Monday, September 1, 2008

The atrocity exhibition: Standard Operating Procedure finds Errol Morris immersed in the labyrinth of awful images


With its unprecedented access to key participants in the crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, its multitude of images of violence and humiliation both real and staged, and, maybe most of all, its prodding of one hell of an ugly scar on America’s visage, Errol Morris’
Standard Operating Procedure, first released last spring, hasn’t proved to be the feel good movie of the year. It is however among the most vital: confrontational, grotesque, divisive, fascinating, smart, beautifully crafted and—here’s the catch—more generative of questions than answers.

Elegiacally scored by Danny Elfman and vividly shot by Robert Chappell and frequent Scorsese collaborator Robert Richardson, S.O.P. alternates between the wide view and the uncomfortably intimate, between the familiar evidence and the unseen, sometimes contradictory details, between the state and the individual, with all roads leading back to a handful of hours a few years ago during which some largely un-remembered men were at the mercy of a handful of US officers taking the objectification of the ostensible enemy to a diabolically juvenile extreme. I can’t quite believe it, but I actually went to see Morris’ “non-fiction horror film” twice in a single week when it had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs. Yet I still feel there is much to learn from it.

The case file opens with letters sent home to a spouse, speaking fearfully about the escalation of aberrant behaviour at the prison, about the poker face required to go along with things. These letters are from Sabrina Harman, the “thumbs-up” girl, whose pixie-smiling poker face graces a great many of the most appalling images. Soon after we begin to hear of a romance from one of Sabrina’s colleagues, who talks about how love makes you blind, especially when you’re only 20, a woman in this man’s army, and the man you’re in love with is a charismatic superior. This testimony comes from Lynndie England, that slight, demonic-looking girl holding a leash, a hooded, beaten prisoner on the other end of it. If she’s not one of the real culprits, than who is?


It is expected that political documentaries utilize journalistic sources in building their visual narrative, and there is some of that here, but S.O.P. is a movie about snapshots, hundreds of them, taken by numerous cameras, mostly by those who would gain the least from their existence: the criminals. In S.O.P. no single image remains trustworthy—what we don’t see often contradicts our assumptions about what we do—but there is embedded in this project a hunch that some sort of truth might be found in the collected photos as a whole.

While Morris, who finally won an Oscar for The Fog of War a few years back, is certainly among the world’s most prominent documentary filmmakers, his characteristic mise en scène—the lovingly aestheticized reenactments, the talking heads which seem less interrogated than given an open mic, the highly selective inclusion and paced delivery of context—continues to be debated for its moral scrutiny. It is of course these very aspects of Morris’ work, both the approach and the debates it incites, that make his work so deeply engaging. Filmmakers like Werner Herzog may push journalistic/objectivist norms even farther, but it’s Morris who applies these techniques not to marginal figures but subjects as volatile as American war crimes and the death penalty.

David Edelstein’s very good review of S.O.P. for New York Magazine ends with these questions: “Special Agent Brent Pack, who analyzed the photos and sent many of Morris’s subjects to military prison, says, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Okay, maybe. But which words? Whose words?” To which I could only reply, “Exactly!” Though it’s considered over and over throughout S.O.P., Morris’ core thesis about the relationship between accountability and evidence is in an odd way overshadowed by the monstrous events investigated here. Hardly used as a tool for deception, Morris’ particular approach very much emphasizes the slipperiness of images, the fathomless layers of subjectivity and spin inherit in any act of photographic or cinematographic documentation—not to mention the ways in which such images are thereafter delivered, re-framed and viewed by an audience.

Morris, who was once a private investigator, has made the process of investigation itself a dominant theme in his work, and his recent essays for The New York Times on what truths can be gleaned from the extant photographs from the Crimean War has placed him in a small group of major intellectuals, Susan Sontag among them, who’ve made the dissection of photographs crucial to their body of ideas. In this sense he is a sort of poet of doubt, drawn toward subjects that might otherwise seem easy to gloss over. With Abu Ghraib he has perhaps found his ultimate subject, a catastrophe made more labyrinthine instead of less so for the proliferation of data surrounding it, and the best sort of proof that our age of seemingly infinite images and all-seeing technology is not to be mistaken for one of greater knowledge or certainty.

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