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“Citizenfour,” which aired on HBO Monday night, is a dispatch from deep inside Poitras’s and Greenwald’s deposition of Snowden — Poitras filmed their 2013 meetings with him in Hong Kong — and it doesn’t always bridge the gap between the reporters’ experiences and a more general audience’s.
“To see it, the physical blueprints of it, and the technical expressions of it, brutally hits home in a super-visceral way that is so needed,” Greenwald says of one document. I’m sure that’s true for him, given his deep absorption in the details of American surveillance. But if you’re not steeped in the story the way Greenwald is, the bolts from the blue aren’t as obvious. And while long scenes of anti-surveillance activists contain some powerful insights, they also add to the sheer volume of information in a way that can be more overwhelming than clarifying.
To Poitras’s credit, part of the power of “Citizenfour” comes from the way the movie juxtaposes mundane facilities with the malignancy carried out inside of them. “We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man,” Poitras reads from Snowden’s communications over shots of a bland construction site. The movie has a droning score that evokes the hum of servers. We see still shots of green fields punctuated by satellite dishes, Menwith Hill station in the United Kingdom with its Epcot-like domes, Dagger Complex in Germany, which comes across as an office park with bad lighting and slightly better security.
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Snowden’s affect is muted, but even his tone can’t conceal all of the strain he obviously feels when he acknowledges that “I don’t think I’ll be able to keep the family ties that I’ve had for my life.” He’s proved right: his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (who now lives with him in Moscow and appeared on the Oscar stage on Sunday) is interrogated. “I just heard from Lindsay, and she’s alive, which is good, and free,” Snowden tells Poitras and Greenwald, revealing the full extent of his fears only in that expression of relief.
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More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...itizenfour-and-the-power-of-personal-stories/
