmmaker, but the whistleblower, who turned out to be
Edward Snowden, a 29-year old NSA contractor who demanded utter secrecy in all
subsequent contacts, eventually meeting six months later in a hotel room in
Hong Kong, along with two journalists working for The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Meeting him for the first time with the
cameras rolling is a tense moment where no one really knows what to expect, but
it becomes one of the historical and perhaps defining events in our
lifetimes. It turns out Greenwald was
initially sent encrypted emails some months earlier, but he dismissed them as
junk mail, so the contact established with the filmmaker allows us a window
into this moment, along with audiences for generations to come.
What’s immediately fascinating, once Snowden starts engaging
the journalists, is the extraordinary level of caution, meticulous detail, and
intelligence, where the mindful nature of protecting themselves from anyone who
might be listening in on them is just stunning, elevating the level of paranoia
not seen since those tense atmospheric thrillers of the 70’s, like The
Parallax View (1974), The
Conversation (1974), CHINATOWN (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE
CONDOR (1975), and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), yet this is real life
unfolding before our eyes. All of this
lends a certain theatricality to the geeky and overly technical nature of much
of the material Snowden intends to make public.
Poitras seems to realize this and maintains her focus more on the man
than the nature of his revelations, allowing the journalists to do their jobs
(where The Guardian was subsequently awarded
a Pulitzer Prize in public service), which by the time viewers see the film will
have already been thoroughly debated and analyzed in public and speak for
themselves. What’s curious about what
the audience sees is that none of this is actually known yet, but is about to
unfold in the upcoming days and weeks ahead.
Condensing material gathered over the course of eight days, we learn
that Snowden is highly articulate and displays a natural brilliance, where his
ease with his own conscience suggests unassailable convictions, which will
certainly be challenged in the upcoming days and years ahead. While Snowden never intended to become the
focus, preferring instead to remain on the sidelines, it’s interesting to see
his reaction once the secret revelations are exposed, where suddenly a
construction crew has mysteriously moved around his home, his family and
friends are questioned, and the government is awkwardly caught offguard, searching
for answers, eventually introducing a smear campaign against him, where he is
subsequently charged as a “traitor” for violating the Espionage
Act that was passed after America’s entrance into World War I. The film doesn’t enter the discussion of
whether Snowden is a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a patriot, or a
traitor, all labels that have been attributed to him, but it’s certainly ironic
that those artists and journalists that effectively conspired with him to help
expose these public revelations have all been lauded and acclaimed. Greenwald has separated from The Guardian, and joined forces with
Poitras, fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill and others to form an independent
news website called The Intercept, where they’ve delved further into the
ramifications of Snowden’s documentation, which includes the fact that 1.2
million people are currently on Homeland Security’s watch list, reminiscent of
similar tactics practiced by J. Edgar Hoover during his tenure with the
FBI. The government’s hardball tactics
used against Snowden have also been applied to journalists and their families
as well as the filmmaker in the room, where they or their loved ones are
routinely stopped and interrogated at length at airports, practices so
intrusive that Poitras now lives in Berlin while Greenwald had already chosen
to reside in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
