BAGnewsNotes

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)

Alive Day: Beyond The Mind's Eye

My first piece for American Photo is on-line.

It takes issue with the still photographs of injured war veterans created in conjunction with the HBO program "Alive Day." (The "alive day" is the date a particular soldier suffered, but survived a catastrophic injury.)  For some reason, most likely a commercial one, the soldiers are posed in such a uniform and stereotyped manner that it frustrates the point of portraiture.

I hope you'll take a look at it, and show some "BAG presence" by commenting at American Photo's fine State of the Art blog.

On the subject of the program itself, I know I was critical of the staging and the role of James Gandolfini.  Having now watched the program on-line, I thought Gandolfini did a tasteful, warm and smartly inconspicuous job.  There were a couple other elements to the production that were also interesting from a visual perspective.

One thing I was fascinated by was just how much video documentation -- from both the U.S. and the insurgent side -- seems to be available of the battlefield.  We are all familiar with the number of surveillance cameras in public/civilian spaces, and how quickly authorities seem to be able to reconstruct video accounts of incidents after the fact.  What is more novel and less familiar, however, is how much the same can be done from a particular field encounter or IED detonation, which this documentary seems to take full advantage of.

I'm not sure if the shot of Sgt. Anderson from the "humvee cam" was taken on his "alive day," or not.  (Notice all the documentation Jonathan Bartlett has of his attack, however, or the web-cam footage of the blast that hit Jay Wilkerson's humvee.)  I also can't say if the insurgent-shot attack footage that HBO shows for each soldier is the actual one that involved them.  Although I'm thinking many of these sequences do.

Just the sense that it is, or easily could be, however, has all kinds of new implications for the veterans relationship to his personal cataclysm. Whereas these experiences used to be exclusive to memory, how different is it to witness, as well as to own a copy of how your old life ended when you arms or legs were blown off -- one you could review anytime, edit, and share with family or friends?
----
Update 9/14/07:

I wrote to to the HBO publicist for clarification about the "attack" videos paired with each soldier in the program.  The response is as follows (italics mine): 

"The insurgent supplied video mirrors the kind of attack each soldier/marine was involved in.  The insurgent video matches the attack and was carefully vetted by HBO military advisors."

So one more question here: Should the program or caption somehow indicate that these are not the actual incidents where the individual soldier was injured, or are we expected to know that?  Also, given that "friendly" web cams capture some of the actual attacks, doesn't that just further blur the line?

(image via HBO Documentary Films and Attaboy Films)

Iraq Status Follies

What these newswire pics express is what a farcical exercise the supposed Iraq war re-authorization showdown has become.

In spite of buzz about troop drawdowns, I don't see Chairman Bush, absent the opposition, signing on for any change at all.  As such, the martial feel of this halo shot -- matching the ludicrousness of Bush's off-the-wall speech before the VFW -- seems completely fitting.

And then, there's the whipping boy.  The non-stop, bipartisan chorus that Iraq is sinking because Malaki can't even walk and chew gum at the same time is the most callous and yellow Washington example of "blame the victim."

Lay it on that thick, and photo editors are only too happy to comply.

(image 1:  Jim Young/Reuters. Kansas City, Missouri, August 22, 2007. image 2:  Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters. August 20, 2007. caption: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tightens his laces during a visit the historical Umayyad mosque in old Damascus city. Via YahooNews)

Alive Day. Cut!

So, I've been working slowly, and looking at a lot of images for my first American Photo piece.  The theme I'm playing with has to do with how contemporary war images don't look like war anymore, so much as they look like the set or the staging for one.

In the middle of this, I get one of those PR emails from HBO touting a new documentary called "Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq."  (If you're not familiar with the term, "alive day" is the day -- sort of like your birthday -- you were almost blown to bits in Iraq, but through the miracle of medical technology, your life was saved ... if minus some of your body parts.)

Anyway, I've had the opening shot of the HBO preview video sitting on my desktop, and -- with my "war versus constructed reality" theme in mind, I can't stop examining it.  You see, James Gandolfini is the host of this program in which he holds intimate conversations on a sound stage with vets who, having been seriously injured, have survived.

What I can't get over, however, is how:

--  A Tony Soprano (as if, here, finally ousting his shrink and commandeering her chair) would have little trouble lending himself to such otherwise unfathomable trauma and violence.

-- The camera operator -- bucking for visual parity with the other two -- seems to cue for "less of a show" feel and more hand-held reality.  (Which only makes for a better show.)

-- The veteran (or veteran/patient), sitting high, holds his body like a little boy.  (And who could have picked that t-shirt?  Seems like the last connection this man would need is to a cartoon monkey.) (Although maybe I don't get the reference.)

-- The camera apparatus looks like a component of the vets artificial legs.

...I'm sure there is plenty more.

(image via HBO Documentary Films and Attaboy Films)

Exhibit #1 Why The Military Wants To Keep Our Boys Off YouTube

Can't decide what's more "striking," the audio or the video.

(Clip title: Mosque Vs F-18.  uploaded: May 16 2007 by max. location: Iraq.  Possibly Tajii.  Via liveleak) 

Bush On The Other Hand

Now we're talking.

Last week, I isolated Jim Webb's use of a family photo during the Dem's State of the Union resonse.  The picture, showing the Senator's father on duty near the end of World War II, helped the Senator fuse together a family's long military record, intense patriotism and the  responsibility of challenging the President's Iraq campaign.  My point was that opponent's of the war needed to go further in forging that message, more economically and emotionally, into a single picture.

The latest VoteVets.org ad, slated to run in states with Republican Senators on the war fence, is a good example of what's involved.

Watch it first, then read the rest....

What makes this so powerful is not just the visual impact, but the perfect blending of rhetorical and somatic metaphor -- hands and hands.  As the cadence builds, you keep waiting for the "other hand."  And when you get it, you don't exactly expect the singular, offsetting comparison with the President.

But it goes further than that, psychologically.

Notice how Loria raises his stump, moving it back and forth as he says the President's name.  Beyond driving home a point, the gesture -- for just an instant -- creates almost an anthropomorphic association with the President.  With the extension obviously part of Loria's body, but visually alien too, at the intonation of the President's name, our sense is to wonder (just like in puppetry or in a magic show) if this object and the President have a more literal connection.

As a result, we not only think (intellectually) Bush caused this stump -- we get the near-physical sensation that Bush, himself, is part of that stump, and/or he now exists where that arm doesn't.

(still: votevets.org/Wesley Clark via youtube.com. January 2007)

Saturday Versus Monday Night Live

If you're looking for evidence of the conservative meltdown, consider the strides the opposition has made lately in achieving visual parity.  This latest example involved some pretty strategic real estate.

It's not often Rove gets shown up when it comes to staging, but Al Gore's Oval Office routine on Saturday Night Live left Bush's prime time immigration speech two nights later looking like sloppy seconds.  And it didn't help that CNN cued Bush early, creating an awkward false start to the address.  (This frame is where Bush had to pull up.)

Content-wise, the two performances also show an almost complete reversal from 2000.  Now, Bush looks like the overly rigid, overly scripted, and overly self-conscious politician while Gore seems loose and comfortable in his own skin.

Policy-wise, Gore did his part to loosen some of the biggest screws holding together the Bush Administration, including tax cuts, energy policy and security.  He did so, however, with a kind of deft misdirection that characterized Stephen Colbert's deconstruction of Bush at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few weeks ago.  With the friendlier venue, however, Gore achieved it as much with nostalgia as with parody.  As "the inventor of the anti-hurricane and tornado machine" pretends to review six years of a Gore Administration, who couldn't dream (and even, pine over) how much better America might have become?

When these two frames are juxtaposed, there is really no sense the top shot comes from a comedy show  Even after you see the sketch, the images still achieve equivalence.  It's the spectacular failure of the Bush Administration that puts these two image on par.  In fact, this Gore pic forces into the open the fundamental question people grow more uneasy about by the day, which is  -- who's competent enough for the seat?

See the Gore SNL sketch here.
See the Bush immigration "false start" clip here.

(image 1: NBC/SNL via iFilm. com.  image 2: CNN via crooksandliars.com)

There Will Be No Snows

Honestly, I was hard pressed to identify "better" or "worse" images from the "An Inconvenient Truth" trailer.

The film, hosted by Al Gore, is like a global warming nightmare roller coaster ride.  There is great use of black-and-white.  I love that rising, glowing temperature indicator ball.  With the Katrina disaster fresh in mind, the hyper-spinning hurricane on the thermal weather tracker was pretty nerve wracking, as were the pinned back palm trees and the slamming, crashing wave shots.  Of course, watching huge chunks of Florida, Shanghai and Calcutta suddenly turned into swamp is also quite alarming.

Still, after taking the ride about four or five times (each time, getting a little more creeped out by all that drying up, cracking earth), I'd have to say I'm still partial to the Kilimanjaro sequence.

Maybe it is winter in the first shot and summer in the second, as one person commented on the trailer's discussion thread.  Even so.  The film has the acumen to play on any number of visual images (and, in this example, visual phrases too) that have been imprinted in us since grade school -- all toward a vital end.

Most interesting of the three frames, however, is probably the last one.  I read it as the lone scientist, verifying a disaster that we really could have handled back, say, in 2006.

Watch "An Inconvenient Truth" trailer here.  Climate Crisis website.

(images: "An Inconvenient Truth")

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist

I think my all-time most popular post is the one which promoted Will Ferrell's parody of ranch hand George Bush (Will Ferrell "Pasturizes" Bush - link).  I thought the spot (created by now-dormant voter registration group American's Coming Together) was the best piece of satire from the last presidential election.

This recent Harlan McCraney piece -- featuring comedian Andy Dick -- covers some well worn ground (Bush's abuse of the English language).  Still, it does so with a combination of flair, corn and production value that cracked me up.  Dick really makes it work.

Quicktime video here.

(referral: Jeff B.)

(image: Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist.  Host site: Otis Productions. Starring Andy Dick.  Director: Russell Bates/Crossroads Films.)

Gunner's Palace Update

Back in June, I did a post about Michael Tucker, an embedded journalist in Iraq who was making a film about the war.  An unpretentious observer with a clear eye for emotional details, Tucker bonded easily with soldiers and assembled a website offering bits and pieces about the impact of war and things troops did to maintain normalcy.

Apparently, his film is about to be released.  Because I haven't seen it, I can't really vouch for it.  (I also had a little trouble viewing the Yahoo-hosted trailer.)  If it's like the web journal, though, it should give a less varnished look at the war from the soldier's (as opposed to the government's) point of view.

As Tucker writes in his last entry from his last visit:

With each trip to Iraq, my opinions have become dulled--it's all become personal. When I watch the news, I think of people I know in Baghdad. I think of the families I've had dinner with, the friends that I've drank endless cups of tea with and the soldiers that I've rolled with. I worry about all of them. During the last year, if anything, I've learned that war isn't what most of us think it is: it has nothing to do with what most of us know and it's definitely not what you see on the news.

I've asked soldiers what they think about the war and their answers are surprisingly simple. After a year, the war isn't about WMDs, democracy, Donald Rumsfeld or oil. It's about them. Simple. They just want to finish the job they were sent to do so they can go home.

(Gunner's Palace journal)
(Gunner's Palace trailer)