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After making history by opening the 2008 Berlinale with Scorsese’s Stones documentary "Shine A Light", Oscar-winning director Errol Morris’s "Standard Operating Procedure" was the first documentary to enter the competition of the film festival – and ended up with a Silver Bear on top of that. Just in time for the extensive coverage of the US Presidential Election and a media onslaught that seems to be intent on keeping the Iraq war under wraps when faced with an economic crisis and the bafflement that is Sarah Palin, SOP manages to serve as a reminder to a world that is too quick to forget the ongoing war by focusing on the infamous pictures of abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel in Abu Ghraib. The story broke in the spring of 2004 and led to a public outrage and subsequent apology by George W. Bush before it was pushed back from everyone’s consciousness after the apparently guilty parties got sentenced. Out of sight is out of mind, literally.
Only, it’s never as easy as that and the question of ultimate guilt is one of many that the documentary manages to raise. It’s a big topic, but Morris decided to focus on the people and photographs, not the media frenzy and trials, and tells his story through interviews with most of the involved soldiers, including Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl and Javal Davis amongst others. These interviews are intercut with the photographs themselves, some actual video footage and dramatic re-enactments that range from perversely beautiful to highly uncomfortable due to the extreme close-ups chosen most of the time, filling out the frame and making it impossible not to look - almost taunting us in the way they force us to look. Morris lets the interviews speak for themselves for the most part and viewer reaction in the cinema included everything from laughter over shock to disbelieving head shakes. The interviews themselves don’t really manage to shed any new light on what actually happened and how it could happen in the first place, though one may argue that that may not the ultimate goal of the film in the end. It’s a bit like watching footage from the Nuremberg trials. The excuses and ways of blaming anyone, everyone else are familiar and along the worn-out path of “I was only following orders.” or, in this case, “I never know what to do with my hands in a photograph so I just gave the thumbs-up.” Who’s being lied to – the audience or the people involved in it all?
This is a world without John Wayne swooping in and standing for everything that is supposedly “good” in America. This is a world without clear-cut heroes and villains, irregardless of what the media is trying to tell us in a “with us or against us” rhetoric. So we turn to the authorities and unsurprisingly, the most damning interview comes from former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski who was in charge of Iraqi prisons at the time of the abuse and is the only interviewee who was in a higher position on the chain of command. She manages to open up the frame and hint at the bigger picture behind it all, with the chilling message that Abu Ghraib was less of a singular event and more of an emblematic problem. The difference of course is that, for this instance, we have the photos to prove it. Or do we? This is where "Standard Operating Procedure" is so powerful. It opens and closes with photographs of a sunset as seen from Abu Ghraib, yet, symbolically, we never do go outside of the prison. It’s all in the framing and that thought runs like a silent commentary through the film and makes the interviews themselves take a back seat to the actual pictures.. What’s in a picture? Does a photo show the truth or is it merely a representation of a part of the truth? We’d be inclined to believe the former, the idea that an actual photograph is a true depiction of actual events. But seeing on screen how some of the widely publicized photos were cropped, leaving out another guilty party, the truth is, at best, highly questionable. And looking at SOP, one question remains – why where the people who where punished actually punished? On an obvious level, it’s striking how it’s mainly the low-level serviceman and -women who had the finger pointed at them, disregarding the command structure and overall construct of prisoner interrogation going on in probably every single US controlled prison. I don’t think anyone can delude themselves into thinking that it was Privates and Sergeants like Lynndie and Graner who came up with the torture and inhumane treatment of these prisoners as documented by the pictures from Abu Ghraib. If anything, Morris’s documentary unearths a disturbing sense of this being “normal”, aka standard operating procedure in times of war on terror or whatever other catchphrase we may use for it. No, the sense prevails that the people who were punished were punished less for what they did or didn’t do, and more for the fact that they took the incriminating pictures and “starred” in them. The true crime, in military and government eyes, seems to be less the mistreatment of prisoners and more the fact that actual evidence of it was allowed to see the light of day – showcased in the film through the death of a prisoner and the person committing that crime getting away while the person in the picture with the damning evidence did get sentenced. The crime was not in what happened, apparently. It was in recording of what happened and letting that record become public, tarnishing the world’s view of the US military and by that, the US as a country. A country and government apparently condoning these kinds of actions. Sure, sentencing Lynndie and Graner to prison terms does look like dealing with the events, on the surface, and bringing those to blame to justice. But deep down, it’s punishing the messenger for the message and not the actual culprit behind it all. It’s less the act of torture and more the act of recording that torture that appears to be worthy of punishment, a development that, in this digital age, is more than just disturbing in all of its implications. And speaking of the digital age, I cannot help but point out an inherent irony of sorts. The documentary is produced by Sony Classic Pictures and in the film itself it’s pointed out how two of the three digicams used to record the main body of incriminating photographs were Sony cameras. Yet, on top of that, some of the staged recreations of events feature an extreme close-up of a camera snapping pictures, the logo plainly visible. And of course it turns out to be manufactured by Sony. So, “creative” product placement by a corporation with all the disturbing consequences or missed irony on the part of the filmmakers? Regardless of playing around with the idea of what a picture can and cannot show, the bigger picture emerging behind it all, not a snapshot on anyone’s camera, is where this documentary succeeds - combining interviews of people involved with the photographs themselves, making it clear that Lynndie et all are scapegoats. Guilty scapegoats, but still, despite all the photos we have and all the interviews that are shown, we only get to see that little frame in the middle of the big frame. The rest is, literally, in the dark. Images: © Sony Classic Pictures |
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