Laura Poitrass new documentary, Risk, has all the conspiracy and paranoia you could wish for much of it behind the camera as well as on screen. The latest film from this Oscar-winning filmmaker, billed as a personal and intimate character study of Julian Assange, is arguably more notable for the inside story of its making than it is for any unmasking of the founder of WikiLeaks. <\/p>\n
Poitras first unveiled Risk at Cannes in 2016 and critics once again admired as they had with her Oscar-winning study of Edward Snowden, Citizenfour her repeated ability to use the camera as a guerrilla weapon in the war against secretive state culture. <\/p>\n
Poitrass surveillance aesthetic is clearly marked in the movie. She lets images of rainy streets linger in the mind; a walk in the woods is suddenly filled with tension; Assange and his mother in a hotel room is littered with paranoid thriller references. All these images are accompanied by inter-titles: WikiLeaks release of classified documents, watchlists, Poitrass apartment being broken into and more that are both menacing in their suggestiveness and opaque at the same time. <\/p>\n
But the real significance of Risk is not whats on screen. To the extent that we know Assange at all, revelations appear to be in short supply and little is new or shocking. What is revelatory is how this films exposure of surveillance culture is increasingly tangled up in the agendas of its filmmaker and subject with puzzles and perplexity that can risk clouding viewers judgement that threaten to obscure one of the most important issues of our time: state surveillance of the citizenry on a grand scale. <\/p>\n
Two fundamental problems gnaw away at Poitrass expos. One is that the film she showed at the Cannes film festival in 2016 is not the Risk released in the US and UK this spring and summer. Among other things, Poitras recut the film inserting a voiceover that reportedly virtually rewrites her impressions of Assange and is far more critical than the original. <\/p>\n
Poitras periodically filmed Assange between 2011 and 2013. She then diverted her attention towards Snowden and made Citizenfour, only returning to Assange in 2015 and finding his manner was new to me. Risk duly records her doubts about the relationship: Its a mystery why he trusts me because I dont think he likes me, she says at one point in the film and its true that Assange had been unhappy with the Cannes version of Risk, despite it being reputedly sympathetic towards him. <\/p>\n
Poitras took the film away regardless and layered this new version with more self-absorbed meanderings from Assange and an enhanced focus on the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden that trailed him to London in 2010. A particularly excoriating scene with Helena Kennedy sees the high-profile barrister attempting to mould Assanges public language about the accusations while he keeps insisting it is all part of his accusers ongoing lesbian conspiracy. Whats their lesbian nightclub got to do with the price of fish? Kennedy asks him in arguably the films priceless moment. <\/p>\n
The films second problem is that it inhabits the same territory as Alex Gibneys much-praised We Steal Secrets documentary from 2013. Given that so much in Assanges world is built upon shifting sands, its easy to forget Gibneys earlier movie which unlike Risk was dogged by the directors inability to pin Assange down to an interview. But the critical immediacy of We Steal Secrets is fleshed out by commentary from some of WikiLeaks key former personnel, including James Ball and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who Poitras neglects in Risk. <\/p>\n
Instead she relies on access to Assanges right-hand spokesperson Sarah Harrison and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson and, most controversially, WikiLeaks tech consultant Jacob Appelbaum. Controversial because Appelbaum is someone Poitras admitted to having had an intimate relationship with. Risks voiceover confesses that they were involved briefly in 2014 which resulted in some questioning Poitrass recollection of the time frame, let alone her objectivity. <\/p>\n
Only adding to the subtextual complexities, Appelbaum was then the subject of sexual assault allegations himself in 2016, including by someone Poitras claimed was a friend and Risk feels obliged to dwell upon these contentions. As a result, Poitras loses much of the films main thrust when she indulges in the personal and starts citing Appelbaums questions to her about loyalty and betrayal loyalty to whom and for what, were never told. <\/p>\n
If Risks web of entanglement seems suspicious, it results from such total immersion into Assanges world that the film stands accused of not knowing where Poitras impressions of the WikiLeaks organisation should stop and the verifiable details of their actions must take over. Has Poitras been duped into believing the myths surrounding Assange or is she complicit in reassembling those myths for the film? Here is someone who is no longer chronicler but an active participant in the surveillance war. In the last two films, I have become more of a protagonist, she claimed recently, adding that: It is very uncomfortable. <\/p>\n
Risk is an intriguing yet frustrating documentary. Poitras tempts us with a gripping finale: Assanges part in Donald Trumps dramatic US presidential election win. But the conclusion seems more fascinated with Poitrass and Assanges falling out over the first version of Risk than it is in WikiLeaks part in Russian collusion with Trump. The films somewhat illusory climax therefore asks considerable questions of the intent of both filmmaker and film. <\/p>\n
In this golden age of documentary, Steve Rose recently observed that: Filmmakers start to outnumber potential subjects and the investigative credentials of factual films are surely tested as a result. Poitras, Assange and Risk certainly testify to the age of alternative facts and fake news. But answers to the big questions about surveillance politics only get more difficult when the distinctions between message and messenger become this blurred. <\/p>\n
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