RISK: A Film by Laura Poitras

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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-laura-poitras-risk-20170505-story.html

Perspective: With Laura Poitras' re-cut 'Risk,' a director
controversially changes her mind about Julian Assange
By Steven Zeitchik Contact Reporter May 6 2017 3:25 AM New York

The story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been as compelling
and Shakespearean as any in modern media.‎

But the tale of the person making a documentary about him — by his
side when he called the State Department about a diplomatic-cable
dump, filming him don a disguise in a London hotel room before he fled
to the Ecuadorean Embassy — may be even stranger and more
interesting.‎ It’s the kind of story that raises a lot of questions,
not all of them ones the filmmaker likely intended to raise.

Here’s how it unfolded. Six years ago, Oscar-winning documentarian
Laura Poitras began filming Assange for a project she would eventually
title “Risk.” (Her 2014 hit “Citizenfour,” about Edward Snowden,
actually grew out of it.).

She first crafted the Assange material into an episodic series,
showing some footage at the 2015 New York Film Festival. Then, at
Cannes a year ago, she premiered a complete film — an up-close,
lionizing portrait of Assange, occasionally depicting the WikiLeaks
founder as a blowhard but ultimately presenting him as a maverick
hero.‎

This weekend, "Risk” finally arrived in theaters. But the movie you
will see at the cineplex is very different from the Cannes version of
the film — which was so favorable toward the WikiLeaks founder that,
at a glittery post-screening reception, Assange deputy Sarah Harrison
attended in full celebratory ‎mode.

A number of key changes jump out. A heroic opening in which Assange
buttonholes State Department lawyers has been cut down; instead the
film now essentially begins (and ends) with an interview that reveals
his narcissism. ‎

There are added snippets of Assange talking about the Swedish women
who’ve ‎accused him of sexual assault (what led to his five-year
embassy stay) with contempt.

In general, Assange is depicted as more than just prickly — he is seen
as highly imperious, at times pushing around staffers, other times
making troubling comments about women.‎

But the biggest switch is the addition of Poitras' voice, via periodic
readings from her production journal from the shoot, raising doubts
about Assange. What had been a favorable portrait with no commentary
is now a less favorable portrait with amplified skeptical commentary.

“I didn’t trust him,” is the gist of some of these voice-overs. Not
only do we see Assange in a far less flattering light than we did in
the previous version of "Risk," but we learn that Poitras didn’t have
such fuzzy feelings toward him all along.

What in the name of the Freedom of Information Act is going on?‎

In a long conversation with Poitras earlier this week, a day after the
new cut screened at a Whitney Museum premiere, she acknowledged she
had made a “tougher, darker film.”‎

So what happened between the Cannes screening a year ago and now to
make her take a more critical view of Assange?‎

The most obvious explanation — the one that many filmgoers heading to
the ArcLight this weekend might assume — is that it was the election.
Assange, of course, took an activist role in the 2016 campaign,
publishing the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee and
Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Needless to say, the
source of those emails remains a matter of charged debate. (At a
Senate hearing this week, FBI director James Comey called WikiLeaks
“intelligence porn.)

That publishing decision — and comments in Assange's Twitter feed that
implied he relished his role — has been enough to sway even some
sympathizers against him.

But that’s not actually what bothered Poitras. She includes the
election development in the new cut as a kind of final chapter. Yet
there is not much questioning of the ethics of Assange’s moves. In
fact, when asked whether Assange’s role in the election caused her to
be harder on him, she demurred.‎

“That wasn’t really it,” she said, then defended him with a common
pro-WikiLeaks refrain — that he was less trying to bring down Clinton
or even influence the election than publish whatever he could, and
that he would have released Donald Trump’s tax returns if he had them
too.

But if it wasn’t the Podesta emails, what tipped her over the edge?

“His manner,” she said, “was new to me.”

Wait. Surely someone who’d known Assange for so many years, who’d been
in the room with him so many times, could not have been surprised by
this behavior? From 2011 to 2015 he was all good, but in 2016 he
finally went over the edge?‎

In a word, yes. Right before the Cannes screening, Assange had a long
phone exchange with Poitras. (This is covered briefly in the film but
she opened up about it more in the interview.) His level of upset,
particularly over the inclusion of the Swedes’ accusations, was
extreme. More than extreme. Irrational. And threatening.‎ Poitras, on
the record in the interview, called it "intense pressure." It's clear
she was putting it mildly. She decided soon after to re-cut the film.

"I at first didn't want to put myself in the movie,“ Poitras said,
noting her observational style of filmmaking. “But when I went back I
wanted to make a film that was honest. The production journal emerged
because I felt I could bring [new] insight.”

Brenda Coughlin, Poitras’ frequent collaborator and a producer on this
film, said that the pre-Cannes pressure from Assange made filmmakers
look at all the old footage with fresh eyes. "You see everything
differently when something like that happens," she told me.‎‎ “Laura’s
feelings evolved.”

But that still leaves plenty of smoke around these embers. The
production journal bits aren’t saying Poitras changed her mind after
the Cannes call. She was telling us she was skeptical all along.

If Poitras knew all these things then, why did she conceal her “I
don’t trust him” feelings in the earlier version of the film? Was she
too close to the subject to be critical? Or was she such a believer in
the politics that she downplayed her doubts, not wanting to jeopardize
the greater cause? There’s no way to know. And she didn’t explain when
asked. She simply repeated that she didn’t like putting herself in her
films. But there are other ways to convey skepticism besides
voiceover, even in observational filmmaking.

Ideology, certainly, is tough to get away from as an animating force
here. "Risk” takes the question that most Americans would say is the
most polarizing aspect of this affair — is the wholesale publication
of leaked or classified material journalism? — and downplays it, just
kind of assuming that the answer is yes.

It instead gets caught up in a secondary question: Is the man doing
the publication a good or bad human being? But Assange is a means, not
an end. It’s like writing an essay on the morality of nuclear weapons
and spending most of it parsing the chemical properties of plutonium.‎

Documentarians should be allowed the luxury to revisit their subjects.
They deal with fast-moving stories. They have to finish a film, and
the news keeps going. Anyone who’s ever made or written about a
documentary understands that. ‎Poitras deserves credit for doing this
— for her willingness to examine what she is admitting was her own
naivete, at least when it came to Assange’s character.

But what makes it tougher to swallow is that she didn’t revisit the
material by making a new movie, or leaving the old movie as is and
updating it, the way many other journalists would do. Nor did she walk
away without distributing the film, as she contemplated doing. She
revisited by painting over the original, as if that naivete never
existed in the first place. Chunks of the original are still there, of
course. But like the divorced guy who’s covered up some of the wedding
video with a football game, the spirit of the Cannes film is gone.

There’s one more complicating factor. In the new “Risk,” Poitras
reveals she had a brief romantic relationship with one of the movie’s
subjects: Jacob Appelbaum, an Assange acolyte and a leader in the
hacker and WikiLeaks community. The disclosure was not made in the
first film. But several weeks after the Cannes screening, news of it,
and of multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Appelbaum,
came to light.

These developments are handled quickly but cleanly in the new film, at
the point when they make sense chronologically: Poitras discloses her
relationship, putting it in the context of the larger scandal
surrounding Appelbaum. Yes, critics would be forgiven for asking
whether what we see is undermined by her romantic relationship with a
subject. In her defense, Poitras’ reputation and integrity have always
been stellar, and the relationship, she said when I asked, happened at
least after the shooting part of production.

But Poitras’ involvement with someone in her movie reinforces an
uncomfortable impression about the work — reinforces, really, the same
impression all these other questions leave. When it comes to the
controversial subjects of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the director
may simply be too close to the flame.