Errol Morris, 2008
Frederick Wiseman this is not. Nestled somewhere between effects-laden TVdocutainment and the awful personality-driven narratives of fucking Nick Broomfield (but nowhere actually near them) lies Errol Morris & The Interrotron. Whether you consider his super-stylised styles the epitome of created non-truth or the apex of fact-driven first-person revelation, one must volunteer that his tinkering with methodology and his consideration of subject is masterful, and in turning the art of interrogation on the original masters - Morris, here, investigating the prisoner torture and subsequent imagery that emerged from Abu Ghraib - he unveils one of this fascinating though supremely upsetting work’s sleeve-aces.
Ostensibly its own investigation into the investigation of the participants’ involvement with said imagery, it spends much time presenting us with proof of the evil that procedure made, leading to the shattering legal assertion that, actually, most of the images are often merely documents of military procedure, and therein lay his chief accusation: under the Bush regime’s war on terror, even basic military procedure is scandalous, and as Phillipa Hawker rightly asserts, there is at least as much power in the interrogative usage of the images – of the act itself - as there is in the subsequent images’ content.
Also, he has lately been pre-occupied with the nature of still imagery, particularly its relationship with the elastic affair of memory and, for far longer, has been pre-occupied with the notion of representation within the documentary structure, and both of these feed into one of Standard Operating Procedure’s other aces: it’s largely about horror film imagery, its thrust being that the horrific imagery that surfaced across the world in 2004 is the real deal; truly the true terror of so many lurid Saw’s and Hostel’s. Taking DP Robbie Richardson’s trademarked hot-ass highlights and shaping it into some arrestingly recreated re-enactments of most of the most controversial images (and scattering them amongst the nauseating originals), Morris slyly submerges us in the viewer’s contract; our role in the spectacle of cinema always one of participatory acceptance and, subsequently, the second-hand evolution stemming from such experience and the coping mechanisms that enable us to sleep that night, and the inference that these recreations are a narrative’s way of communicating the truth of these images speaks, awfully, to the strength and elasticity of human acceptance in the face of brutality.
Opens today at Cinema Nova.
