Standard Operating Procedure and a new book of photographs taken on the sets of Errol Morris documentaries confirm that the filmmaker will do whatever he feels he needs to so as to get the uncomfortable message across.
By Brent Simon, FilmStew.com
There have been literally dozens of documentaries made about the war in Iraq, and almost without exception they've been rather famously ignored by a filmgoing populace seemingly too ground down by a combination of their own economic anxieties and generalized, numbed depression or despair to care about a cinematic rehashing of what they now overwhelmingly judge as a from-day-one royal screw-up.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, though, is mad as hell, and thinks others should be too. "I would often say when I was making this movie that I don't know, really, whether Americans care about torture. I care about it," he tells FilmStew, stressing the personal pronoun and leaning back in his chair. "I don't know whether most people care, in the sense that they tell themselves, 'Well, it's an implacable foe, a ruthless enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war.'"
Among other works, Morris is the director behind The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and, perhaps most eerily timely and insightfully, 2003's The Fog of War, which used former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his decision-making in the waging of the Vietnam War as a prism through which to assay the missteps of American military aggression and intervention. His latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, is about a series of photographs at Abu Ghraib prison that changed the world, changed the nature of the Iraq war and changed America's image of itself, or at least dragged into the light of day the yawning gulf between a nation's soaring rhetoric and its actions.
A hundred years from now, these photographs in all likelihood will define the war in Iraq, in particular three iconic shots taken by soldiers in the 372nd MP Company: the ones showing soldier Lynndie England posing with a prisoner on a leash, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, and a pyramid of naked prisoners. In his perspicacious new film, Morris shows how the photographs served as both an expose and a cover-up - the former because the photographs offered everyday Americans a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, and the latter because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers working the night-shift.
"The photographs became politicized immediately - the left would say one thing, the right would say something else," Morris bemoans. "And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football."
"I've pointed out a couple of times my surprise that no one really bothered to investigate the photographs, per se," he adds. "No one had bothered to actually talk to the people who had taken the photographs, bothered to figure out what had happened in [them]. I wanted to make a movie about... the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs, I wanted to make that movie."
"I think there's so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven't done it they're just pissed off, like, 'That's the job, guy! Why are you f*cking around with a bunch of pictures?'"
But Morris counters that he couldn't help it, because he is truly fascinated by the pictures in particular and photography in general. And especially the notion that there are things in front of our eyes that we cannot see.
"The scary thing about pictures to me is that they can be used to reveal and to hide," Morris offers. "They can [both] make you think you know things that you don't know, and they can certainly show you things that you cannot have seen otherwise."
While it's built chiefly around unblinking interviews with the actual subjects at the center of the controversy, Standard Operating Procedure, like most of Morris' other films, also includes exacting reenactments. Because of this, and also because it's in part about the inherent ambiguity of still photography - which after all captures only one moment in time, and in subjective fashion - it only stands to reason that the documentary arrives on the heels of Nonfiction, a 100-page book of photographs taken by Nubar Alexanian on the sets of Standard Operating Procedure and other Morris films.
The photographer, who has a relationship with Morris spanning more than 15 years, says he got a feeling early on that this project was different in substantive ways. "The set of Standard Operating Procedure was strange in part, due to the fact that the events of Abu Ghraib have been part of our recent history," Alexanian explains to FilmStew in a separate interview. "Errol created an exact duplicate of the cell block of Abu Ghraib. So all of us working on the set were in Abu Ghraib prison, and [yet] we were not."
Also, in comparison to previous dramatic stagings, "these reenactments were much more complex and exact," Alexanian continues. "Errol had a military expert on set to make sure the reenactments of water board were exact and precise. Standard Operating Procedure is a movie about a subject we all know something about, that the press thinks it's covered. But what Errol Morris has is the truth."
It may be the truth, or an almost entirely accurate recreation of it, but of course part of the interesting duality of Standard Operating Procedure is that it gives queasy depth and sometimes ironic context and shading to something that many Americans very much don't want to see. That fact has caused the movie to take some advance flak from cultural critics who claim, somewhat awkwardly, that such technique somehow breaches ethical protocol.
"I've done the dramatizations, for better or worse, in almost every single movie I've ever made, and am I surprised that now people are paying attention to them?" Morris wonders. "I mean, there was a Yewen cry when I made The Thin Blue Line about so-called reenactments.",/p>
"I have no problem with them, obviously," he adds. "You're telling people that photographs really don't show us the world, they de-contextualize things, they allow us to read into them, to imagine things about them that might not be true. So part of the idea, and maybe the central idea of the movie, something that's still on my mind, was what if you could walk into a photograph and its history?"
"Nicholson Baker has just written this revised history of the period between the wars, and the advent of World War II, with his radically reinvented version of [Winston] Churchill, the anti-Martin Gilbert version of Churchill, and it's really, really interesting and worth reading. He does something that interests me - he seizes on little details which he attends to, and then puts them together in a historical collage."
Morris maintains that because history is always written from the outside in, he wanted to take very specific moments and bring them to life in SOP, so as to explore what was the inner world and thinking around them. "The re-enactments help me to take an audience into that moment of photography," he insists.
The long look in a national mirror and collective societal analysis that follows is another matter.
In Theaters 
