Today’s journalism is completely linked to audiovisuals. Every big newspaper or media outlet, at this point in history, have a YouTube channel, or many of their articles have self-produced videos attached. The capabilities that sound and vision offer as a way of transmitting messages, have become integral part of what makes up modern journalism.
From All The President’s Men to Spotlight, journalism and filmmaking have been closely linked together. The former has provided compelling and critical narratives of passionate individuals attempting to bring their reportings to life, while the latter has been an effective narrative vehicle for them. Through fiction, documentary and hybrids of both, events such as Watergate, Big Tobacco whistleblowing, and many more have seen attention to them amplified by their appearance in film theaters. While fiction has mostly achieved this, documentaries have taken things to a next level, as they have become the story itself rather than a form of representation or diffusion.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Laura Poitras from Citizenfour to Beauty and Bloodhsed
Neon
In the last decade, no one has made better use of the documentary form, to create films fusing both cunning filmmaking with honest and cold journalism, than Laura Poitras. This Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award-winning American filmmaker has become synonym with fearless and daunting pieces of work that challenge the norms of the people in power, particularly of the US government.
Her Oscar and Golden Lion-winning documentary, Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal brought her into mainstream attention and established her work as one that not only incorporates exceptional filmmaking, it also holds its ground as a courageous journalism that challenges the status quo.
Focusing on how the United States has developed various systems of vigilance that attempt against civil liberties, has led her to be harassed by authorities and be subjected to intense vigilance for the better part of the last two decades. However, this has not stopped her output, it has rather fueled it to continue demanding a better future where civil society has a fighting chance at privacy and power over authoritarian policies of control.
Her newest work, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, detailing Nan Goldin’s career and activism against the Sackler family, won her again the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is gaining track towards the coming Academy Awards. In another bravado statement towards the power that be, Poitras has found a cunning way of bringing together the personal and political once again, differently from her previous efforts about Snowden and Julian Assange (Risk). So how does this intrepid combination of disciplines come together in her films?
Journalistic over journalism
ShowtimeNeon
Documentaries and fiction whose subject deals with journalism can easily be just about that, and not precisely journalistic pieces. Ever from her first widely known work, My Country, My Country, Poitras made clear that she is not making films about certain subjects or simply incorporating aspects of journalism, but rather making pieces of journalism itself or better said, journalistic audiovisual pieces that are at the same time documentary films.
Honesty and Vulnerability
Radius TWC
The “reality” of any film, even a documentary is always constructed. Lots of documentaries try to portray their entire narrative and editing as objective, the subject takes center stage over whoever is creating the film, as if whoever is making it does not have a certain level of bias towards what is presented.
This is not the case in her films as there is constant communication through the creators to the audience, in which they detail their own personal feelings while making the documentary. Whether it’s Poitras and the disgraced Glenn Greenwald having their personal lives affected by vigilance in Citizenfour, or her production journal voiceover narrations in Risk, detailing her change of mind regarding Assange, in the middle of the film, objectivity is thrown out the window in favor of honesty.
A New Documentary Way to Look
Zeitgeist Films
These films do not care about being beautiful, they do not care for plastic feelings, as their focus is to document moments in a raw and unfiltered way. Cinematography in her films is absolutely fearless, as it has a lot of technical shortages and standardized rules being broke, in favor of making up a more human look at things. Characters are not placed in traditional documentary-like settings, they are in small rooms, open spaces while on the run, or communicating through encrypted messaging then shown on screen as developing text.
It’s brilliant because the use of audiovisual language, is in its most bare and bones: sound and vision, as the canvas for a journalistic piece. Storytelling comes as a collaborative effort between subject and filmmaker, editing process is in a way transparent as the moments not being filmed, are conveyed through black screens with text on them, leading up to the next situation. This honesty and way to look at both footage and the recording process, is a statement itself, against the societies of vigilance which both the filmmaker and the protagonists of her films face.
Audiences Make Their Own Conclusions in Poitras’ Films
Even though there is an initial subjectivity, the films’ ending usually don’t go near an idealistic, moral or didactic standpoint. The author’s subjectivity is here only to stand as part of a journalistic integrity, rather than to be part of the work’s endgame. This has been set side by side with whatever happens on screen, through interviews or recording of happenings, by the end of them, conclusions are set by facts. Partial or total, they are what they are by the moment editing is closing, much like when a newspaper is finishing a day’s work.
The only probable intention, which is congruent through Poitras’ films, is the strong feeling that the power balance in the world is heavily shifted in favor of those in power over the people, and that despite the many struggles and initiatives by civil society and individual actors, there is a gigantic agglomeration of entities working tightly together, to secure this inequity continues.
This is not seen with any emotion, the intentionality of putting up there as cold as possible, is the ultimate alliance between filmmaking in journalism, as it uses the audiovisual and journalistic language to allow the audience to have their own say. This is a huge act of humbleness by part of the makers, as they have already done their work, what they wanted to, so passionately show is no longer theirs, it’s now for the world to look at and make up their own mind.
