In accepting the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on Sunday night. Laura Poitras focused, as always, on the significance of transparency and visibility. As the film she made with Glenn Greenwald and Ed Snowden reveals, such democratic ideals remain at risk by the American government’s activities and attitudes. For all the daunting information Citizenfour reveals it asks you not only to see, but also to take responsible for what you see. Sometimes, the film offers long, nearly meditative takes of exteriors, the Hong Kong hotel from afar, implacably shiny, or distant views of dully thunk-thunking machinery at a new NSA data collection facility under construction in Bluffsdale, Utah, and near film’s end, a long shot of a kitchen window, showing Snowden and his partner Lindsay Mills, in their for-now home in Moscow, quiet, ordinary, perfectly framed.
These observational moments invite you to fill in, to contemplate not just the fact of data collection, but also its labor and costs, the means by which NSA or any other official (or unofficial) agency might undertake its purpose. Your view of such apparent material reality offers a kind of correlative for the discreet work of Snowden and the journalists with him. Here and elsewhere, Citizenfour is gorgeously filmed and carefully reported, but its greatest effects have to do with what you don’t see, the plans and ambitions that underlie surveillance, the turning inside of democracy, its slippery notions of trust or transparency. Conversations with previous another NSA whistleblower, William Binney or current investigator Jeremy Scahill provide contexts, the understanding that none of this activity is new or, sadly, surprising.
This weekend, the film won the Oscar, the Independent Spirit Film Award for Best Documentary, and the Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize — this in addition to multiple other awards during this season — and all of its makers have used their acceptance speeches to underline the film’s point. “My hope,” Snowden says, “is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.” More people have that chance when the film debuts on HBO on 23 Feb.
See PopMatters‘ review.