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Tackling the horror of Abu Ghraib in a documentary

Errol Morris’ mother calls him “a good nag.” The 60-year-old American documentary-maker does have a knack of badgering and cajoling even the most reluctant witnesses.

The evidence he assembled for his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line helped rescue a man wrongly convicted of murder from death row. In his Oscar-winning 2003 documentary The Fog of War, he managed to persuade the form er U.S. Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, to acknowledge on camera that “in order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.”

Now, Mr. Morris has tackled the Abu Ghraib scandal and those shocking photographs of Iraqis abused in the jail. Standard Operating Procedure, which he calls “a non-fiction horror movie,” investigates just how the Abu Ghraib photographs came to be taken, what they revealed, and how they were interpreted by the media. The movie, which has just won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival, is complex and ambivalent. At one level, this is the polemical documentary about the tragedy of the Iraq war that many people will be expecting. At another, it is a thoughtful and self-reflexive film essay, exploring what Mr. Morris calls “the irony of images” and the way photography both conveys and distorts truth.

“These images seem to show you Abu Ghraib, but they don’t really,” he says. “They show you a glimpse, but certainly not the entire place.”

This, he argues, is the paradox at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Yes, they are an expose — without them, we would not know about the horrors of the prison. After all, the U.S. authorities went to considerable lengths to cover up what was happening. But the photographs are also about concealment. “I am now really interested in how the photographs encouraged us not to investigate Abu Ghraib,” says Morris. “They create a barrier you don’t want to walk beyond.”

Standard Operating Procedure is not one of those grainy, shakily shot documentaries. Filmed in widescreen, it is a disconcertingly glossy affair. The re-creations — of snarling dogs terrifying prisoners, or of U.S. soldiers overpowering an inmate who has somehow got hold of a gun — would not look out of place in a Hollywood action movie. Meanwhile, there are hi-tech animations and graphics; and Danny Elfman’s music is not so different from his score for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When Janis Karpinski, head of the prison service in Iraq, or former Private First Class Lynndie England appear on screen in interviews, we see their faces in huge, high-definition close-up.

“I don’t believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation,” explains Mr. Morris. “I don’t think that if it was grainy and full of hand-held material, it would be any more truthful. Oddly enough, people don’t want truth. They want to avoid having to think. If anybody really thinks that truth and style are one and the same — that if you obey a set of documentary conventions truth magically pops out — well, that’s not the way it works.”

Mr. Morris, speaking in a Berlin hotel, is used to asking questions, not answering them, but he is gracious and humorous. He was told many times during the making of Standard Operating Procedure that he was “much too late” and that Abu Ghraib was no longer a news story. He disagrees, and takes issue with the idea that the disgraced guards — the so-called “bad apples” he interviews in the documentary — should show more obvious evidence of remorse. His own attitude toward Lynndie England and others is far from hostile, and his film at times comes across as strangely sympathetic. “I have a lot of trouble interviewing people I don’t like,” he says. “Maybe I have to like them [the guards] — but I do like them. I am certainly engaged by them. I am not interviewing them because I want to pass judgment. There are all these odd ideas that you do an interview to get someone to confess or apologise. It is almost a Christian idea of the interview. Because I don’t do that, I think I make people angry.”

Some of that anger was evident during the press conference for Standard Operating Procedure when Mr. Morris was accused of humiliating the victims shown in the photographs all over again. The film-maker tried to track down these detainees but says it was “difficult to impossible.” Instead, we have the guards, or at least the ones Mr. Morris was allowed to speak to. They are more articulate and forceful than their caricatured images in the media might suggest. Mr. Morris also argues that, had circumstances been different, Sabrina Harman — who caused horror and outrage after being photographed beside the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner with her thumbs up and smiling — could just as easily have won a Pulitzer prize for being among the team who actually took these shots and, in turn, let the world know what was going on. Intriguingly, although no one could ever excuse Ms Harman’s facial expression in the photograph, that inane grin never seems to leave her face throughout the movie; it almost starts to look like a nervous tic.

“One thing is absolutely clear to me,” says Morris. “Without the photograph, we would have no knowledge of this murder. She stumbled on this. She was not involved in the crime. It is one of the strange things about this story. If you ask me if these pictures are of torture, I would say yes. Yet, they are defined by the U.S. military as ‘standard operating procedure’. You’re talking about a world that has gone mad.”

Mr. Morris has been constantly asked why he didn’t interview senior officers other than Janis Karpinski. He simply says he spoke to whoever he could get and “who could inform the story around the pictures.” Like his subjects in Standard Operating Procedure, Mr. Morris is a complex and contradictory figure. One moment, he talks of his film as if it were a Susan Sontag-like exploration of “the attraction of atrocity photography” and morbid voyeurism; the next, as if it were a campaign tool for Barack Obama (whom he is supporting), and a way of expressing his dismay at U.S. foreign policy. Abu Ghraib “represents America in its policies,” he says. “The country, in its foreign policy, has gone stark raving mad.” He talks about the cloud of depression President George W. Bush’s re-election cast over him: “We’ve gone through seven years of what seems to be an unending horror show.”

One principle stays sacred to Mr. Morris. When he shows the photographs, they are always displayed as they were taken — never cropped to maximise the horror and conceal any context, as he says the media often did. Even so, Mr. Morris argues it is a mistake to believe the images can be fully trusted. He quotes the writer Philip Gourevitch, with whom he is collaborating on a book version of Standard Operating Procedure. “Philip is very fond of talking about the line from Othello when Othello demands of Iago, ‘Bring me the ocular proof.’ Well, he gets his ocular proof, but it doesn’t serve him well. It is no proof at all!

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