Secrets become history: Edward Snowden on film as Citizenfour
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Citizenfour is filmmaker Laura Poitras' account of the first meetings between herself, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. It was first shown publicly last Friday, and it will open in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on October 24.
For those who have followed the news around the Snowden documents, even in small doses,Citizenfour isn't full of revelations (though there are a few surprises). But for viewers interested in surveillance, or the future of the Internet, or journalism—it won't matter. The film is riveting, and its power is in its source material.
Poitras filmed Snowden for 20 hours over eight days in his Hong Kong hotel, and her film has now given the world an unfiltered portrait of the man who, in the course of the year, became the West’s most wanted dissident.
The movie follows Snowden in Hong Kong up until his decision to leave the hotel and flee for Russia, where he remains today. The hotel scenes are sometimes tense and at times surprisingly funny. Snowden and the reporters get granular, talking about how they’ll break the story and what might happen afterward. For a journalism junkie, Poitras’ fly-on-the-wall picture of a meeting with the source of the century is practically pornographic (in the best possible way).
Citizenfour isn’t perfect. The scenes with Snowden are pure gold, and the portrayal of how the wider debate unfolds into a 24-hour news cycle is also sharp. Other parts, like when Poitras’ activist friend Jacob Appelbaum is lecturing Occupy Wall Street protestors about maintaining digital anonymity, fall flat and would have been best left aside.
No matter, Poitras hasn’t made a slick documentary. Citizenfour is at once an irreplaceable piece of history and a sharp riposte to every politician or pundit still screaming for Snowden's head. It's a movie that will be talked about 20 years from now—beyond compelling.
To Hong Kong
In its first scenes, Citizenfour shows the viewer typed messages between Poitras and Snowden, which Poitras voices over. At the time, Snowden tried to contact Greenwald as well, but they couldn’t establish a secure channel.
"What you know as ‘stellarwind’ has grown," Snowden wrote to Poitras in early 2013, then calling himself by the "citizen four" moniker. "We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man." (The full e-mail exchanges were published a few days ago at Wired.)
Enlarge / Filmmaker Laura Poitras
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From there, the movie follows the logistics of Greenwald and Poitras meeting up with Snowden in Hong Kong. The movie’s best segments are the three of them together in the laptop-filled hotel room, where they’re shortly joined by another Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill.
"All these VoIP phones, they can be hot miked," Snowden says at one point, disconnecting the hotel phone as their conversation about the documents gets deeper. Shortly afterward an alarm bell goes off. "Maybe they got mad they couldn’t listen to us through the phone anymore," he says. The tension rises as the fire alarm keeps going off. Will they have to leave the room? Ultimately, Snowden calls downstairs and asks what’s going on. It’s just a test.
At one point, Snowden covers himself in the hotel’s red sheets to avoid “visual surveillance” while he’s accessing the documents he took. MacAskill and Greenwald look stunned. They can’t help but smile at the insanity of it all. It is funny. But in the world Snowden is showing to them, none of it is really that paranoid.
To the public
Not long after they realized the significance of the document stash, Greenwald and Snowden began discussing how and when he should reveal himself to the public—and how he should explain his actions.
“I want to start teasing these stories out,” Greenwald tells Snowden. “I’m going to start publishing in a day or two days.”
Snowden nods his agreement. He will leave the decision-making up to the journalists; it’s a one-time handoff of documents.
He doesn’t want to hide forever—and realistically, he can’t. The NSA is sending agents to talk to his girlfriend; his street in Hawaii is full of construction vehicles, she tells him.
At the same time, Snowden doesn’t want to be the story.
“I feel the modern media has a big focus on personalities,” he says at one point.
“Oh, yeah,” Greenwald agrees.
“It’s a distraction,” says Snowden. “I’m not the story here.”
There’s a tension between that desire and his human need to explain his actions. Ultimately, the fact that Snowden did come forward, and did not stay anonymous, changed the calculus of public relations significantly. If Snowden remained a hunted figure, it would have been easy to paint him as a traitor.
"It is powerful to come out and say, I'm not afraid,” said Greenwald. “To say, you don't have to investigate. Here I am."
The public needs an explanation of why a man would take such risks—why a person would abandon a good life. Snowden, who spent years as an active Ars Technica reader and commenter, had a dream of a more free online world.
"I'm more willing to risk imprisonment than curtailment of my intellectual freedom,” said Snowden. “I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched. There’s never been anything like it in the world.”
To Moscow
In July, Snowden’s longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills moved to Moscow to be with him. "The fact that he is now living in domestic bliss as well, with his longterm girlfriend whom he loves, should forever put to rest the absurd campaign to depict his life as grim and dank," Greenwald wrote in an essay he published just minutes after the film began rolling on Friday.
The movie shows only a few seconds of Mills and Snowden together. It’s a domestic scene, shot from afar: they're cooking. The location, of course, isn’t detailed.
Citizenfour's final scenes are again Greenwald and Snowden talking in a hotel, now in Russia. Greenwald has a new intelligence source who’s feeding him information about the drone surveillance program. That's been treated as an additional revelation in some quarters, but since the launch of The Intercept it’s been clear Greenwald has at least one non-Snowden source with deep roots in the intel and drone world.
In the final minutes, Greenwald, worried the room might be bugged, communicates key points with Snowden through writing on a hotel tablet.
“That's really dangerous, on the source’s side,” says Snowden after reading that Greenwald is getting information about the drone program.
Greenwald explains he’s seen an organization chart detailing how the drone surveillance program works; it’s the same kind of document that made the Snowden leaks so explosive. He draws a basic diagram of what it looks like; at the top, he writes “POTUS,” for President Barack Obama, and circles it—it’s clear who’s in charge.
Snowden’s eyes widen.
The next note reads: “There are 1.2 million people on various stages of their watch list.”
And now he has even stunned his old source. “That’s fucking ridiculous,” says Snowden. His mouth, like those of the viewers, is agape.
Dozens of 'Star Wars: Episode VII' concept images leak online
Inside Movies
Star Wars Galaxy
Dozens of 'Star Wars: Episode VII' concept images leak online
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@breznican
@breznican
The shields are down, the landing bay doors have blown open, and many of Star Wars: Episode VII‘s secrets just got sucked into cyberspace.
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An Imageshack account under the handle “themillenniumfalcon” posted 32 drawings from the upcoming J.J. Abrams movie that revealed some major details from the film, due in theaters Dec. 18, 2015.
Here’s the thing … EW’s not going to post the photos or link to them. Stolen goods, folks, and it’s not the Pentagon Papers or a Wikileaks dump that concerns the public good. In the interest of respecting the storytellers, we’re going to refrain from publishing purloined images the same way we respect certain spoilers when we do a set visit or interview.
But the fact is, this is a massive security breach on perhaps the most anticipated film of 2015. That is news, and Episode VII seems to have more leaks than the mechanical shark that kept sinking during the making of Jaws.
With that in mind, it’s fair game to talk about what these photos reveal about Abrams & Co.’s approach to the most iconic sci-fi franchise in movie history. Those wishing to avoid all contact with these images, even descriptions of what they contain, should back out now.
1.) Darth Vader — Yes, he may be dead (and redeemed just in time), but that funeral pyre on the forest moon of Endor that concluded Return of the Jedi is not the last we will see of that masked man. His scorched armor features prominently in Episode VII, and the concept art reveals that a sinister cyborg in a black cloak is giving Anakin Skywalker’s helmet the “Alas, poor Yorrick” treatment. Who he is, and why he has collected Vader’s remains is the first question these images raise.
2.) Silver Trooper — This figure looks to be what happens if you mate an Imperial Stormtrooper with an old-school Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. The ImageShack post describes this character as a “knight,” and the shiny metallic armor certainly conjures a refined, medieval vibe. What we don’t know is whether this a singular, specific character, or part of an overall class of warrior (think the scarlet guards who once flanked Emperor Palpatine.)
3.) War-wound Chewbacca — One true spoiler revealed in the images is that Chewbacca takes a serious hit in this movie. It’s confusing at first because the concept drawing shows the character with his signature bowcaster slung over one shoulder, but another representation on the same page shows the Wookiee co-pilot with a mechancial right paw. That suggests Chewie hasn’t lost his limb in the 30-odd years since we last saw him, but suffers an amputation during the course of the new story. (There’s even a note with an arrow pointing to it that states: “Bionic arm from war wound.”) Maybe this is an homage to kids who grew up with the Kenner action figures … Chewbacca’s hands always seemed to get chewed by little brothers and sisters.
4.) Old Stomping Grounds — Multiple images in the collection of stolen drawings are of an airbase we’ve seen in multiple snapshots from the set in England, all based around the real-life Greenham Common, a grassy former U.S. military base where nuclear weapons were stored during the Cold War. We see similar structures in the concept art, identifying the fictional location as Massassi Hangar. That won’t mean anything to even casual fans of Star Wars, but hardcore fans will recognize that as the temple on the moon Yavin 4 that’s used as a base by the Rebel Alliance in the orignal 1977 Star Wars. (This is the place the Death Star is lining up to annihilate in the climax.)
5.) A New New Hope — Although Abrams hasn’t revealed any character details, it’s clear from the drawings that the central figure in the story will be newcomer Daisy Ridley’s character, depicted in the drawings exploring the lair of the cloaked cyborg, raising a lightsaber while he looms over a fallen young man, and in one pose being clutched by him while wearing a dazed expression. If Luke Skywalker was the chosen one meant to bring balance to the light and dark sides of the Force, she seems to be the subject of this film’s tug-of-war.
6.) Human/Cyborg Relations — Who is Montross? The concept art reveals several versions of this battered old-timer, apparently sitting at a bar and drowning his space-sorrows. (There’s no background, but this guy would fit right in at the Mos Eisley cantina.) Although each sketch is different, the character tends to have at least one mechanical eye (one looks like part of a C-3PO-style protocol droid), a robotic arm and leg, and in one drawing a steel trap jaw. He’s an older man, which suggests this could be the Max von Sydow character.
7.) Life in Ruins — Perhaps the most exciting thing revealed in this document dump is the way residents of a desert planet that looks a lot like Tatooine have eked out an existence among the shattered remains of the war between the Rebels and the Empire. There is a toppled AT-AT, now serving as a makeshift hideaway, and salvage operation to haul away a fallen X-Wing with the wreckage of an Imperial Star Destroyer rising in the distance like a mountain range. It’s clear from the fiery crash-site of a TIE Fighter that fighting continues and these are not dusty relics from the past.
Those are the main takeaways from the concept images. The only other remaining question is, “Will any of Episode VII‘s secrets still be intact when the movie opens?”
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