One of the great storytelling challenges of the 21st century has been describing the intangible phenomenon of the internet, especially in a visual medium such as film. Early websploitation movies like Hackers envisioned cyberspace as a kaleidoscopic theme park, while more recent dramas such as The Fifth Estate have imagined a Brazil-like world of interconnected but anonymous bodies. In this year’s HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis joined the dots between the social isolation engendered on the web and the literal isolation of a remote algorithm farm.
Few film-makers, though, have adequately captured the dichotomous nature of the internet as something both omnipresent and entirely abstract, like the air we breathe. That’s what Citizenfour director Laura Poitras attempts in Project X, a remarkable new short launching this Monday on video-journalism platform Field Of Vision. In it, she zeroes in on a single building in lower Manhattan to reveal the invisible pervasiveness of internet surveillance around the globe.
33 Thomas Street is a 550ft skyscraper operated as a telephone exchange by AT&T. According to a joint investigation by Field Of Vision and The Intercept – an online mag whose editors include former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald – it is also an NSA spy hub. In Project X, Poitras draws from three NSA sources – a handbook for undercover domestic travel, a leaked engineering report and an internal newsletter – to trace the journey of an imagined NSA employee from the agency’s headquarters in Maryland to its alleged New York City outpost.
Monotone voiceover performances from Rami Malek and Michelle Williams evoke the whistleblowers and government operatives of 70s American spy thrillers, as does a pulsating electronic score. Movie buffs who appreciate these allusions, however, will be disappointed to learn that Project X’s title comes not from the 1987 Matthew Broderick chimp movie nor the 2012 teen comedy, but the original architectural code name of the building at its centre.
Before watching the film, I recommend visiting 33 Thomas Street on Google Street View. Despite the building’s immense size and prominent location, its windowless facade and proximity to other New York skyscrapers render it inconspicuous in daylight. Under nocturnal observation in Poitras’s film however, the faceless brutalist tower transforms into a real-life Death Star, a vast nothingness blotting out the twinkling stars and city lights. Visible only by inference, it’s a fitting metaphor for our uneasy relationship with the web.
