Secrecy

February 29

Secrecy, a Film By Peter Galison and Robb Moss

Special Event Tickets $10 (Free with Harvard ID)
Friday February 29 at 7pm

Directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss.
US 2008, video, b/w & color, 85 min.

This arresting documentary explores what it means for a democratic society when its government withholds information from its citizens. Under what circumstances, if any, is such secrecy justified? How can we know what our government is not telling us? Using interviews with people from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, reporters, and individuals whose lives have been marked by their contact with the national security bureaucracy, the film probes secrecy's relationship to fear, executive power, and national security. Making use of art installations, original music, and animation (by Harvard's own Ruth Lingford) the film gives shape and scale to secrecy's vast, invisible presence in our democracy.

Robb Moss's The Same River Twice (2003) premiered at Sundance, screened theatrically in eighty cities across North America and was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit Award. Previous films have shown at Telluride, MOMA and numerous international festivals, including in Amsterdam, Paris, St. Petersburg, Ankara and Sydney. In the past five years, he has served on the documentary juries at Sundance, Chicago and Denver and has for three summers served as a creative adviser for the Sundance Institute Documentary Labs. Moss has taught filmmaking at Harvard for the past twenty years.

Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard. Galison received a 1997 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, won the 1998 Pfizer Award (for Image and Logic) as the best book that year in History of Science and in 1999 received the Max Planck Prize. His books include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003) and Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). His previous film, Ultimate Weapon (with P. Hogan), on the moral-political debates over the H-bomb, premiered on the History Channel.