This film is not just a guy in a hotel room, like a subpoena deposition. I really like the image you start out with, for example: a ribbon of light through the darkness. What is that exactly? That’s a tunnel emerging into Hong Kong. At the beginning, you don’t see where it’s going, and then when we arrive in Hong Kong, you get the skyline. It’s also psychological—it feels like I’ve been in a tunnel for the past year. As if the last movie you did, The Oath [10], wasn’t high-tension enough. Definitely. I’ve been more stressed working on this film than being in Iraq during the occupation. Just in terms of what the movie discloses, what does it reveal that has not been disclosed already? I could answer that in a couple ways. For one thing we wanted to make a film that wasn’t about breaking news, but was about a story that would have resonance now and in five years or 10 years. But there are things that are new in it. The fact that Lindsay Mills has moved to Moscow to be with him hadn’t been disclosed before Friday night at the premiere. There are [also] some things in the final scene. Some things have been published—the watch-list documents have been published—but the role of the Ramstein air-force base is in the film. We’re working on it, and there have been other whistle-blowers who have talked about Ramstein as being key for the U.S. drone program. There’s that, and then there’s the President being the person who decides who gets killed in the drone program. That’s also been reported in other ways, but we’re doing different reporting. Then there was a section called “Into the Archive” called Core Secrets, which is looking at some of the highest level of classification in the U.S. government. You see it when Snowden leaves the hotel room, and there’s this cut to the archive called “Core Secrets,” and you see some of what’s being initiated. That’s something we published on The Intercept on Friday, simultaneous with the film. There’s a story by me and Peter Maass which looks at these Core Secrets, which involves things like having people who work for the U.S. government deployed in the technology industry to build in backdoors, through encryption and stuff. We intended to have [CITIZENFOUR] work as a narrative that’s not going to have a wave of headlines, and then all of a sudden be old news. So we wanted to make it a story. That’s sometimes a challenge for documentaries. When documentaries come out, people often treat what they say as if it’s news and nobody ever said it before. I always wonder how much documentary filmmakers grapple with that. I mean, we are definitely doing long-form journalism. It’s great if there’s something new in there, and it can get attention. But it has to go further and go deeper to have any depth. There’s something especially striking about the nature of what CITIZENFOUR reveals, though. It’s not as though the government is spying too much—it sounds like it’s just spying all. It’s shocking, and not just the first time you hear it. It’s almost as if you need to be told certain things more than once—and need to be told it in a particularly effective narrative—in order to absorb it. Obviously I choose to do visual storytelling—if you connect emotionally, then maybe you can shift consciousness in a certain way. There’s lots of information that we know about. We know that the U.S. has a drone program, or we know that we torture people. But if you can actually communicate those things in a way that hits people in a different way, then I think it’s fundamentally different. It’s not about news or not news—it’s about whether it has any emotional resonance. And therefore it’s about whether people care, or don’t care. The work I do tries to ground it, so it’s about communicating on the level of emotions, or empathy, as much as it is about information. There’s information that’s not revealed—that we know about—but the fact that we can see why he did it, and what he sees as the danger of it, changes how we interpret that information. If he’s willing to risk his life for this, perhaps it’s important that we pay some attention rather than brush it off.
The film’s structure—having the hour or so in the hotel room frame bookended by the outside world—is very effective. The way you set it up, it’s almost as if the room was the theory—and as soon as you leave that room you’ll be encountered with reality, with the world. That’s really interesting. What do you mean when you say “theory”? You have all this stuff he’s telling you. And you have no particular reason to doubt it, but it’s still just stuff he’s telling you. But then you have the news reports, and then it’s happening, and it’s real in a way that it wasn’t real before. Yeah, I mean that does mirror, like, time stopping. And then all of a sudden psh!—something exploding beyond the hotel room. It’s also like a cat-and-mouse game—until he comes out. What made you linger on those shots of him getting ready to leave? Picking things up, milling about. These moments feel like they last a long time, after the very dense scenes of him talking. With everything in my relationship with Snowden, it was always: “Here’s the next step.” He didn’t say when we first started corresponding: “Oh, I will go to Hong Kong at some point, and then we’ll meet there.” It’d be like, “I need the key, let’s exchange email addresses,” and then, “You should go here and we’ll wait for the next thing.” I only knew one step ahead, and I didn’t know he was leaving the country until he’d already left and then went to Hong Kong. But I kind of thought he had the next step planned after the hotel room. When he’s packing and leaving, you realize that his planning actually stopped—right there. It was important to show that—that it’s clear he didn’t have an exit strategy in that moment, and the emotion that goes with that. Once he’s left, it’s surprising that he ended up taking a flight that would go through Russia. Were you surprised by that? Whatever his choice was for Hong Kong, it seemed that when the U.S. issued an extradition warrant it wasn’t safe for him to be there anymore. Then it does create a problem of what airspace, how do you get out of there, in a way that the U.S. is not going to intervene. As we saw later, when the U.S. downed the airplane of the Bolivian president, the U.S. was really after him. But I actually thought he had a strategy with regard to Hong Kong. After that—this has been widely reported—he was in transit in Moscow and was trying to get to Latin America.
Could you talk about when you decided to film? After he, Glenn [Greenwald, journalist], and I met, we went back to his room, and I did take out my camera really quickly. Partly because I know Glenn pretty well, and I knew he was going to want to jump right in, and I didn’t want to miss that. So I took out my camera right away—which was probably a bit awkward, and he was probably also a bit nervous. Then I started filming, and on this first day, I filmed—and Glenn did—a really lengthy debrief of who he was, his biography. The “you” story. I love that phrase. [Laughs] Yeah, it was the “you” story. And it went on for hours. Glenn was incredibly on point to try to understand who he was, why he was making this decision, and where he came from. That was the first day, and the second day Ewen [MacAskill, defence and intelligence correspondent for The Guardian] was brought in. And he did a separate kind of vetting which we see in the film. Then they progressed, and so the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were a lot of who are you, why are you doing this, and a lot of technical talk. He’s describing programs, and telling us about whatever, about XKeyscore, about Tumult, all these different things. I like that you kept all that in. Right, it becomes about journalism. And we’re all like, what the fuck are these things? Of course, now these things are all more in our vocabulary. Then Glenn starts publishing, and there’s a change. Because that’s when the NSA visit Snowden’s home where his girlfriend is living, and that’s when you realize there’s a bit of a race, or a clock ticking. The government clearly knows that he’s gone, and they probably know he’s the source. But they’re not ready to do a press conference or anything. And we’re publishing, and I think because Snowden had already made the decision that he wouldn’t remain anonymous, we felt it was important for him to articulate why he did what he did. So there was a bit of time pressure. Were you filming every time you were there with him in the room? Not every time but a lot. How long were the sessions? Each day was different. I’d say I filmed four hours a day, but each day was different. You can see him changing also in that time, on his face. It’s beautiful. First you have these strangers meeting, and a sort of awkward encounter, and then slowly getting to know each other, and then you realize the stakes for him get higher and higher. Then you realize the world outside is paying attention. From a filmmaking perspective, there was a lot of drama.
By the third or fourth day it’s clear he hasn’t been sleeping. But I suppose you might not have been sleeping that well either. I was not sleeping, no. I was very concerned that at any moment the door would get kicked in. I felt more afraid while making this film than any other film I’ve made. Because these are really powerful forces that we were angering and we knew we were doing it. At a certain point, you said you realized you were being followed. What were you seeing? I wanted to stay in Hong Kong and film, and after he left the hotel room, and he went underground, I actually wanted to film where he was. I was talking to his lawyer and asked if that was possible, and we tried to make a plan where I could be taken out of the hotel room and put someplace and maybe meet up. And then, yeah, it was just clear… What literally did you see? Was it a person walking behind you or a car? Yeah. A car, a person. Different things. It’s funny, I can sit here and have my little paranoid flights of imagination—and then you just confirm them. I mean, it wasn’t surprising, that after that, people would follow me as a way to lead to him. That’s ultimately why I left. I said, it’s too risky. I was eager to keep filming if that was possible. But it just seemed risky for him, and also risky for me. And at that point, everyone else had left. Glenn had left, Ewen had left, the Guardian had left, so I was the only person there. I remember seeing some cheesy movie in the late Nineties, Enemy of the State— Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that a few times. [Laughs] A few times? It’s no longer cheesy, in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s actually right.
Being in the thick of it, you must no longer be surprised by things. I still do get surprised by things. For instance, I was surprised that the CIA spied on the Senate committee to investigate torture. I thought that was surprising! I was like, really, you’d think that they wouldn’t go there. Specifically because you have people in those committees who have supported the torture programs—you’d think that they wouldn’t spy on Congress. But, no, they do. So you think you’re not going to be surprised, and then things happen. And there was also some stuff in Germany where the CIA had a double agent, who was spying on the German inquiry into the NSA. And you just think, come on guys! That’s just going too far. What about the second half of the film, is there a second film that could come out of that? It’s too soon to know. One aspect related to some of this is the role of business in surveillance. Is that ever something you’d like to explore? I do think that money and capital is going to have a big impact in terms of how the surveillance debate plays out, because what we’ve seen is that there are big U.S. companies that want to have a market internationally. These revelations make foreign citizens rightfully concerned about handing their information over to the U.S. government—which then opens up a marketplace for other people to step forward that aren’t cooperating so much with U.S. internet companies and telecoms. I think that there will be economic pressures that will have hopefully a role in creating technologies that are privacy-preserving as opposed to privacy-destroying. People—both U.S. citizens, and internationally—will expect that. Right now we’re in the era of handing over everything, the data. We haven’t really gotten the blowback from that yet, but I think there is going to be blowback. There’s going to be a generation of people who grow up and have their photographs out there—you know, their parents put their photographs up—and then there are these facial-recognition technologies… Et cetera. And there are going to be people who grow up and say: “I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to live where there’s a digital trail that collects everything I’ve said, every friend I’ve had.” I think there is both a right and a human desire for privacy. And we haven’t really seen how that’s going to play out, both in terms of what governments do, and also what companies and commercial entities do. So your view is that at some point people will react. I think so. I think there will be a blowback, and people will demand it. And parents will say: “I don’t want my kids, all the details about my kids, in the hands of a company or government.” That the right to privacy is a fundamental right and it’s a fundamental human need. And if you look at any repressive regime, you can see that that’s what happens: this kind of information can be used against populations. Right now, we’re in sort of a naïve state of mind thinking that it’s all innocent. I mean, Google’s email services—you can search things, you can find things, super convenient, et cetera—we all naïvely think that this is never going to be used in ways that could work against people. It’s a challenge talking about the film because there are so many intersecting issues. But I wanted to ask about feeling part of cinema verité, as a filmmaker, and it’s funny because so much of the cinema verité people know from the Sixties and later is about famous people. [Laughs] Not everything! You’ve got Salesman. It’s so brilliant. I love Salesman! Or Frederick Wiseman. Yeah, any of Wiseman.
But what I really appreciate about CITIZENFOUR is how it’s merged with journalism in a way. At the Q&A, you called yourself a documentary filmmaker, but you also then used the term “videojournalist.” Is it all together for you? Clearly I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I do think I do visual journalism, and that’s different than print journalism. And I would also say that I’m an artist. So I think that those things cross. So, a long form of film is not just about journalism. It’s about narratives and stuff like that. I think they’re both. You’ve done installation work in the past. What are you planning next in that regard? The Whitney asked me to do a show in 2016, so that’s probably my next big project. But I still have documentaries and shorts that I want to do. And how do you balance, how do you reconcile the artistic imperatives with the duty you’ve spoken of in doing journalism? It’s hard. It’s hard, because there’s still a lot of reporting that needs to be done. And I feel an obligation that it needs to happen. It’s a challenge because the reporting takes time, and it takes time to find partnerships that don’t make mistakes that could cause harm. All those kinds of things take time to navigate. But ultimately, I think what I can contribute, or what’s maybe more unique, is what I can do with the camera instead of what I can do in print. There are plenty of great print journalists that can report on the NSA stuff. But I think that my skills are maybe better used in other ways. We did a piece [Chokepoint] about a German company that was targeted by the GSHQ [British intelligence]. What the NSA and GSHQ are doing, which is really pernicious, is they target engineers at telecoms, personally, so they can get their passwords and get into their networks, and get their customer data. So they target this German company that provides Internet to Africa and the Middle East. They actually have names of employees and these documents. We published about it, which is a big deal, because it’s the U.K. targeting another European Union country. But then we did a video on it, which shows these engineers learning that their names are in this list.
Chokepoint For me, that’s what videojournalism can do, where you see the faces of the engineers being shown the data going, oh my God, I’m being targeted so that you can find out all of what my customers are doing. The print journalism is essential, and should be done, and I’ll continue to work on it, but to actually show the faces of somebody—an engineer who’s entrusted with customer data—realizing that his name is in an intelligence document, and to see that reaction, it’s a different way of communicating information. It’s powerful. It’s information that wouldn’t surprise you, so there is that idea of “yes, you know everything,” but it’s how you can know it in different ways.
title: “Interview Laura Poitras” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-07” author: “Sara Gibson”
Astro Noise—Poitras’s new art installation at the Whitney Museum—charts a narrative, and, with each visitor, creates a new one. Through a constellation of mixed media, spread across rooms and a peephole-lined corridor, the work builds upon the project of Poitras’s three documentary features in delineating post-9/11 experience. And it collapses the public and the private (much as the government does) in illustrating Poitras’s own resulting travails at the hands of the FBI, TSA, and others. Yet as one moves through the artworks, Astro Noise has a way of inducing a heightened state of self-consciousness (and thanks to a couple of feedback-based works, a vivid awareness of the imprint one leaves behind). Framing the entire exhibition is a giant opening video screen, drawing on footage from Poitras’s installation O’Say Can You See, footage of people viewing Ground Zero in September and October 2001. These are reaction shots in pure, painful form; one shot showing what appears to be a mother talking to her daughter particularly moved me, and found a strange echo when I visited the Whitney, in a woman trying to focus her stroller-strapped child on a wall of inkjet prints depicting signals intercepted by the U.K. from satellites, drones, and radars. Another sort of reaction is shown on the flip side of the O’Say screen: footage of an Afghanistan interrogation. Like CITIZENFOUR, the upshot to this immersion is a dry-eyed emotion—that mix of awe and fear created by proximity to the power demonstrated by surveillance, and then a deepening feeling of unease that sets in and stays like an ache. Last Wednesday, following the press preview of Astro Noise—which had received its finishing touches just the night before—I sat down with Laura Poitras to discuss the work, together with Whitney curator Jay Sanders.
O’Say Can You See That first piece you walk into, the footage of people reacting to the aftermath of September 11th from your O’Say piece, really struck me. You just set up a tripod and filmed? Laura Poitras: There was a sort of pilgrimage that happened down there, and I just filmed the faces. Rarely did somebody make eye contact. I myself found it hard to go anywhere near there for weeks afterward. LP: I didn’t go down the first couple days, but then I felt like I really had to. And then I went with my camera. I thought there was actually nothing there to film—but there was a lot to film. It was a really interesting moment to be in New York. There was this outpouring of compassion, a generosity, a kind of “How are you?” Strangers acknowledging each other in different ways. Something that we, people in New York, experienced. That opening screen frames the entire exhibition for me. It almost seems to encapsulate a lot of the debate that happened—or didn’t—in the ensuing few years: between fear and reason, in our policy response to terrorism. LP: What you said about it being an extended reaction shot totally resonates. But I don’t associate those reactions with the government’s reactions, or the government’s actions, actually. Because I felt like in those faces you see a real sense of compassion and openness. Not a sense of vengeance—you just have anguish. They’re faces in anguish and disbelief. And I’m interested in them as images that you can read into and try to understand that moment through. I feel very different when I think about the policy directions that the government has taken in the aftermath of 9/11. I put them in separate categories. Had the government made different decisions, we would be in a different place in the world right now. There was the hope we could expect our government to act more rationally than a mob might. LP: Right, and in a weird sort of reverse, the government was making plans to invade Iraq while people were just trying to make sense of what had happened.
Then the flip side of that—and the flip side of the screen showing WTC site spectators—is the screen showing interrogation footage from November 2001 in Afghanistan. LP: What interests us in terms of formulae is exactly what you’re saying: the flip side and shifting perspective, from this [first] set of images that maybe you identify with or can relate to. So, that was filmed in Afghanistan after the war started. It’s always a dance in non-fiction filmmaking, the line between exposition and what I want to be more experiential. We didn’t put things like wall labels all over the place. We want it to be something you have to explore and experience. Jay Sanders: And that was deliberate, that our confrontation is first with the visual material, with the room, the choreography, the space. Then we have this brochure which is supplemental to help people orient, but would trail their discovery in real time. The choreography strikes a chord with the corridor of peepholes—each of which opens on a document, or interview footage, or something else you can’t quite positively identify. You enter a room full of people peering into glowing holes in the walls. For example, one peephole just opens on a shot of a forest. Where is that? LP: Again, we wanted to leave a few things actually a bit more mysterious, and experiential. Is the forest something that cannot be identified, or is it just as an anonymous forest? LP: It has personal meaning… I knew when I first started talking to Jay that I didn’t want to make a work that viewers would have a passive relationship to. And I wanted it to have a narrative so that there would be a way that you enter in, and another way you leave. And there’s some sort of arc and some kind of reveal, like typical narrative tropes. Discoveries, reveals, challenges. Choices. So we started dividing up into these rooms, and I started crafting out the different sorts of works and then realizing that it was drawing upon a lot of cinematic language like the reaction shot, which is like an opening shot. Or the peepholes being an early cinema reference. And so we discovered at some points, Oh, wow, this is sort of a lot about cinema. And it’s also about seduction and all the ways in which cinema can work. JS: And often in each room the first thing you see is the other people, and that orients you to a different view and condition. LP: It’s the choreography of people. People saying, “What’s going on here?”
Bed Down Location Before that corridor comes a room called the Bed Down Location, a room with a platform where visitors can lie back and gaze at the ceiling, which shows time-lapse recorded images of the sky. That’s another space where you’re choreographing people, into a position of vulnerability: a restful, star-gazing position. Were there any other permutations you considered for this portion? LP: And at some point we did spend a lot of time seeing if live feeds could be possible from different places. But to get something that was beautiful and that was reliable for three months, the technical people said, “That’s really tough.” I felt that I wanted quality but also that cinematic beauty, and I couldn’t get both. So I went cinematic. But all those kinds of things are very much what I was interested in—asking people to slow down and contemplate parts of the world where drones are flying, and then flip that. About the various documents that are on display, have they generally been available before now? LP: There’s a range. One concurrent news story that was published in relationship to the exhibition is around this program called “ANARCHIST.” And that’s a collaboration between a journalist Henrik Moltke who worked with me in Europe. We started discovering these images that I think are striking visually but also have these striking backstories. But it took us a long time to figure out what the program was and what it did. And that journalism was done by Henrik and his colleague Cora Currier at The Intercept, about the Anarchist program which is intercepting signals in the Middle East, and they focused on intercepting Israeli signals. Then we started to find out that GCHQ is hacking into signals, Israeli drone feeds, and collecting them and decrypting them. In some of those images, you see actual drones, and others are signals that are in various stages of being descrambled or decrypted. So that series of images that are classified went through all the sort of standard journalistic processes. So Henrik and Cora did the reporting and spoke to all the named parties, and wrote the story and we published that before the exposition opened because we felt that it was important the information be out there. And there were several documents that are in the show that went through the same journalistic process: we confronted the government, and we said, “We are going to be including this in the exhibition.” They know that this is happening. We redact, in general, names that I don’t tend to publish in my reporting unless it’s somebody at a high level. There are some documents in the show that haven’t been revealed before. But it’s gone through a lengthy journalistic process that’s been led mostly by Henrik and gone through the legal teams with the Whitney. And this experience is very similar with what I did with Citizen Four.
ANARCHIST: Israeli Drone Feed (Intercepted February 24, 2009) And what about the FBI documents about you that you obtained? LP: The FBI documents are in a different category. Those I didn’t receive through a source, they were received through a lawsuit against the government—a FOIA lawsuit that was also very much a part of this exhibition. I knew the date for the show and I wanted to see if I could get my files, and it was actually inspired by the writing of William Vollmann. He did this great piece for Harper’s called My Life as a Terrorist, where he discovered that he was a Unabomber suspect, and he got his FBI files and wrote this really fantastic play about discovering his files. I was inspired to get my files and I reached out to his lawyer, the same one who’s very good at getting FOIA documents. He works for Electronic Frontier Foundation, who agreed to submit requests for my files to the government. The government was not responsive in most cases. Then we sued the government, as you’re able to do under FOIA law, and I started to receive documents. So far I’ve received 800 pages of government documents of my file. And they started coming in October, right in time for the show. The FOIA lawsuit I consider part of the artwork. Those documents and those redactions were not made by me, they’re made by the government. The big surprise in the FOIA stuff was that there was a grand jury investigation that I hadn’t known about. And the level of surveillance that I was under, by FBI and NYPD. The FBI documents are posted next to a loop of some footage you filmed in 2004 while making My Country, My Country that aroused the government’s interest. And your voiceover, which plays next to the FBI documents, has this amazing line: “It took me 10 years to learn what happened to me.” Could you talk about the temporal experience of working through all of this? LP: As a verité filmmaker you’re always going in the dark—not really knowing until you zoom out what you, what the story is. The filming at Ground Zero becomes the beginning of a body of work that I didn’t know was going to be the beginning of a body of work. And in a way that’s a kind of chapter close to that. JS: And that line in your recording, “Those eight minutes changed my life.” Some very banal minutes of real-time footage have such a vastly different meaning in the context of the story. LP: Yeah, and as a narrative piece, you could also talk about it as an inciting incident. Everything else that’s in the show goes back to those eight minutes. But it was one piece that I struggled with: “Do we hide it, do we make it concealed?” There was a part of me that wanted to make it really hard to find.
O’Say Can You See Jay, what were some analogues or points of reference in thinking about this show? JS: It’s unique. I love artists that really redefine things from the ground up—the space, the conditions. You need a maximum amount of control of all the variables of the experience in order to really do things that can be as unsettling or euphoric or transforming as they can be. So Laura’s way of working, we’re sympathetic in that way. You could talk about the history of cinema or the history of expanded cinema, which is something that the Whitney has a lot of history about with Chrissie Iles and that sort of thing. Something like that Into Light show that was 15 years ago—that show blew me away when I first came to New York, and saw Michael Snow and that generation for the first time. That was new to me. And I’m always interested in what you can do to take the conditions of your medium and extend it sort of beyond what it’s meant to do or something. This show updates those potentialities for how a moving image can situate itself and what it can ask of viewers. And also how you deal with documents, factual material, but create situations that allow for very different point of entry. LP: I studied that tradition, in Michael Snow or Warhol’s work, and I love what they did in terms of pushing the boundaries of cinema. I remember seeing Chelsea Girls, and it was just like, “Wow!” But for me, the resonance of doing installation work is actually how do you use the space in an emotive way—not just making it an intellectual experience but that it’s another physical experience. And then I go to a different tradition than expanded cinema. Installation work like [Christian] Boltanski, who’s been constantly working with materials and histories to evoke with the Holocaust. It’s very emotive. You experience it. Jumping back to the FBI file again for a moment, I like how they refer to you in the document as an “independent media representative.” And I thought, “That’s not wrong.” [Laughter] What’s the situation now for you in terms of surveillance? LP: You know, with the government, you can’t just call up and say: “What’s the status of my watch list?” It’s not information that’s been forthcoming. Nor has the government ever chatted with me about why they put me under investigation. So I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that they stopped detaining me at the border, but that doesn’t mean you’re off their watch list. They have something that actually one of the documents talks about. There’s no-fly, selective—which means harassment, questioning, I was a selectee for many years—and then they have something called Silent Hit. Who comes up with these names? LP: Silent Hit means they don’t stop you [at the airport], so you don’t know, but it’s like a silent hit. So I don’t know if I’m no longer on the watch list or if I’ve moved to the Silent Hit list. That brings me to another aspect of the work, which is finding ways of representing or figuring bureaucracy. Because for this stuff, you don’t get to see or talk to somebody face to face. In terms of surveillance, have you ever talked face-to-face with anyone in the government who has explained anything whatsoever to you about this? What’s so completely vanished is any physical interpersonal experience, any actual face-to-face interaction. LP: The answer is no, which is probably what motivates some of the work. Particularly the dispositions of the peephole boxes. It’s that there are forces that you can’t quite understand that are acting and that are having impact—but they’re not approachable. They’re hard to see into. I’ve had the effects of it but I’ve never had, “These are the personal records we’ve obtained from you.” I don’t have any idea. So the closest I’ve gotten to it is the FBI documents. They’re disturbing, but there’s a sense of appreciation that I have more insight than I did before, which actually feels like a good thing. Even if it doesn’t feel necessarily good to know the extent to which I was put under investigation.
ANARCHIST: Power Spectrum Display of Doppler Tracks from a Satellite (Intercepted May 27, 2009) There’s a strange way in which those FBI documents actually add a human element: you see a certain amount of narrative, you can picture someone. LP: Right, right. But it’s probably not very satisfying. LP: I’ve said it a bunch of times before, but I really feel like it is a kind of bureaucratic machine that you get caught in the grinders of and then its very hard to get out of. It sucks you into its mechanism, and it has happened to other journalists—James Risen reporting in the subpoenas, the Grand Jury stuff. You get too close to it and it’s gonna pull you into its vortex. I wanted to ask what you’re working on next, and specifically whether you’ve been considering any kind of work in virtual reality. LP: Right now I’m really focusing on Field of Vision and the commissioning of short-form, which can be responsive to events. I’m helping to executive produce and send filmmakers. So I’m definitely really deep into that right now and loving it. AJ [Schnack]’s piece about gun violence is using form in such a way to really make a point but also to think outside a locked structure. It’s structured in such a way that the film will get longer if there are more mass shootings. I find virtual reality to be very isolating—maybe I haven’t had the right experience. If virtual reality can get there, I’m all for it. I’m all for it expanding, shifting different types of storytelling. That’s what I think I’ll be doing for the next foreseeable future—working in different formats. And finally, to take a step away from the work, I was wondering what else you may have been watching and enjoying. LP: You know what I love? Mr. Robot. It’s really smart storytelling. Once I got it, I was so hooked, it was hard not to keep watching it. So I’m definitely a Mr. Robot fan. You should see the coverage, the angles they get. The opening scene in the second episode is so good. And all of it is in voiceover acting. I’m glad it’s coming back for another season. It’s like really smart cinema. Astro Noise runs through May 1 at the Whitney, accompanied by a full calendar of events and the exhibition’s anthology catalogue, which includes excerpts from Poitras’s Berlin journal and a short piece by Snowden.
