More on Standard Operating Procedure.

"In Standard Operating Procedure, [Errol] Morris has hold of a monster subject, one in which politics and art bleed together," writes New York's David Edelstein. "Using his own standard operating procedure - fixed camera, slow-motion reenactments, a hypnotic score - the director circles in on two points: that the men and women demoted or convicted for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib were doing as they'd been ordered by higher-ups who remain unpunished; and that the photos obscure larger and more complicated truths. I'm not sure Morris clinches his case, but I'm not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception."

Updated through 4/27.

"A documentarian like no other, Morris, since The Thin Blue Line, has combined head-on interviews, recreations of the testimony with anonymous actors, churning scores (usually supplied by Philip Glass, here Danny Elfman), and an epistemologist's curiosity about image, memory, and human behavior," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Casting the audience into the groupthink of young, inexperienced soldiers whose depraved antics during the fall of 2003 provoked a global uproar only because they were photographed, Morris has made one of his finest inquiries into corruptibility and violence."

The film "is remarkably cool, allowing the horror of the hundreds of photographs and the explanations by some of the soldiers who took them to play across the viewer's psyche like waking nightmares," writes Christopher Dickey in Newsweek. "The book, written by Philip Gourevitch in collaboration with Morris, is, by contrast, incandescent with righteous anger. The full context for the photographs is even more disturbing than the images themselves. When the case is laid out, when you have met the characters and learned their stories and understood what they suffered as well as the suffering they inflicted, it is hard not to want to scream."

"Standard Operating Procedure is a twisted investigative documentary that purposely doesn't add up," writes Chris Wisniewski in indieWIRE. "But the power of the film rests not in Morris's ability to create a coherent idea of Abu Ghraib... but rather in his ability to render such a master narrative impossible."

Brian Sholis has an extensive quote from WJT Mitchell's piece on the film in Harper's. The gist: "The referent of a photograph, the real object or event 'captured' by it, is not the same as the meaning it my acquire as a cultural icon."

Morris, in John Anderson's piece for the New York Times: "It is a mistake to confuse the pictures at Abu Ghraib with the crimes at Abu Ghraib.... One of the incredibly deep ironies is that the photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything. And that is very interesting."

Steve Dollar talks with Morris for the New York Sun.

Online listening tip. Morris is a guest on the Bob Edwards Show. Via Chuck Tryon.

Earlier: Items posted April 1 through 4.

Updates: Morris's "well-argued point is that the real culprits behind the crimes committed weren't the grunts doing the actual dirty work but the higher ups who encouraged and sanctioned such behavior," writes Nick Schager. "Yet given the filmmaker's subject matter, it's exasperating (if, given his past history, not overly surprising) to find him distastefully fetishizing the images via a series of recreations shot with plenty of lavish, self-conscious attention to visual beauty."

The Playlist (following an entry on Robert Downey Jr): "Another long-ass profile we read this weekend (around 17 pages online), was another warts-and-all GQ article on the great documentarian Errol Morris... Morris has gotten many people to admit many a self-incriminating story on film and we loved that he calls his technique, the 'shut-the-fuck-up school of interviewing.' It's called listening and something more interviewers should try."

"[T]he film's narrow focus is both its point and its weakness," writes Jürgen Fauth, who recalls a somewhat rowdy press conference in Berlin.

Peter Bowen talks with Morris for Filmmaker.

Updates, 4/22: Nick Schager talks with Morris for the IFC.

Howard Feinstein talks with Morris for indieWIRE.

Updates, 4/23: "A description of dogs attacking naked prisoners is supplemented with close-ups of slavering hounds. This obtrusive mannerism is not only superfluous but, for a movie that aspires to be a critique of representation, bizarrely self-defeating," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Why so frantic? Does Morris fear that the faces, voices, and photographs he's assembled are insufficiently compelling to hold an audience? A vivid description of Fallujah's nauseating stink doesn't require smell-o-vision to register. Is he, like his subjects, compelled to amuse?"

"[M]aybe the most problematic reenactment is the movie's restaging of already hard-won insights about the commission of horrible acts during wartime," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Morris acts, and promotes himself, like a pioneer, which he is, primarily, in successfully restoring Abu Ghraib to the cognoscenti's lips where Taxi to the Dark Side didn't."

"[A]t about the fifteen minute mark, I was thinking, 'Does he really need all this artfulness?' The answer is, finally, yes," argues Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

Updates, 4/24: "Political posturing is the real subject of Morris's newest film," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Scott Tobias talks with Morris for the AV Club.

Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Morris.

Updates, 4/26: "The very scale of Standard Operating Procedure - evident in its costly-looking production values, special effects and elaborately choreographed re-enactments - suggests that Mr Morris has grown weary of working in the margins to which documentary filmmakers are still too often relegated," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Standard Operating Procedure is a big, provocative and - it goes without saying - disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style." And an analysis of that style follows: how the interviewees are framed, the nature of the Q&As and, of course, those reenactments.

Then there's this: "Mr Morris said this week that some of the lower-ranking soldiers who were convicted of tormenting inmates at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were paid for their time, in which they recount events at the prison in detail and describe a wayward environment that led to the excesses," report Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario. "Word of the payments drew conflicting reactions among those in the world of film documentaries, where show business values have been known to collide with the more austere standards of good journalism."

"If I believed that there was any public appetite for a movie like Standard Operating Procedure, I might also believe that it would spark a public conversation about responsibility for the crimes and abuses committed in our name - some we know about and a great many more, one suspects, that we don't," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Intentionally or not, Morris' interviews with these confused, vacuous and morally rudderless people felt to me like a sweeping indictment of those of us who are their fellow citizens and who share the culture that produced them." And you can read, listen to or watch clips of his interview with Morris.

"The movie affirms Morris's evolution into a political documentarian," writes Elbert Ventura in the New Republic. "He has admitted as much, saying that SOP grew out of his 'horror at current American foreign policy and the feeling that I should be doing something rather than nothing.' Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris's two worst movies."

"Morris takes an artist's view of the Abu Ghraib photographs and their inhabitants," argues Teddy Blanks in the Design Observer. "His interest in photography has led him to a set of iconic images that exposed a nation to its own worst behavior, and at the same time provided a cover for those most implicit in it to duck behind. He subjects them to a full circumstantial and aesthetic investigation, and uses them as the backdrop for his riskiest and most topical film to date. He will thus continue to be chided for straying from the self-congratulatory stoicism that characterizes the dirge of Iraq documentaries that are released each year - all more purely 'documentary' than his. But with luck, Errol Morris will transfer some of his own uneasiness about photography and its many possible interpretations to his audience, and we will think twice when confronted by the future images, horrific and bold, of this American war."

"By the end of the feature-length frustration that is Standard Operating Procedure, the maverick documentarian Errol Morris reminds you of the oblivious, tunnel-vision eccentrics from his past films," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Where other filmmakers and writers have looked at the infamous photos of the Abu Ghraib scandal and sought to chronicle the relevant events and policies, Mr Morris ties himself into knots by questioning photographic truth and by embellishing the events with luxuriant re-enactments in this misguided and ill-defined endeavor.... In a way, by limiting his focus to his one-on-one interviews with the participants, he unwittingly replicates the unwillingness of media coverage to explore the larger context, and perpetuates a myth of incomprehensibility that tends to obscure such events."

"Morris is obsessed with the impossibility of truthful storytelling, the way individual testimony is always strained through the filters of memory, perspective, and the speaker's need to present him- or herself in the best light possible," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "As abstract and intellectually distancing as this approach may sound, it's strangely well-suited to documenting the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which took place in a moral gray zone tacitly sanctioned by the administration's ongoing refusal to define exactly what torture or stress position or enemy combatant means."

Morris "likes to liven things up by bringing what Hollywood has always called 'production values' to his docs," writes Richard Schickel in Time. And he lists them. Then: "All of this seems to me at odds with the very sordid story Morris is trying to tell. It distracts from, even vitiates, the moral power inherent in the film."

"The film makes no attempt to exonerate the participants of wrongdoing, but it does add context to their actions and argues one very important point: these soldiers were not punished for torture; they were punished for being in embarrassing photographs," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online.

"With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts and Minds," announces Scott Tobias at the AV Club, where he gives it an "A."

Film Panel Notetaker was at work at the Q&A with Morris at Tribeca. More from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

And more interviews with Morris: Steve Erickson (Film & Video), Brian D Johnson (Macleans) and Eric Kohn (Stream).

Update, 4/27: In the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher asks Morris what's next: "I used to make funny movies and I think of myself as a funny person, so maybe I'll go in that direction."

Posted by dwhudson at April 21, 2008 2:30 AM