Film on Abu Ghraib: Making sense of war

Two years ago, Chris Bachelder published U.S.!, a novel that centred on a gothic and arresting image: In some dystopian version of our own crazy world, the body of the great muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair is repeatedly unearthed and resurrected, only to be assassinated (again and again) by people who are not fans of his accusatory style.

Take it as a metaphor for the anxiety that must haunt many of America's best documentarians. Their films keep coming. The world remains the same. Perhaps no one cares. The US box office returns — generally infinitesimal by popular or commercial standards — seem to prove it.

Documentary makers, including those passionately animated by the war in Iraq, will not necessarily admit to such a dark view of their profession.

As the war falls off the front pages and the national attention turns to domestic politics and economic pain in America, the documentary world is still tenaciously parsing a war that is in a strange, cultural holding pattern: absent but present, still playing out somewhere, but mostly unseen in the foreground of the media's fickle obsessions.

Yet in two new, high-profile films — one about torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and the other about the excruciating life of a wounded soldier — you sense a meta-level awareness of what it is like to make films in the shadow of the Great Disconnect.

Perhaps you can feel it in the strange way that the war is beginning to feel increasingly like a distant, historical event in two very different films. In Ellen Spiro's Body of War (co-produced and co-directed by Phil Donahue), a video of the October 2002 congressional debate on the Iraq war resolution has that familiar-but-foreign quality of things now slipping into the near past.

Politicians hector each other, with faces less wrinkled, hair less grey than they have today. Names that were once so familiar you felt as if they were family are slipping into the realms of amnesia.

The urgency of the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — announced by the president and parroted by the Congress — feels odd, too, not just because no WMDs were found but because the very foundations of the war have shifted so many times over the past half-decade. The video footage in Spiro's film, now in limited release, feels like the war's baby pictures.

In Standard Operating Procedure, a new look at Abu Ghraib from the legendary documentarian Errol Morris (Fog of War), we have our first serious meeting — face to face, in sustained interviews — with the villains of the torture scandal.

Lynndie England, whom we met before the invention of YouTube, when Saddam Hussain was still alive and Donald Rumsfeld was running the war, finally speaks.

The pixie with a naked man on her leash sounds bitter and her face is older and plumper than in the famous photographs that damned her to prison. Now she wants to set the record straight.

Both films deal with the question of accountability. Both are aimed at a general audience, which the filmmakers hope will not be a partisan one. Donahue says he determined his film would be short, to-the-point and not preachy.

“My gold standard was 85 minutes because that is how long the March of the Penguins is.'' The film, a powerful mix of cinema verite and political confrontation, came in at 87 minutes.

Morris's film, which opens next month, is more intellectual, more a matter of argument, a rumination on what pictures mean and how they function. But the score is by Danny Elfman, tunesmith to the Batman franchise and composer of the theme of The Simpsons.

And the glitzy graphics are first-rate. But it is also not too daring to predict that neither film will, in any directly measurable way, satisfy the craving for greater accountability that many in their largely antiwar audience so passionately desire.

And this basic fact will become part of the way the films are assessed. It is a phenomenon that needs defining: The Iraq war is being processed almost out of sight, in a cinematic unconscious that may not influence mainstream thinking about the war for years.

In different ways, both these films seem aware of the dilemma. Body of War attempts to cut through the silence with emotion. It is a brutally direct film, simply structured, juxtaposing an unflinching look at the paralysed body of Tomas Young with the war resolution debate that ultimately led to his trauma.

As members of Congress, including Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton, are heard parroting the talking points of the administration, a roll call of the Senate vote is edited into the narrative.

Young, who was shot in the early days of the war, talks about catheters, Viagra and depression. We see his dizziness and cold sweats, his medicine and his failing marriage, while a voice-over intones his doom: “Mr Kyl: aye, Ms Landrieu: aye, Mr Lieberman: aye ...''

Body of War fights to be heard by turning up the volume. It uses the primal democratic reward-and-punish system to the point of tendentiousness — a vote for Hillary is a vote to paralyse young men such as Tomas Young — to ask the stock question of so many documentaries: Where is the outrage?

But it also uses a rhetorical technique that has proved so astonishingly unproductive in the present political discourse that one can only wonder at its continued survival.

This is split-screen argument: Here is how they voted, here is what that vote meant. It is an argument for accountability that comes from within the same political and rhetorical world that has so effectively banished real accountability.

Morris's Standard Operating Procedure takes a different approach, fleshing out in detail a story that most viewers who haven't followed the Abu Ghraib scandal will know only in bits and pieces.

Using images from cameras that all were clicking inside the prison when the abuse occurred, Morris meticulously reconstructs the where, when and how behind the images of torture and abuse that shocked the world when they emerged in 2004.

Story with a moral

For Jumana Mousa, advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, Morris's film is important for filling in motivation and context behind the still photographs.
“It is very different to think about what if I was a 19-year-old there and all the people in charge are telling me this is what to do,'' Mousa says.

For her, the potentially explosive details in the film are the questions that remain unanswered. Why was Sabrina Harman, a young soldier who is seen smiling and giving a thumbs-up over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner, prosecuted while no one has yet been punished for killing the man in the photograph?

And why was the CIA moving prisoners into Abu Ghraib “off the books'' in blatant disregard of international standards of conduct in a war zone?

Morris, however, plays down the possibility of igniting new controversy.

Rather, he is interested in the world of information that falls outside the frames of the photographs that sparked the scandal. Throughout his film, he returns to the images — of men strapped to bed frames, men menaced by dogs, men piled into pyramids — to ask, almost prosaically, how did they get there?

It becomes clear that many of the photographs have been misinterpreted, that not everyone captured within the frame is equally guilty and that the low-level soldiers convicted because of the photographs were participating in techniques and abuses that predated their arrival at Abu Ghraib.

By the end of his film, there is the framework of a powerful argument: For the Bush administration, Abu Ghraib was primarily a photographic problem, not a torture problem, or a Geneva Conventions problem, or a chain-of-command problem.

Morris compares his new film with one of his most celebrated earlier works, The Thin Blue Line, from 1988, which helped overturn a conviction in a Texas murder case.

The comparison, he says, is based on the research involved.
“When Thin Blue Line came out, I would hear again and again from people that this is a movie that got a guy out of prison,'' he says.

But, he argues, it wasn't the film, it was the research, the documentation upon which it was based that made the difference. So too Standard Operating Procedure, which avoids the confrontational, split-screen argument that could be made — that the Bush administration says it doesn't torture even as it becomes clear that torture was the de facto policy at Abu Ghraib — in favour of reconstructing events, limning character and casting doubt on much of what is taken for granted about Abu Ghraib.

Morris, Donahue and Spiro all claim that their films are not political.

“It's a story about love and hope,'' Spiro says. “It's a heroic journey and those are things that have nothing to do with your political stance.''

And Morris, whose camera allows the villains of Abu Ghraib to explain themselves and demonstrate conscience, has produced a film that humanises the torturers — which may offend and flummox viewers from across the political spectrum.

The filmmakers' claims to political neutrality will very likely be disputed and the films will certainly be politicised. From a financial point of view, the makers of both documentaries may get lucky, drawing attention and driving people to the box office.

But five years into the war, with public opinion decidedly sour on the subject, these films may be better situated on an emotional spectrum than a political one.

As a culture, Americans are beginning to face the fact of the war rather as a patient faces an illness. It is the stages of grief they are in, and Errol Morris, with his more dispassionate and nuanced film, is a little farther along than the cry of Spiro and Donahue.