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.

Hot Docs 2008: home movies that come back to haunt us

Though it was as diverse as ever in its programming of movies from everywhere and about, seemingly, everything, this year’s well-attended Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, which wrapped on Sunday night, was for me something of a primer on the shape of docs to come—that shape being defined by the wild proliferation of consumer-level audiovisual technology over the last half-century and our impulse to record our lives as a method of either verifying or coping with it. A few years ago Capturing the Friedmans brought home movies into the theatre with an iconoclastic layer of threat, the past coming back to haunt us in living—if deteriorated—colour, while Tarnation clarified that a more personal sort of non-fiction was to become an increasingly dominant genre. Neither of these movies were the first to use home movies in an inventive way, but they were popular, inflammatory, and influential.

Skip ahead to 2008 and we find Must Read After My Death, Morgan Dews’ investigation into the private turmoil of his grandparents and their children, a work composed almost entirely of Super 8 footage taken by the family and unnervingly candid audio recordings they made for each other as a therapeutic device. With the mise-en-scène confined to the construction of a montage that will convey insight through canny or poetic juxtaposition, the movie unfolds as a collective public testament to the troubles of open marriage, patriarchal resentment and experimental psychiatry that none of the participants actually intended to make.

Her Name is Sabine is French actress Sandrine Bonnaire’s absolutely devastating portrait of her sister, who in the last fifteen years has slipped from a reasonably functional, autonomous person living with autism to a heavy, sluggish woman in need of constant care and living in a ceaseless, at times nightmarish, drug fog. Bonnaire’s manipulation of a lifetime of family movies is sly, artful, moving and finally deeply respectful, as it should be. The most powerful moments arise when the images of Sabine from the past—a playful, attractive woman with a striking gaze—finally converge with the present. Sabine watches her old self and recognizes all to well what’s transpired. Her flood of anxiety is almost unbearable, an effect you’re not likely to shake off for some time. I very much hope you’ll have the opportunity to see it soon.

Another work, not quite as reliant on personal archives but certainly made more poignant through the intermingling of past and present, was the festival’s opening night gala, Sacha Gervasi’s awesomely titled Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, which chronicles the mostly middling fortunes of the titular Toronto metal band that’s spent its career perpetually on the cusp of success, despite its ardent cult following and the adulation of numerous metal heavyweights. The movie is surely destined for great things, if for no other reason that it’s so damn endearing, with Anvil originators Lipps and Robb Reiner (a drummer named after the director of This is Spinal Tap: further evidence that truth is stranger than fiction) exhibiting an uncommon depth of long-term, contentious, ultimately redeeming friendship.

Citizen Havel, shot over an 11-year period by Pavel Koutecky, proposes an interesting variation on the home movie theme, in that all the footage was accumulated with the explicit intention of being used in a documentary yet it possesses the candidness of something far more personal. Koutecky was granted access to the charismatic former Czech president’s home and work life of a level unmatched in political history, thus we’re able to witness speeches being spun and decisions being mulled over, as well as Havel’s relationships shifting, his despair over the death of his wife, his killing of approximately 96,000 cigarettes, and his visits with everyone from Bill Clinton—who plays a mean ‘Summertime’ on the sax at a Prague nightclub—to The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps no other use of home movies seen at Hot Docs 2008 could ever equal the caustic effect of Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, his "non-fiction horror movie" and graphic investigation into what went down in the Abu Ghraib prison back in 2003. At the dark heart of the story remain the photos and videos, shared, copied and spread around, made by the US military staff guilty of the torture, sexual humiliation and various other sorts of abuse of Iraqi inmates. As Morris interrogates the interrogators, the question lingers: if we can presume that at least some of these people knew what they were doing was so incredibly wrong, why in the hell did they amass—and flaunt—so much evidence of their crime? While most films at Hot Docs have an uncertain future, S.O.P. is among the few that will thankfully be coming to a theatre near you.