【大師班】4堂攝影課：《第四公民》攝影師傳授紀錄片拍攝經驗 Masterclass Cinematography with Kirsten Johnson (3-4)

Some of you had said earlier that I haven't talked a lot about working with Laura Poitras and working on Citizen 4. And this is all very relevant to everyone here. And the thing that's really remarkable about Laura and the way that she works is that there's a consistency to approach. And so one of her main goals is she'll think about a situation in the world, like the war on terror. And she will think, who is at the center? Who is the human that is at the center of this problem or dynamic? And how can I be close to them and do observational footage of them living through this moment in history? So that's sort of the goal. She talks about this idea of primary evidence, that she does not assume that she knows what is the right thing. She does, I would say, understand there are systems of power that have different weights. So a government has a different weight than an individual, than a different weight than a whistleblower, than a different weight than a prisoner. But she believes there are complex human beings in every situation. So if you can sort of get to the human that is in the center of this really complex situation, you will learn more about the moment that we are in. So if we think about what we saw yesterday, the death of a prisoner thing, her first impulse is, I want to make a film about an innocent prisoner in Guantanamo. And then when she's in Yemen, she has the person who introduces her to Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. So suddenly, this wish of hers, how do I get close to the people who are living in the middle of the dilemma? She realized, I can't get close to a prisoner who's inside of Guantanamo, but I can get close to this person who's living in the center of, you're not Osama bin Laden's bodyguard anymore. What are you doing? And that's the oath. What she does then is stays with that person without judging them. And in some ways, it's a very mutually respectful agreement of, if the person is going to be involved in the film, she is constantly renegotiating the consent and saying, will you let me film you in this situation? And then the person agrees, and then it happens. And she's not judging what happened. She's just filming it, and then adding another piece, and then adding another piece. So in the case of Citizen Four, it was like, she wanted to make a film about how technologies are changing the nature of surveillance and what it means for all of us. She didn't know who is at the center of that. She doesn't know how to get to the center of that. At the time when we started working on the project, she assumed that Julian Assange was at the center of that. So she was working to get access to him and to get access to WikiLeaks and to gain that trust, and that was very difficult to get. And she got that, but along the way, she had to learn many things about encryption and how does it work and meet different people, like the people in TOR. And so she learned all these different things. And at the same time, she was being detained all the time at the border because of the film she'd made in Iraq. And she didn't want to become public about it, but at a certain point, she was getting worried, like she wouldn't be able to continue flying. So she knew Glenn Greenwald's work, and she was like, I'll do an interview with him. And that's the interview that Snowden read, where he said, oh, this person can identify with me because she's experiencing what happens when the global net closes in on you. So she doesn't even know that Snowden exists, right? But she's sort of step by step. Now she's learned how to do encrypted things, but it turns out Glenn Greenwald had nothing encrypted, so Snowden was trying to reach Greenwald, couldn't reach him, so then he reaches out to Laura. So it's like the center came to her, right? Because she had no idea how to get to the center, but she's just moving towards it. And then Snowden was like, I don't want to be filmed. I'm in the middle of doing this thing. I'm doing it to get the information out. And she just, in this very simple way, was like, there will be a before and after to this. You're in the before, before this information becomes public to the world, and you are doing this historical act. We don't know what will happen after, but if I document this moment, we will understand what it is to be an individual, being brave enough to risk your life to share this information with all of us. And so that's how she got in the hotel room with Snowden here in Hong Kong, right? But she could never have imagined this is where, that she would be making that film, right? But she was making a film about this huge idea. But the whole thing was like, how do I get to the people at the center? This is how I met Laura. So Laura was in Yemen, shooting with Abu Jandal. And the pre-trial hearings for Salem Hamdan were about to start. So she had never met me. And she called me, and she said, would you like to go and film in Guantanamo? And I said, yes. She said, well, we're not really allowed to go and film in Guantanamo. When I got to Guantanamo, we were, and this is known, but we were misrepresenting while we were there. Because it was not accepted by the American government that anyone be making a documentary there. So we were saying that we were working for journalism. We were working for NPR. And we were going to make something for NPR. And we had a deal with NPR. They said we could say this. So they were always asking, well, what is the thing you're making for NPR? And we'd be like, well, we're not really sure. So basically, what I was doing was I didn't do anything. Once I was there, I was doing everything the US government allowed me to do. And so they didn't allow me to film in the trial. They didn't allow me to film many things. So I was thinking like Trevor Peglin, OK, they said, I'm not allowed to film this camera. And I'm not allowed to film Nancy. So then I would frame exactly in the center of all of those things. And that would be my shot. And we had a military minder with us. He said, why are you filming that? I said, you know, I'm interested. So I was collecting all of these very strange images. Like the ocean, they were not allowing me to film the edge of the coast. So suddenly, I frame it in a very different way than I would ever normally frame something. But these constraints gave me a new way of seeing and indicated that there was some pressure around all of the shots. So everything I film in Guantanamo, I'm allowed to film. But it looks a little strange, right? So it starts to create this atmosphere. So it's not just artistic for artistic's sake. It's artistic connected to the meaning of you're allowed to do this, you're not allowed to do that. But so anyway, I filmed in Guantanamo while Laura was in Yemen. And then I went to Yemen. And I filmed all of the, she had put a camera in the car of Abu Jandal. So then all of the shots that are like driving shots and the city, I filmed all of those things. So it's cut together between him driving in his car and all of the things that I'm filming in Yemen. So this film is really made up of little tiny pieces. Laura stayed in Yemen for a year and a half. And I think she filmed four hours of footage with Abu Jandal. And he was very, he's always changing his mind whether he wants her to film or not. And she just would wait for him. And I think almost like everything she filmed is in the movie. So it's those pieces plus the pieces I was able to film in Guantanamo. And then that, I don't even know how she got the secret document that is the beginning of the film. Someone gave her this tape, I don't know who, which is a class of, it's supposed to be classified of Hamdan. And so little by little we built this film. But she always wanted to think of it like it's kind of like a thriller. Which is the way also we're thinking about Citizen Four in a way. It's a thriller, we don't know what's going to happen. But we are gathering the pieces that we can gather. I would say Laura's point of view is if you focus on the people who are living through the events then it illuminates the larger, the complexity of the larger problem. And you know, you notice in a thing like this she gives you some context, right? You think information is identified. You understand this person is Abu Jandal, this person is Salim Hamdan, he is in Guantanamo. In a way, right, with your film you didn't tell us who was who, right? We didn't know yet. We don't know, we don't have context. And so she's giving the larger picture, the ideas of the larger picture, but just as context. And then she's showing us a complex individual existing in that context. So that's her way of exploring the ideas. And I think Snowden as an individual was ambivalent. He didn't want to be known, he wanted just the idea to get out. But he is the person doing it. He is the person doing this act, which is an act of great hubris in a way, to say I am the one person who is going to take this risk and reveal this thing. So it's an ambivalent act, right? It's both I am selfless, but I am self, right? And you have that also in Julian Assange of like a great ego. At the same time, he is supposedly doing ego-less work. So there's tension in that, and I think she's interested in the tension of all of that, right? And also Abu Jandal, that he's a great dad, a liar, worked for Bin Laden, abandoned Bin Laden, is giving interviews to the New York Times in 60 Minutes. He's doing many things that are contradictory, and she's letting all of those things coexist, right? You know, sometimes he would just sort of back off and wait. And so when I went to Yemen, I met him, and wow, I've never, like, he started out the conversation being so nice to us and so kind, and then suddenly in the middle of the conversation, he was saying he was gonna take all the tapes back, and it was, like, terrifying. It really felt like, oh, we're gonna walk out this door and be kidnapped. He was a very volatile person. And Laura is really calm. She's just really calm. She just waits things out. And she's also, like, not a pushover. So she's very, she's, like, giving off this very calm, strong energy, but she doesn't ever reveal information unless she needs to. So, like, when you say, like, what did she say to people? It's just, I'm interested in cryptocurrency. I'm interested in how it's affecting your life. And then she shuts up and doesn't have some big conversation over dinner about her opinion about cryptocurrency, right? You let the other person talk. And she can do that for years. You know, there's, like, people don't, there's all kinds of things people don't know about her. She's very private. What was amazing was when this premiered at Sundance, nobody clapped. Nobody knew what to think about it, and nobody knew whether it was okay to like it or not. And then it got good reviews, and then the next day it was standing ovation. But it was really interesting. People were, it was like early, and Bin Laden was still alive, and people were just like, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel. And was the film sympathetic? And there were a lot of, to him, there were a lot of people who wanted Laura to make a really clear film that said the US government is wrong, and there shouldn't be people in Guantanamo. And they were angry that she hadn't made that film. People had a lot of really strong feelings. And now I look at this, and it's like, it's a document of a time, right, that has passed, which is true of all of her movies, in a way, yeah. She, it turns out, she already had legal trouble, which we didn't know. She was being stopped at the border. We didn't know why. When she was in Iraq making this film called My Country, My Country, she was not staying in the zone that Americans were staying in, the green zone. She was just going into the city. And she was filming with a Iraqi doctor. And she went up on the roof of his building, and she was filming. And an IED went off in the neighborhood somewhere, and there was an American soldier who had been taking pictures of her on the roof. And he told the US government that she knew the bomb was going to go off, and that she was filming. And so, in secret, there was a grand jury case brought against her. She didn't know, and people came and testified against her. And they were trying to decide, is she a terrorist, is she not? So this went on for six years, but she didn't know they were holding a case against her. So this is why they were detaining her at the airport and all of this. So she did something called a Freedom of Information Act, where you ask the government, show me all the papers that you have on me. And it detailed all of these things in the papers with certain things blacked out. So she was already in trouble before she started making this.