If we were once or ever naïve enough to believe that television news was keeping us well informed on political and global concerns, the last decade has been a rude wake up call. Important concepts are routinely distorted by or reduced into sound bites (after which they can be easily shrugged off, often to our detriment), biased or outright dishonest agendas are barely concealed (hello, Fox News!). Even in the increasingly rare thoughtful TV news segment, there’s limited time to get at the heart of the matter: you have to make space for those commercials. In this climate, the compelling political documentary feels more essential than ever, affording one the rare chance to really hear fleshed out arguments. Rob Moss, who won previous acclaim with the aged hippie documentary The Same River Twice, returns to Sundance with Secrecy, which he co-directs with Peter Galison. They’ve found a timely and layered topic to examine. The current US administration is far more covert than is the norm. In the age of the war on terror, when everything is concealed (ostensibly to hide it from the terrorists rather than its own citizenry) how can democracy survive? In other words: if all valuable information is concealed, locked up and controlled by the government, how can the citizenry stay informed? If the citizenry is not in charge it's not a democracy.
One of the strengths of Secrecy is that it asks these questions, more or less, without underlining them. These troubling thoughts emerge organically from the hand wringing within the film over how to or even whether or not to move our government from their industrial age secret-hoarding mindset into the open source world of the information age. If they do, will that make us less safe or more safe? Nobody agrees on the answer. Secrecy espouses a wide variety of opinions which fall on either side of the issue but more compellingly in the cracks in between. Reporters, politicians, military personnel, CIA officials ... they all sound conflicted. The competing belief systems are interesting to listen to even if the filmmaking is less than imaginative -- a talking head on off center to the left, a talking head off center to the right (and repeat). The two most interesting “characters” to emerge from all the chatter are Melissa Mahle, a former CIA Station Chief and Thomas Blanton, National Security Archive Director from George Washington University.
Mahle, frighteningly nonchalant about the brutalities of war and a little self-serving with personal anecdotes, has no problem with torture or government secrecy so long as its wisely managed. She doesn't think it is, giving the Abhu Garab debacle an irritated beating. Mr. Blanton comes off like a philosopher of national security, waxing downright poetic about the myriad issues of information control and even the erotic allure of secrets. He has so much to say that one suspects that Galison and Moss could have just as easily filmed his monologue -- a classified information cousin to An Inconvenient Truth's environmental lecture would have emerged. But Secrecy finds room for much more than just this, winding and looping its way through various political and legal touchstones like the attacks of 9/11, the Unabomber case, a groundbreaking Reynolds vs. US case in which a widow was denied information about her husbands death due to government secrecy, the discovery of Plutonium, the formation of the CIA, the US Constitution and much more. Some of it is more compelling and successfully intertwined than the rest as is often the case with patchwork thesis. Secrecy has a lot of ground to cover. Some of the information sinks in and some slips away or remains locked up in the "unimaginably large" web of classified government secrets (the films words not mine). After the rush of information and interpretations of the same, the film wraps up at the 85 minute mark. And that's just in time --one can only hear that double hard-vowel word so many times in a row. More to the point, since Secrecy isn't so much an answer as a proposal for a defining question of our times, it would only be redundant to continue once the question was firmly on the tongue of its audience.
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- indieWIRE's Interview with Co-Director Peter Galison
