Laura Poitras
adulterers and whistleblowers alike know
Inspired by Laura Poitras’s Nan Goldin doc, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I went back to this profile of Poitras I wrote in 2016, for Under The Influence. The theme of the issue was “Private” (ft. Glenn Martens, Amalia Ulman, Trevor Paglen, etc.) Surveillance was a trendy target then, the post-911 morality play had us rapt. Today I think our own dystopia bores us. Critique became a product. I mean it already was, that’s the point of Network (1976). But the luster of that specific leaks-fueled critique didn’t last the Trump age. Big Brother was a boring bogeyman. Not chaotic enough. Like, does all art that speaks truth to power have to be so one-to-one? It doesn’t, it can do gymnastics. Proof: the Hans Haacke show up at Paula Cooper right now. Works from 1975–85, taking aim at Mobil, Chase, Rockefeller, and in that blue-chip context, you can’t forget that they’re assets. To continue with the doublespeak, I won’t argue they’re not valuable. And I keep thinking about this moment in the conversation I had with Poitras, circling around the why of political art and the difference between a goal and a consequence.
Adulterers and whistleblowers alike know there’s something discreet and anonymous about a hotel room. It’s an intimate space, but also a totally impersonal one. Three years after Laura Poitras interviewed Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room, I interviewed Poitras in another one in New York. There was no Rubik’s cube needed in our meet up though. Before I spotted her in the lobby, I already knew what Poitras looked like. The artist, documentary filmmaker, and Academy Award winner, who was placed on a government watch list after her 2006 Iraq-War film My Country, My Country, is one of the most famous targets of the 21st-century surveillance machine.
“Everything becomes a race to get something new. That’s a problematic paradigm because there are things that are very disturbing but that aren’t new”
We were meeting just a week after Poitras (b. 1964) mounted her ambitious solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Astro Noise. It’s a departure in many ways from her documentary film work. While it interrogates the same subjects as her 9/11 trilogy— torture, surveillance, and the contemporary technologies of war — the museum show, of course, functions very differently than a one-and-a-half or two-hour film. It was in the midst of making her last documentary about Snowden, Citizenfour (2014), that Poitras had the idea to present this content using a more abstract vocabulary. When she was waiting to meet up with her mysterious whistleblower source, she wrote in her diary, “Why the fuck am I making long-form documentaries when other ways of working are so much more energizing?” Her ideas developed as she was downloading Snowden’s archive of documents. In April 2013, she made a note to contact the Whitney curator Jay Sanders about the installation idea.
Though she did still make a film too, fast-forward nearly three years, and Sanders has curated Poitras’s show. Upon entering the space, the first thing you see are six prints that derive from Snowden’s leaks. The glitchy blue, green, and red images come from Israeli drone feeds that were hacked by British and American intelligence. The rest of the exhibit includes a video installation pairing the anxious faces at Ground Zero in the days after the Twin Towers fell with viscerally disturbing footage showing the US military interrogation of two men suspected to be a part of Al Qaeda; a bed-like installation that asks visitors to lie down and peer up at footage of the night sky from countries like Yemen and Pakistan where drones regularly fly overhead; a dark winding corridor where shadow box-like dioramas with documents related to government surveillance programs are embedded behind a wall, only visible through small windows; a live video feed of the other museum goers, a room over, watching the drone-filled skies; and finally the documents, largely redacted, that reveal the extent of the government’s surveillance of Poitras, which she obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act, along with the raw unedited footage she shot in Iraq, startlingly innocuous, which prompted the government to put the artist on a watch list in the first place. Altogether, it’s an unsettling snapshot of our post-911 world.
Poitras bristles at my assumption that, with this exhibition, there’s a goal of getting a wider public informed about the dystopic political realities her work exposes. “It’s not my goal,” she contends. “Potentially, it’s a consequence. I think my goal is what any artist does with their work, to make something that expresses what they want to say and communicates that with people. That’s what I’m interested in doing. It’s not a means to an end, which isn’t to say that the work doesn’t reach people.” And she is interested in the fact that a museum show reaches a different audience. “With my previous work, there was a more self-selecting audience. When you go to a movie, you choose which movie to see. In a museum context, there will just be people who go to the eighth floor without any expectations or knowledge just because they are going to the museum.”
She acknowledges that activism and storytelling can overlap, but she insists, “I think it’s important to keep going back to that [her art] is not a means to an end. People write books, people make movies, people paint paintings because they are driven to do that, to say something. I don’t say, ‘I’m going to make a film about the Iraq War to have this policy changed.’ It’s not unrelated to wanting to change things. I think the Iraq War is a national shame and a nightmare and I felt that it was important to document that, but if I was trying to deal with policy change, I would take a very different avenue than filmmaking.”
Still, it’s undeniable that the documentary filmmaker, or visual journalist as she prefers to call herself, was intimately involved in one of the biggest intelligence leaks of the 21st century, which has hugely shifted public consciousness if not government policy. Intentions are very different than consequences of course, but Poitras is also self-effacing. It’s just her personality. During the photo shoot prior to our interview, it’s clear she’s more comfortable being behind the camera than in front of it.
Poitras describes herself as a shy person. She studied experimental film and started with abstract essayistic work not expecting to go into making documentaries. “Until I’d done it, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be the type of person to spend so much time with people and get such intimate access,” she explained. “It was actually on the first feature film I did called Flag Wars [2003] that I really learned about filming with people and what happens. There’s a kind of chemistry. To be be with people in real time as something unfolds, there’s a real drama in that. My favorite part of the process is filming in situations where I have to respond.”
Documentary filmmakers and NSA agents are both voyeurs in a way. Poitras is a watcher who became watched for the things she saw and shared. She had to navigate the ethics of whether or not her presence was invasive to others long before her own privacy was invaded by her government. “In most of the films I make there’s a kind of trust between the people that are in the film and the filmmaking, and I think those parameters get established through the relationship,” she explained. “It does raise questions. Probably the most ethically complicated dilemma I faced was when I was filming in Iraq with civilians there. I was in a situation where somebody had been kidnapped and the hostage takers were on the phone and I’m filming but I’m also asking permission to film. The family was like, ‘yes, we want you to film.’ There’s a sense of, ‘yes, we want the world to see what is happening.’ But then there were other times when something would happen and I wouldn’t take my camera out. It felt like the wrong decision. There was one time after a suicide bombing and I was about a block away. I walked out and there were charred remains on the street. I had my camera with me but I didn’t take it out. I don’t know what I can do with charred remains with my work.”
While Citizenfour and Astro Noise expose the urgency for there to be a more robust framework regulating surveillance programs and protecting people’s privacy, it’s often gut decision-making for journalists and filmmakers that determines when it’s okay to peer into the lives of others and expose what’s there to an audience. “It’s all complicated because the work does have real world impact,” said Poitras. “I definitely try to work in contexts where I have consent and meaningful consent, but still nobody can really predict what kind of impact it can have.”
Of course, consent and also just the awareness of being observed and recorded are some of the many many differences between the kind of watching documentary filmmakers engage in and what the NSA does. When it comes to the latter, it’s the unknowing that can be especially haunting. When Poitras was communicating with Snowden, she was particularly afflicted by this anxiety. She started rereading George Orwell’s 1984 and noticed similarities between how she and the book’s protagonist Winston were internalizing the gaze. “You know where Winston is writing in his journal and he is like, ‘where is the camera? where can I write,’ I understand that mindset of not knowing what is being watched and when — a panopticon situation.”
It was an intense few months for Poitras. “I was really aware that the person I was talking to was taking enormous risk and if I did things wrong, it would have very bad consequences for this person and for myself. I knew enough; I had done enough research into NSA surveillance and what programs were out there to think, pretty early on, that the source I was talking to was legit. And, if that’s the case then we are dealing with someone’s life. Being careful was the right thing to do.”
At this point when Snowden contacted Poitras she already knew she was on a watch list. She knew too that she was “dealing with people who really knew how to spy.” Being cautious meant extreme lengths. She bought a computer with cash and created multiple fake email addresses. She changed emails multiple times during her correspondence with Snowden to divorce metadata. “I actually even went as far as not turning my phone on in an apartment I was staying in for a few months because I just figured, I’m not going to broadcast where I live.”
This affect of surveillance manifested physically for Poitras. “I started hearing loud noises constantly in my head, just basically from stress.” You could call it paranoia, but paranoia also implies a level of delusion. In this case, there was a real legitimate fear. “It’s been interesting now because I did this FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] lawsuit and got the FBI files, I’m seeing I was totally right to be paranoid and cautious because according to those documents, my records were subpoenaed by the government and there was a really active national security investigation into the work that I do.”
These FBI files are a part of the Whitney show, as are countless other government documents that give a window into extensive surveillance programs. The quality of many of these documents are at once dystopic and absurd. In one titled, “Input to the ‘No Fly’ Watchlist: How The Process Works,” there’s a cheery blue and yellow logo in the left corner of the page and the memo is written in a friendly and helpful voice: “Just imagine the repercussions that could arise if a ‘single’ name were watch listed, with no specific and valid evidence regarding that individual! Unfortunately, some have already been inconvenienced when incorrectly identified as a terrorist.” The choice of the word “inconvenienced” is especially shocking, but perhaps the most jarring document of all is a diagram explaining the NSA’s collection strategy. It’s an amateurishly hand-drawn chart complete with clouds and smiley-faces, an unnerving contrast with the insidious nature of the collection and interception it’s describing.
These documents full of flowcharts and other details reminiscent of Windows 95 word-processing reveal the banal bureaucracy of these government surveillance programs. The paper trail Poitras shows us doesn’t suggest that they’re particularly sophisticated either. I’m not sure if I should feel relieved or terrified that these insanely powerful programs are also inefficient examples of bloated bureaucracy. “It’s not so much that there are thought police that are going after people because they don’t like their work,” Poitras contended. “It’s a machine and you can get caught up in the machine, and it’s not a very intelligent machine, a lot of the time.”
An element of the reaction from journalists and media outlets to the museum exhibition has been frustrating for Poitras. “There’s a way in which, with journalism, everything becomes a race to get something new,” she said. “I feel like that’s a problematic paradigm because there are things that are very disturbing but that aren’t new and I think we should still constantly be reminding ourselves of them and reminding the public of them.”
Proving her point, you can find articles about Poitras’s Astro Noise that note the interrogation footage, which she screens on loop at the Whitney, has long been available on youtube and that feel the need to mention that a particular document in the show is a lot like another one previously published. Poitras noticed this urge for a fresh news item especially from David Remnick The New Yorker editor who got to see the exhibition during install, ahead of even the press preview. “He was so interested in what has been published before and what hasn’t been published before. And I was like I’m actually not going to engage those questions because I don’t think that should be the issue at hand. The question should be, what does the material say?”
Poitras says something too in the way she puts the material together in the space. Regardless of whether they’ve been published before, the documents mean differently this way. The interrogation footage loops on one side of a screen hung in the middle of the room. On the other side of the installation titled O’Say Can You See, footage of the faces of men, women, and children at Ground Zero trying to make sense of the wreckage simultaneously plays in slow-motion. These are twins: our post-911 anxieties and their human cost. Salim Hamdam, one of the men being interrogated, was sent to Guantanamo in 2002.
A week after the exhibition had opened, Poitras already noticed patterns in how audiences were interacting with it: “I’ve been surprised how many people sit and watch all the interrogation footage in the first room. They are treating it like a cinema, which I didn’t expect. I thought it would be more of a pass through.”
O’Say Can You See is the most cinematic of the pieces in the show while the rest navigate a different relationship between the museum goer and what they are looking at. “I was really interested in how bodies in the space become part of the piece,” Poitras said. This is especially palpable in the winding corridor, Disposition Matrix. Documents explaining government surveillance, as well as other archiving their consequences, are revealed through peephole-like windows designed for one person to look through at the time. The consequence is feeling alone together with the other people in the space. Even if you are physically close, you can’t see the same thing that anyone else is looking at. The effect made me think about how alienating it must have been for Poitras, Snowden, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who also helped facilitate the leak, to have access to this information when no one else did.
For Poitras, it was an extremely isolating experience to have this mysterious source contact her, suggesting he had vast amounts of damning classified information he wanted to expose. “I did notify a core group of people that I was working with but I would only talk to people about it in person. Nothing long distance. Nothing over email or phones. I felt an obligation to do that because I knew that it would mostly likely instigate a big national security investigation and anybody in my orbit would be a part of that. And I wanted to give them an option to consent or opt out,” she explained. “I knew that the risk would be most high for the source, and for those of us in direct contact, myself and Glenn, it would be pretty high too. And as much as I tried to mitigate it, it was real. And then, there was risk that emanated out in concentric circles.”
When Snowden first emailed Poitras, she was in Berlin starting the editing process for a documentary she had started in 2011, filming with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Being part of one of the most momentous leaks in American history distracted her from this Assange-focused project but now in recent months, she’s returned to it.
“It’s going to be a longitudinal piece that covers many years,” she said. “I’m not quite sure when it will be finished but the structure will be episodic. It’s a different type of storytelling format. I’m excited about that.” This past September, Poitras visited Assange where he’s been living in the Ecudorian Embassy in London, and it hit home for her just long three years is for someone to be confined to a single space. “He’s been in the embassy now since the Summer of 2012. It’s taken a huge personal physical toll on him.”
In spite of all the hardships Poitras has witnessed, and that she herself has gone through, she’s stubbornly hopeful. “Obviously, I feel like there are decisions that have been made over the last ten years that are really pretty nightmarish including mass surveillance and collection of data. But one of the things that was most inspiring about meeting Snowden and other young people who were working for Internet rights, was that people who have a lot of choices in terms of their own skill sets, people who could be making a lot of money working for Facebook or Google, are making choices that are really big sacrifices and that aren’t just about leveraging a skill set for financial gain. They are saying, what is the world that we want to live in and how can we make it a better world?”