Poitras: Citizenfour (2014)

Before Citizenfour was even fully conceived, the world was already familiar with some of its footage, namely the iconic interview that director Laura Poitras shot with Edward Snowden on June 9, 2013 in Hong Kong, catapulting his claims about the NSA’s surveillance tactics into the global spotlight. Released two years later, her Academy Award winning documentary expands upon that interview, compiling footage from the eight days that she and Snowden spent together in the Mira Hotel with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. As might be expected, it’s an extraordinary interview, largely because there’s no effort to delve into Snowden’s personal or professional life any further than he chooses to disclose, a discretion in the face of his right to privacy that actually ends up emphasising and dramatising his precarious position at the coal face of the information economy, as well as the likeliehood that, at this point in time, he was already well on his way to becoming the prime target of NSA data collection. And, in some ways, the film works first and foremost on a visceral level, by putting the audience in that unbearable position as well, not least because it culminates a decade, for Poitras, of being followed, surveilled and intercepted by the NSA, experiences which make her quite scrupulous and selective about how much – and how much of herself – she includes outside of Snowden’s testimony. As a result, the film is not eespecially expository or explanatory – there’s been more than enough journalism and legal commentary in that vein – so much as interested in evoking the sheer pressure of data brought to bear on Snowden, the informational burden he is trying to divest, in an approach that occasionally recalls Steven Soderbergh, who serves as executive producer. Oscillating between heavily redacted – almost self-censored – background information, and sequences that are so explosive – usually footage of transactions that took place in person, or on paper – that they induced Poitras to edit and complete the film in Berlin, it makes sense that there are a list of data encrypters included in the closing credits, since most of the scenes we’re watching are highly privileged legal documents, documents that could have wrecked everyone involved if they were released at the wrong time or place, and might still have the power to do so. Perhaps that’s why it feels more like a an act of hactivism than a film per se, or at least a film that’s been so heavily encrypted, protected and concealed at one point or another that the shadowy, covert conditions of its production are as much its subject matter as Snowden - and in that sense a reminder that his story is still present, rather than a fait accompli relegated to history.