Film After Film by J. Hoberman

Author:J. Hoberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

The War in Iraq was distinguished by the presence of participant-chroniclers as seen first in Gunner Palace and fictionalized by Redacted, as well as two other movies from 2007, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, a thriller which involves recovering video data—evidence of torture—from a dead soldier’s cell phone, and Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, in which an instance of combat was restaged with actual US soldiers. If ordinary combatants were making movies of their experiences, documentary filmmakers were inspired to draw on their own in imagining the war as motion picture simulation.

REPRESENTING IRAQ: THREE AMERICAN DOCUMENTARIES2

Standard Operating Procedure caps Errol Morris’s atrocity trilogy. Mr. Death (1999) offered a disturbingly facetious portrait of a “scientific” Holocaust denier; more sober, The Fog of War (2004) presented that old devil Robert McNamara with an all-too-human face, albeit allowing McNamara to put his own spin on his prosecution of the Vietnam War. Standard Operating Procedure addresses Iraq—specifically, the infamous photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the so-called bad apples who took them.

Morris doesn’t use voiceover; he’s a master at getting interviewees to pose certain questions on their own—like why did Abu Ghraib even exist? For one thing, this prison was where Saddam’s minions murdered 30,000 Iraqis. For another, it was located in a combat zone—and under frequent mortar attack. Common sense, if not common decency, would have suggested that the US level this nightmare. Instead, as Morris’s interviewees attest, Rumsfeld and his generals elected to “Gitmo-ize” the operation, torturing and otherwise brutalizing prisoners they dumped there—thus converting Abu Ghraib from Baathist hell to international symbol of American occupation.

Standard Operating Procedure is all about symbols. The Abu Ghraib images are hardly unfamiliar; Morris’s mission is to interrogate them. How did these pictures come into existence? And what, if anything, do they reveal?3

The snapshots and videos are mainly annotated by interviews with four of the seven bad apples, all former MPs, as well as letters home written by the most diligent of the amateur photographers, Sabrina Harman. What emerges from this testimony—which also goes a bit up the chain of command to include Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general who supposedly oversaw Abu Ghraib, and who has since been demoted—is the suggestion that whatever the CIA was doing to extract dubious intelligence, the MPs were just entertaining themselves by producing their own show.4

Bored, ignorant, and afraid, the bad apples were simply having fun. The prisoner photographed naked on all fours with a dog collar around his neck wasn’t actually dragged by the leash. The hooded guy standing on a box, wires attached to his outstretched hands, was never really in any danger. These pictures were posed! For Morris, who seems skeptical that photographs can ever disclose anything, the issue is legalistic. Focusing only on the photographic evidence, he asks if these images prove the commission of criminal acts or simply illustrate what one MP calls “standard operating procedure”—that is, the acceptable methods of stress positioning, sleep deprivation, and the ordering of inmates to masturbate while wearing nothing but panties on their heads.

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