Standard Operating Procedure.

Paul Arthur, whose passing last week has been noted in an appreciation by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, has left us an important piece on Errol Morris that now appears in the new issue of Artforum. When Standard Operating Procedure premiered in Berlin, many of us struggled to pinpoint just why specific aspects of documentary - the reenactments, the score and so on - irked us; and why, overall, this film is not the film about Abu Ghraib we need. It's difficult in the frenzy of a festival to think past initial suspicions; here, Arthur takes them home: The "visual aperçus, which Morris refers to rather sophistically as 'impressions' rather than reenactments, are undeniably gorgeous. Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning."

Updated through 4/4.

A must-read piece, establishing Morris's position in relation to "the gospel according to verité" and noting that "whatever meager gifts of original research" SOP offers, "they tend to pale in comparison" with Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side.

Update, 4/4: In a longish, footnoted New York Times blog entry - evidently the first in what'll be a series - Errol Morris addresses the issue troubling most critics of SOP by again looking back to The Thin Blue Line: "It wasn't a cinema vérité documentary that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation - part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It's not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It's the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth."

"Where Gibney essentially conducted an investigation of the entire present-day military hierarchy and the sociopolitical state of mind that allowed for the formulation of its torture policy, Morris opts for a point of view at once more personal and philosophical," writes Robert Levin at cinemattraction. "Most obviously, it powerfully portrays the enormity of warfare's psychological toll. At the same time, and more intriguingly, it raises important questions about the nature of our voyeuristic society, the reliability of photography in shaping our understanding of history and the inherent interplay between the subjects of a picture and its audience."

Blogging at Slant, Ed Gonzalez defends the reenactments, which "feel as purposeful as they were in The Thin Blue Line, cannily dialoguing with his thesis about the veracity of image-making... A semiotic essay that doesn't feel like one or announce itself as one, which is to say it doesn't play like some Haynesian PhD thesis, Standard Operating Procedure leaves the mind reeling—art, philosophical discourse, and human rights activism in one."

Michael Guillén wonders if "gory reenactment worthy of pop culture's best horror flicks will not induce fatigued avoidance and a mistrust of investigative journalism guised as entertainment?... I can appreciate Standard Operating Procedure for the horror film it is, if not for being the incisive documentary it purports to be. As a horror film, it's pretty repulsive and frightening."

At the press conference in Berlin, Morris said that Specialist Sabrina Harman is the most fascinating interviewee in the film, and he'll find no argument here. She took the only photographs we currently know about that provide evidence that at least one prisoner was killed in Abu Ghraib. But in her first set of pictures of the corpse, she smiles and flashes the thumbs-up; later, as Morris and Philip Gourevitch, co-authors of the accompanying book, describe in their profile of her in the New Yorker, she returned to shoot a more sober set: "Real or unreal, participant or bystander, degrader or degraded, overstimulated or numbed out - Harman may have meant no harm but she seemed to understand that in the malignant circumstances of the MI block she could not be entirely harmless."

Michael Meyer talks with Morris for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Posted by dwhudson at April 1, 2008 4:43 AM