Synopsis
The Unknown Known (2013) is Errol Morris's documentary, available to watch online on iFILM. One man sits in front of the camera: Donald Rumsfeld, twice head of the Pentagon, fielding questions about his own decisions for nearly two hours, smiling the whole way through.
Morris walks him from his start as a young congressman in the early 1960s to his role in planning the 2003 push into Iraq. The spine of the film is the mountain of office memos Rumsfeld dictated over the decades, the so-called snowflakes that buried Washington in paper. The camera watches him juggle language, blur the line between what was known and unknown, and concede nothing. His famous riddle about the "unknown unknowns" becomes the key to the whole portrait.
It's shot in Morris's signature face-to-face interview style, the same approach that took home his Oscar for The Fog of War. Only this subject doesn't repent, he defends, which is far more unsettling. Pick it if you want a cold psychological study of power rather than a recap of events. Stream The Unknown Known (2013) online on iFILM.
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