Academy award winning director Laura Poitras was at the Coolidge Corner theatre last Sunday to present her latest work, Risk. Risk, although released after the completion of her trilogy that ended with Citizenfour, was started before she started making that Snowden documentary. The film debuted at Cannes film festival almost exactly a year ago, as it traces Julian Assange’s life from the past half-decade.
The screening at the Coolidge was sold out. Full house. Laura Poitras was present with her composer, Cambridge-based Jeremy Flower, for a Q&A after the film. To me, this film reveals as much about Julian Assange as it does about Laura Poitras as an artist at a turning point in her creative career. One question to keep in mind is: how do you finish editing a documentary about something that is still going on? This film is a great insight into Julian Assange as a man, and Laura Poitras as an artist.
Julian Assange
As the founder and the WikiLeaks, Assange has published multiple series of information that provides a previously unseen view of the operations of the U.S. government, international military activity, and, more recently, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Along with Chelsea Manning (whose files he helped circulate) and Edward Snowden, he might be one of the three most important actors in the western uncovering of the American government and the internet as a medium to be seen critically. This film presents us a very complex look into Assange’s personality and values. The film intentionally avoids placing Assange into a box. Laura Poitras is, without a doubt, an artist who shares the values of these whistleblowers and their mediators. However, this film is about Assange the man, rather than WikiLeaks the organization. WikiLeaks is only central to this film because it is central to Assange. For example, its logo only explicitly appears once, and that is only in the background as Assange is live on air.
The film started out as an investigation into surveillance, journalistic values and government suppression from inside of one of the most influential organizations in the 21st century. However, as Poitras experiences life from within the organization, it has evolved into a study on Assange. Assange as a man who has complete faith that what he does is right, someone who has a set understanding on what he needs to provide in the world.
The film, however, takes a turn. In one of her production journals that chapters the film (in the form of voice memos), Poitras states:
This isn’t the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions, that it wouldn’t affect the story.
Rather than the more abstract values on information and integrity, the film shows the deep flaws that Assange has as a person. She has to reconcile her belief in his “mission” with the man who is undoubtedly human but toxic, no matter how much he tries to hide his humanity. And Assange himself provides easy material for the claim: he is consistently condescending towards the women he interacts with and by how he inhumanly talks through his inability to apply his strategy toward discrediting the women who made sexual assault claims against him. But I think the film doesn’t dwell on that, despite it being a common theme.
Assange surprisingly shows a lot in the film. I, like Poitras, am surprised that he lets the camera crew film as much as they do, as they strategize on how to tactically navigate through the different agencies that are going for him. Since it’s practically impossible to not show any vulnerabilities over four years no matter how much you craft your personality, Assange’s character is revealed and blooms over the duration of the film.
What this film reveals is that Julian Assange is a powerful man with a god complex. An incredibly sharp person, whose eyes parse through information like codes flying through the screen, he is articulate, clear about his values, and extremely charismatic. In one scene, he mentions that acting locally has no importance, that the “only way to act to remove features you don’t like is to act globally.” His idea of political action is about “how many people you’re willing to sacrifice to advance a political goal.” But these could have been said by any politician with some amount of power in their hands. What reveals his egomania is how he understands himself.
Two scenes that ferment this idea are two where he is most vulnerable. In the first, he is getting a haircut, surrounded by his staffers at night. Haircut recipients must trust their barbers and are especially vulnerable, since it’s very rare that you let someone run razor sharp blades all over your head. In this scene, Assange receives his haircut while his staffers merrily surround him, laughing at Japanese aerobics videos, becoming increasingly joyous whenever Assange lets out a little smile. The scene reminds you of popularized images of tribes paying tribute to their leader. Throughout the film, aside from lawyers, he rarely openly interacts with people outside this small circle of WikiLeak staff. To the untrained eye, it might seem like he surrounds himself with people who worship him. In the other scene, Assange is interviewed by Lady Gaga. She asks him a question about what food he last ate, or what his favorite food was. He veers off his mental script. He gets angry that she asked this question, that she tried to uncover his humanity.
“Let’s not pretend for a moment that I’m a normal person. Why does it matter how I feel? Who gives a damn? It doesn’t matter how I feel”.
He tries to present himself as disinterested in this one quality that makes us human– hell, that makes us a living animal. It seems like he wants to transcend this state. Of course people care about how he feels, since this film sold out the Coolidge’s largest theater. This outburst directly opposes what we see in the opening scenes of the film. Assange opens a bottle of an alcoholic drink to pour for the interviewer. After opening the bottle, he sniffs the half-empty bottle, examining the smell and savoring the aroma to determine the drink’s quality. He clearly enjoys this drink. Soon after, he asks a figure off screen about what they’re about to have for dinner. He does not want to be seen as another human being. This, in combination with the power that he wields that’s presented in various forms (driving the search for asylum of America’s most wanted Edward Snowden, the influence over the US presidential elections, the leverage that he has over the US government), creates this superhuman being that attempts to transcend the mortal man.
—
Laura Poitras
What this film and the Q&A session afterwards reveal to me beyond Assange’s life is Poitras’ turning point as an artist. She is implicated in this documentary and does not try to hide it. Beyond the production journal, a scene in which Assange has a discussion with his lawyer in the woods reveals her position in the film. As she is asked to investigate the source of a noise that Assange thinks might be an observer of the secret conversation, the camera walks in search of the intruder along the bushes and then returns, rather than cutting between the scenes.
What Poitras does well is present the importance of WikiLeaks as the organization, while placing an important stress on Assange’s character. However, despite my description of Assange’s flaws, the film does not present him as a villain (or a hero). It does not demonize him, and a small sliver of Poitras’ journalistic integrity is shown when, during the Q&A, she consistently emphasized that the sexual assault allegations were still allegations, and that she believes Assange. What she does struggle with, and starts to deal with, is moving into the realm of an inquisitive look into herself as an artist who needs to present her vulnerability in a film. She did not set out to make this documentary to be about her, but circumstances made it essential that she included her experiences in the film. I thought the production journals were incredibly brave, especially since she expressed her extreme reluctance to include herself in the film during the Q&A, when talking about having to put herself in with (as I recall) a producer of the film. This film shows us an artist at an important turn in her creative career as she takes upon herself the challenge of doing something she’s uncomfortable with. Funny how an Academy Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning documentarian and journalist finds the most trouble in uncovering a story that is right at home, literally speaking.
To me, the film does not feel complete. Assange’s intentions, involvement, and impact in intervening in the 2016 presidential elections were a mere footnote. The inclusion of the Chelsea Manning storyline felt unrelated to the thesis of the film, although there is no doubt that she is central to Assange’s WikiLeaks in real life. I think the increasing involvement of the Laura Poitras character in the film (the Cannes cut apparently is much more pro-WikiLeaks and does not feature the most revealing production journals) has made it a little difficult for her to cut this film in the way she knows how to.
But don’t get me wrong. I am sure Poitras knows these things about herself and is not done with the project. Her personal involvement in the story and characters brings an incredibly rich and complex relationship between filmmaker and topic, between the photographer and the subject. Although some might argue that we should be wary of the filmmaker’s position on the subject due to her brief romantic involvement with Jacob Applebaum and her worsening relationship to Assange, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a neutral film that is a mere mechanical reproduction of the real life. In the first chapter of her book Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, revolutionary photography scholar Ariella Azoulay talks about the nature in understanding photography:
The pencil (read “camera”) of nature could not be positioned differently – not as a device that wrote itself by itself, nor even as one wielded by the author who used it to produce pictures of other people. Rather, the pencil of nature could be seen as an inscribing machine that transforms the encounter that comes into being around it, through it and by means of its mediation, into a special form of encounter between participants where none of them possesses a sovereign status […] no one is the sole signatory to the event of photography.
This argues that even by having Poitras (or her director of photography) film Assange’s life already implicates all of them (outside of anyone’s control) in the event of photography, that the actions of Assange (or any other documentary subject) are already afflicted by the presence of the photography. In this sense, no documentary film is ever as tabula rasa as critics want them to be.
Much like how the situation around Assange, surveillance, free speech, and journalism evolves, Poitras, and therefore the film, is developing too. As Poitras reveals in her Q&A, she does not see herself as an activist in her filmmaking. This film would benefit from a viewing that takes into account Laura Poitras as an person evolving her craft, and as an artist presenting her understanding of the world, because she feels the human desire to share experiences. To close, another quote from the book:
The event of photography is never over. It can only be suspended, caught in the anticipation of the next encounter that will allow for its actualization: an encounter that might allow a certain spectator to remark on the excess or lack inscribed in the photograph so as to re-articulate every detail including those that some believe to be fixed in place by the glossy emulsion of the photograph.
Risk
2016
dir. Laura Poitras
87 mins
Now playing at Coolidge Corner Theatre
