Citizenfour Literary Elements

Citizenfour Literary Elements

Director

Laura Poitras

Leading Actors/Actresses

Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald

Supporting Actors/Actresses

William Binney, Ewen MacAskill

Genre

Documentary, Biography

Language

English

Awards

Won Academy Award for Best Documentary, Feature

Date of Release

2014

Producer

Mathilde Bonnefoy, Laura Poitras, Dirk Wilutzky

Setting and Context

Hong Kong, Germany January 2013-August 2013

Narrator and Point of View

Point of view is that of Edward Snowden. Narrator is Laura Poitras

Tone and Mood

Serious, Dramatic

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist is Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. Antagonist is the NSA.

Major Conflict

Snowden desires to release classified documents from the NSA through Greenwald in order to ensure the intelligence agency stops spying on private citizens.

Climax

Snowden receives temporary asylum from Russia for a period of one year so that he isn't extradited to the United States. And, we learn that the President of the United States is involved in the spying scandals.

Foreshadowing

The opening shot of a car driving down a dark tunnel with very little light foreshadows that these people are going down a dark path with no end in sight.

Understatement

It is understated that Snowden will escape from the grasp of the NSA.

Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques

N/A

Allusions

The film is an allusion to the misuse of power by U.S. government intelligence agencies with the support of the White House, and how those in power have created the necessity for a world with no privacy in order to protect people, while at the same time they are invasively and deliberately breaking the laws that they demand others to pay for breaking.

Paradox

The U.S. government wants to prosecute Snowden to the full extent of the law. Paradoxically, no one is being held accountable in the intelligence community for breaking privacy laws for decades.

Parallelism

The beginning of the film shows us encrypted emails from Snowden deciphered. This is paralleled at the end of the film in a different way as Greenwald uses scraps of paper as a way to "encrypt" his conversation with Snowden so as not to be heard by any spies who've potentially bugged the room.

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