Standard Operating Procedure
It’s true that photographs capture a moment. What they don’t necessarily convey, are the moments leading up to, or following the ones you see immortalised on photo paper or, more commonly nowadays, in pixels.
Digital photography has led to an unprecedented number of people taking snapshots of events and sharing them with others.
Such was the case at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad when, in 2003, a number of photos of Iraqi prisoners and their US Soldier captives were leaked to the press. Who can forget the horrific image of a man with a hood over his head, standing on a box, arms outstretched with what appear to be electronic wires attached to his fingertips? Or the image of naked prisoners standing in a line, while a female US soldier, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, points at the genitalia of one of the prisoners?
In his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris aims to tell the stories behind the photos, by interviewing the people who were involved in those incidents, other military personnel from Abu Ghraib, and a civilian interrogator.
Despite its success at the Berlin film festival, there has been a fair amount of criticism of Morris’s film: some people believe that the integrity of the project was compromised due to the payment that many interviewees received, and the implicit exoneration of their actions.
Certainly, this documentary adopts the line that although the acts perpetrated against the Iraqi prisoners were appalling, the soldiers who were indicted for the crimes were hapless scapegoats who were carrying out orders by “softening up” the detainees for interrogation.
Morris suggests that the so-called “real” atrocities in Abu Ghraib prison were committed against unnamed prisoners who were brought in by OGAs (Other Government Agencies), and even killed during interrogation.
Nevertheless, for some, the results of this film, and of his last documentary, The Fog of War, are unsatisfactory. Morris has been accused of letting his interviewees off the hook, as it were.
It is true that he gives his interviewees free reign to admit culpability in this film, which they never quite seem to do. But, as with Robert McNamara in Morris’s previous film, we often learn as much about people from what they omit, as what they tell us.
So, is Morris to blame here? After all, he used the same techniques in this film that resulted in the freedom of a man falsely imprisoned and awaiting execution for a murder he didn’t commit (The Thin Blue Line).
Given the topic of the documentary, it’s difficult to see how the filmmaking techniques could possibly eclipse the subject matter. But in some way they do.
In a Q&A session at Cinema Nova (as part of their Meet The Filmmaker series), Morris acknowledged to interviewer Tom Ryan (from The Age newspaper), that when people are being interviewed, they are ostensibly recounting the story as they see it. What Morris does, is simply provide a visual representation to accompany their words.
One of the pitfalls of this film is the re-enactments. Morris has always gone for some level of visual accompaniment to his subjects’ narratives, but the re-enactments, on top of the disturbing photos were redundant, not to mention excessive.
It would be awful to think that a distinctive filmmaker like Morris had reached his apex with The Fog Of War. Nevertheless, purely for the questions it raises, Standard Operating Procedure is an important film.