Confrontation In Silence: The Study Of Laura Poitras’s Post 9/11 Trilogy

The Terrorist attack broke on September 11 in America has claimed to offer an arrival of a new era, which is named by the media scholars as “Post 9/11 Era”. In terms of state stability, civil politics and values, the America has seen a huge disturbance and crisis with precedence unseen, the domestic anxiety and threat extensively spread. American authorities stepped into the highly sensitive period of anti-terrorist and place the defense measures at the first priority shortly after the attack. A wide range of political and social issues has served as the immediate catalysts of postmodern political documentaries in Post 9/11 era. Most of them aim at examining the reason and consequences of the so-called anti-terrorism wars, or criticizing the extreme political policy of America. Among the counterpart documentary films, director Laura Poitras distinguished herself by producing political documentaries with the “core human issues” subject, which involves with democracy and civil rights, and human’s psychological status along with their living crisis.Female documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, as a successor of cinema verite legacy, protests against the extreme internal and external anti-terrorist policies of America government with her Post 9/11 trilogy, such as the My Country, My Country(2006), with the theme of Iraqi’s everyday routines and life status under the American occupation; The Oath(2010), exploring the ex-Al-Qaeda members, as well as the best-known Citizenfour(2014), which tells the story of American state surveillance scandal. Poitras is quite skillful of unpretentious narrating which is based on respecting the internal drama of unfolding incident, and she is also a master in exploring the hiding complexity of characters. In this essay, I will be going to analyze the three long documentaries from the perspectives of political environment and Poitras’ s filmingexperiences, visual style and narrative techniques of Post 9.11 trilogy, the relationship between Poitras and her protagonists and her concern of “human”, along with the relationship between Oscar academy awards and director Laura Poitras. I will attempt to explore the stylistic visual style and implication of Poitras’ s documentary film works on diverse level.