“I feel like that’s private.” After this comes a long silence.Perhaps this is the residue of being surveilled.
The exhibit includes a number of short films but is primarily a series of immersive installations, designed almost as a walk-through narrative about the world post 9/11.
We’re in her studio, a few blocks from the Hudson River, peering at the sky in Yemen. (Poitras says any suggestion she abetted Iraqi insurgents is spurious.) But then, as we see in the film, Assange is charged with sexual assault in Sweden; to avoid extradition, he takes shelter in the London embassy of Ecuador, which has granted him asylum; a coterie of worshipful aides serves his needs; the paranoia runs deep (sometimes justifiably), as does the grandiosity. “I hope you’ll understand.” And as she heads off to someplace I’ll never know, I realize that I do.The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com.Laura Poitras in her New York studio.
She attended a private school that emphasized student-led learning. “In retrospect, a lot of people think, Oh, the Snowden story is a great story that any journalist would want to get ahold of,” she says. (Poitras is not involved with the film. In conversation, she’s thoughtful and earnest, laughing often but never appearing fully relaxed. You can cancel anytime.
I was seriously scared.”Poitras has flowing dark hair and gray-green eyes that are wide and watchful.
Twice now, I’ve attended premieres of her films—crowded, celebratory affairs meant to be all about her—and each time she seemed deliberately to get lost in the crowd. Knowing the stakes were high, she limited contact with friends, moved to a new apartment, and stopped carrying a cell phone, knowing it could be used to track her location.
“To be quite honest, I don’t think I’ve taken the time to take a breath,” she says. It’s not relaxing at all.”Poitras was 35 years old when she embarked on her first long-form documentary, collaborating with a filmmaker named Linda Goode Bryant on In her films, Poitras is mostly invisible, dedicated to the let-it-happen style of cinema vérité. “I’ve never talked about my private life,” she says. She won’t tell me which part of Berlin she lived in, whether her journal was a bound or spiral notebook, whether she wrote in it with pen. “And Laura Poitras knows the issues firsthand.” She’s titled the exhibition “Astro Noise,” which is also the nickname Edward Snowden gave to the massive file of leaked documents he sent her in 2013, which landed in her life with the force of a meteor. “I really think that the war on terror makes us less safe,” she tells me.
The sex charges; the Russia connection; his blooming paranoia; the sense, gleaned from several in Assange’s entourage (we see it on the faces of his lawyers and advisers, as they try to debrief him on his legal and PR troubles) that he’s a narcissistic asshole; all of the above? Despite the hubbub and occasional glitz of the last year, Poitras remains solidly devoted to documentary filmmaking. The sky over Yemen at 1:30 a.m. is dark and still, a vault of deep blackness brushed with a faint smattering of stars.
“With my work, being under the radar is sort of a good thing,” she tells me.There’s a distinct irony to this, of course. films About Staff Field Notes Submissions Newsletter. The journal entries reveal both a churning intellect (“What is this film really about? Stepping onto an elevator one day, she bumped into actor Zachary Quinto and a Hollywood film crew working on the Oliver Stone version of the Snowden story, due out this spring, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden, Quinto as Greenwald, and Melissa Leo playing the role of Poitras. Poitras is unswervingly guarded when it comes to her private life. She played out different scenarios in her head, including one in which she went to jail in order to protect her then-anonymous source. Dressed casually in a black cotton shirt, jeans, and sneakers, Poitras, who is 51, leans back in her chair.
)Hollywood remains a strange kind of otherworld. Through the Intercept, she recently launched a bold new outlet that funds and posts short-form documentaries (“visual journalism” is how she refers to it), called “Field of Vision.” At the New York Film Festival in late September, she previewed her next film project, All the while, she continues to work with a small team of journalists, divining information from the seemingly inexhaustible Snowden archive.
She will speak animatedly about films she loves (the documentary Our conversation begins to take on a kind of comic push-pull as Poitras declines to give details, even when the details—it seems to me—are harmless. I can think. “I don’t love it when someone comes up to me in a coffee shop,” she says, almost sheepishly.