The Unknown Known

The documentary sits down opposite one man: Donald Rumsfeld, twice United States secretary of defense and one of the architects of the Iraq War. Errol Morris spoke with him for thirty-three hours across eleven separate sessions. Its material is what Rumsfeld wrote himself. During his years at the Pentagon he produced and circulated more than twenty thousand short memos, which he called snowflakes. Morris has him read them one after another, and we watch a man explain his own sentences today. The title comes from another of his own lines, from the famous remarks about known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Errol Morris directed. The interviews were shot with the device he calls the Interrotron: two facing cameras and a teleprompter, so the subject looks straight into the lens, which is to say into the viewer's eyes. The absence of an answer is deliberate. Rumsfeld shows no regret, concedes no contradiction and smiles throughout; rather than cornering him, the film records that smile. It is dedicated to the memory of Roger Ebert. Who it is for: anyone who likes Morris's documentaries and is curious about how the language of power is built. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for a confession. The film arrives nowhere, Rumsfeld gives no ground at any point, and some viewers will feel that was time spent for nothing.