Interview. Errol Morris.

"This is a very complex, convoluted story on so many, many different levels," Errol Morris tells Sean Axmaker. "I think it is, in many ways, a story about American women in the military. I think that's one of the things about the photographs that made the photographs particularly strange, particularly appalling, particularly perverse. I've often imagined, when [Charles] Graner was taking those pictures, of his 90-some-odd pound, twenty-year-old girlfriend, holding that leash on that the prisoner known as Gus, he was in some very deep sense reenacting American foreign policy."

Standard Operating Procedure continues to roll out across the country, opening in more cities just this weekend. Earlier entries: 1 and 2; newish items after the jump.

Updated through 5/24.

Roger Ebert comments on a message he's received from Morris regarding the controversy over the reenactments (Sean prefers to call them "illustrations"; Morris tells him he's used the word "reenactments" all along, so he feels he's stuck with it).

SF360 presents a transcription of the Q&A with Morris led by B Ruby Rich when Morris received the San Francisco Film Festival Persistence of Vision Award on April 29.

"In The Fog of War, [Morris] managed to grill former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about details of his career without ever daring to ask him why he, McNamara, shouldn't be held at least partly responsible for the more than 2 million civilian deaths in Indochina," writes Michael Atkinson in In These Times. "In his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, Morris revisits the Abu Ghraib scandal in his classically myopic way, scrutinizing and re-enacting and scab-picking the minutiae of the infamous incidents at the Iraqi prison - without considering the larger political implications, impact or context. He may well be the only filmmaker in America who can make movies about atrocity and yet resists any sort of overt ethical inquiry."

"By insistently focusing on the photos and the lower-level soldiers who appear in them, the movie version of Standard Operating Procedure often has the inadvertent effect of playing into the 'few bad apples' argument put forth by the Bush administration," writes the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Standard Operating Procedure, co-authored by Morris and Philip Gourevitch. "This book version, in contrast," she continues, "does an admirable job of situating those photos (which curiously do not appear in the volume) within a larger context, showing the roots those repellent images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration, which started the torture snowball rolling by declaring that it need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror. As Lt Gen Ricardo S Sanchez, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, notes in his new memoir, Wiser in Battle (Harper), the 2002 presidential memo concerning Geneva 'constituted a watershed event in US military history.'"

"The film has drawn criticism because Morris paid his subjects for their interviews, possibly influencing their stories, but at least he doesn't seem to pressure his subjects to deflect blame upward, as director Rory Kennedy did in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Kennedy also paid her subjects)," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "The numerous reenactments in the film have also sparked some controversy, but the distinct look of those shots and the frequent use of slow motion make it clear that these images portray only one hypothetical version of events. Standard Operating Procedure is a fascinating, if limited, glimpse at the small personalities that handed the United States its greatest humiliation in decades."

For Mother Jones, Dave Gilson talks with Morris about, among other things, the "best political ads you never saw."

Online listening tip. Philip Gourevitch follows Morris on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 5/20: Errol Morris's latest blog entry:

SABRINA HARMAN: I can't believe they murdered the guy.

Wait just one second. Murdered?

And who are they? What does the photograph really show? What are we looking at? A smile? A murder? And if it is a murder, who is the killer?

I would like to answer these questions.

And he's inviting readers to help.

Update, 5/22: "Morris has not set out to assemble the definitive account," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "In a sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anti-definitive, a lament that the truth of what went on at Abu Ghraib will never be brought to light."

Update, 5/24: New reviews of the book: Raymond Bonner (NYT), Michael Byers (Guardian) and Michael S Roth (Los Angeles Time).

Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 9:49 AM