Standard Operating Procedure

You look at a photograph, and you think you have a veridical piece of reality. And you see these famous photographs, these infamous photographs, that came out of Abu Ghraib, and you think, “This is despicable, blah, blah, blah,” and you look no further. I believe that no one did look much further.
...
I think that the photographs served as a cover-up as well as an exposé. That is one of the things that’s truly fascinating about them. They gull you into thinking that you know everything there is to know. This is the bad stuff—look at it; here’s the ocular proof; here’s the image.

-- Quotes from Errol Morris.  Interview with Michael Meyer in Columbia Journalism Review

What is stunning about Errol Morris's generative idea for his latest film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is the observation that everyone looked at the Abu Ghraib photos (and reacted in the extreme), but nobody really "looked into" them -- not to the extent one would typically attempt to ask and answer what is actually going on in them, why, how, and in what sequence or specific context.

In attempting to layer and infuse the images with dimensionality, the film pursues many approaches, including in-depth interviews and filmed re-enactments.  Regarding the latter, photographer Nubar Alexanian's photos of those reenactments are being touted to help impart more of a sense of knowing which viewers can then bring back to the original photographs.

In setting up such a cheap, soft-porn quality liaison between the "bad apples" (ignoring an overweight prisoner hanging on the blood-streaked, plywood background), I'm wondering if you feel this single image -- offering such a cinematic and dramatically paradoxical contrast -- lends more reality and context to the horrors themselves?

Recovering Reality: Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib (Morris - Meyer interview/CJR)
Standard Operating Procedure website
Sony SOR website - This site not only includes the trailer, but is also an extension of the film in literally applying context to the original images. (Sony Classics)
Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib (a specific look at Sabrina Harman by Philip Gourevitch  and Errol Morris - The New Yorker)
Nubar Alexanian photos from set of SOR (Takepart.com)
Nubar.com

(image © Nubar Alexanian)

Comments

[catfood]

For a moment I assumed I was looking at some more Pennsylvania "values" voters. My bad.

[mdhatter]

I think it's brilliant.

[black dog barking]

Morris makes an interesting observation, that blunt brutal images can mask the underlying facts, a sort of scabbing-over or a shock-like short-circuitry of conscious perception. Holocaust images can have that effect. The documentary Shoah worked around this mental blast wall by *not* showing images of horror, instead showing the ledgers and documents used by German bureaucrats to record and manage the flow of raw material to the eastern death factories. By discussing the logistics problems faced and met by Nazi engineers and administrators — problems of logistics, implementation, waste management — the real horrors became possible, became real.

We are accomplished practitioners of this process of selective observation. Just yesterday a suicide bomber killed 50 mourners at a double funeral in Iraq. That's a horror, a toll, a now familiar mini-drama. It happened. Again. If this misadventure had architects willing to own up to their work, willing to share their plans to bring this project to conclusion, I'd ask them a simple question: What does the *fact* of suicide bombers mean for our project in Iraq?

Not the consequences or the toll of suicide bombing, not the disaster management resources required, not the tactics and training required to recognize and mitigate walking bombs. No, what does the fact of suicide bombers mean?

[gasho]

Great point made in that quote.. the photos that were released were terrible, of course, but also had an element of .. "gosh some chick has some dude on a leash - half of the government officials I've heard about would pay for that kind of thing". They were terrible, without being Horrific in many instances. Not so much blood, but more humiliation - at least in the images that I saw. And descriptions work the same way - like "simulated drowning" or "head slapping".. we hear these and think that the interrogators are holding back in some way. My guess is that the real stuff that was done was bloody, brutal and pure evil.

As for this image of the film, it's taking the issue and making a fake representation. I thought this might be an ad for Perfume or Diesel Jeans. I'm not so sure this will help us get past the pictures and into the horror - I think this is another barrier to that. Hollywood is investigating, not Congress or the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. That's a big difference that shows the follow up might be headed in the wrong direction.

[boxcar]

one danger of art (of this type) is the dehumanization of the acts due to the artistic treatment.

The crime of the torture - according to Rummy - was not that acts, but that there were PICTURES! "The pictures were grotesque" he said. Not the acts. The people who took the pictures were persecuted, not those that did the acts.

How would the torture scandal play out differently if these "artistic" treatments were the ones released?

Art blends reality with fantasy; borrowing a little from each. We must not forget the reality when the outrage is masked so sublimely by good art.

peace
box

[Cactus]

At first I thought this was photo-shopped. Surely no one could be making out in front of torture. Then I remembered the stories of soldiers getting "horny" after battles. Violence and sex, reminding us we are not as removed from the animal kingdom as we would like to pretend. And we don't want to see it, to be confronted with evidence of it.

We are used to filtering out images we don't like. Much has been said about the shortening attention span due to TV. How many of us sit with the remote and flip from channel to channel, immediately editing out images we don't like.

If we have truly become a nation of bullies, then how many people looked at those photos and silently hought, 'good, they deserve it.' We learned just last week that the psychopath-in-charge calmly discussed with others in the black house just which prisoner would get which form of torture. Yet the "debate" last week focused on whether to wear a flag pin or not.

gasho brings up a point that could be directed at several other recent films. Does the fact that a film is made about the subject of an outrage, blunt the cry for action against that outrage. How much does a particular film agitate successfully for change with the intent to make that change inevitable? Or does a film, by once again depicting the aberrant action, especially if done 'artistically,' thus blunt the need for action?