Errol Morris is a great documentary maker. Some might call him unrestrained and even melodramatic, but he is undeniably an intensely moving storyteller. From pet cemetery entrepreneurs (
Gates of Heaven) to Florida residents lopping off their limbs for insurance money (
Vernon, Florida) and a prize-winning film on Robert McNamara (
The Fog of War), among others, he continues to hold his audience spellbound while asking them excruciatingly uncomfortable questions.
Last weekend he appeared at an ‘In Person’ slot at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, ahead of a screening of his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure. The book of the same title, co-written with The Paris Review’s Philip Gourevitch, is currently making the rounds in Canongate’s editorial department.
The director’s talk revealed a streak of black humour wide as Texas and a long-held fascination with the bizarre. It was also a telling conversation about Morris as an obsessive researcher, and as an artist who imagines sequences of images inspired by a story’s quirk, then turns those concepts into great dramatisations of history. The Interrotron, Morris’s original invention for filming interviews, has put him in a league beyond many other directors; interviewees speak directly into a camera, on the lens of which, in the place where a teleprompter would go in a news studio environment, video feedback of Morris listening and asking questions appears. Partly, maybe, because they’re looking at his televised image instead of the director in person, subjects open up much less self-consciously; and because it looks like the speakers are staring straight out of the screen and into viewers’ eyes, the effect is personal and direct.
The Interrotron is key to manufacturing the effect of Standard Operating Procedure. The documentary is composed of interviews with the US soldiers involved in the prisoner-abuse cases at Abu Ghraib. The soldiers’ words and the filmed re-enactments of their stories communicate a stunning nightmare; scored by soundtrack maestro Danny Elfman, the mood of the film is terrifying in a way that is hard to put into words. Morris’s masterstroke, the humanising of Lynndie England (aka ‘Leash Girl’), is achieved so fully that you wonder if you ever considered her a monster in the first place. Sabrina Harman’s (‘Thumbs-up Girl’) letters to her wife describing the treatment of Arabs in the prison, complete with stick-figure diagrams of the worst incidents, are eye-opening to the extreme – it is incredible that they ever got past the army mail room. Most of all, the actual photographs taken within the prison, of the prisoners, provide dark proof of the torture and twisted laws that govern US military prisons in Iraq. Viewers are relentlessly faced with images they try not to catch sight of in everyday life, facts they’ve fantasised can’t be true, and most of all events they wish they could un-happen.
‘The world has gone completely insane,’ he told us, when asked what we can learn from the film about politics and the future.And his one-line mission statement for Standard Operating Procedure? ‘Well, I like to call it the feel-bad movie of the year.’ That almost, nearly does it justice.
