ERROL MORRIS

The man behind Abu Ghraib's reenactment

By ROB TURBOVSKY

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The overdue Academy Award win for The Fog of War, his 2003 documentary on LBJ Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, is really the least of Errol Morris' remarkable achievements in his one-of-a-kind career. The documentarian's work has exonerated a man wrongfully convicted of murder (The Thin Blue Line), journeyed inside the mind of Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), and reinvented talking head movies as engrossing art. Morris' newest film is Standard Operating Procedure, a disturbing and revealing probe of the Abu Ghraib photographs.

MANY OF YOUR FILMS FEATURE SLOW-MOTION REENACTMENTS. WHY DO YOU USE THEM?

I'll hear a word in an interview. Robert McNamara will start talking about automobile safety, padded dashboards, collapsible steering wheels. He tells me a story about how he dropped skulls down a stairwell at Cornell. I hear the line, I like the line and I reenact it. It has some strange visual power in its own right. It's strangely suggestive. It's ironic, because, I remember thinking at the time, McNamara—even when he's trying to save lives—is dropping things from the sky. It's taking you into some odd place. It's not taking you into some real scene. It's taking you into an idea.

It's hard to know how you reconstruct the past, in a movie or anywhere else for that matter. I've pointed out that interviews are reenactments, in some very real sense. You're asking someone to re-enact an event in the past with words—an event in the past that they know now from memory. So, it's all a tool.

IN A NEW YORK TIMES BLOG, YOU WRITE THAT WE SHOULDN'T ASK WHETHER A PHOTOGRAPH IS TRUE OR FALSE BUT RATHER "TRUE OR FALSE IN REGARD TO WHAT?" WHERE IS THAT IDEA IN THIS FILM?

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I don't think photographs per se have truth value ... Photographs provide evidence, absolutely. To say that a photograph is neither true nor false does not say that a photograph has no evidentiary value. It certainly does. The question is, evidence of what?

The impulse [behind this film] was I think that photographs are very interesting and odd. And, I asked this simple question: Why've the photographs been taken? What did the people taking them think they were doing? What's really shown in the photographs? Is our conception of what they are a reflection of what actually happened or some groupthink that's completely divorced from reality?

IS EVERYTHING NOW UP FOR DEBATE?

I think it's a really big problem. As newspapers decline, as the blogosphere grows by leaps and bounds, political discourse seems to be endless posturing and arguing, based on nothing. Someone has to remember that independent of left and right is a world where you can actually find things out, if you bother to look.

One of the things that scares me about the torture debate, by the way, is that there's no real way to win the torture debate. Someone could say, "I don't think democracies should be involved in torturing people. Has no place in our society. Blah blah blah." Another person comes up with some cockamamie scenario, "Ticking nuclear bomb set to go off at such-and-such an hour." I find it utterly dreadful. First of all, I don't think that the central issue is torture at all. The central issue is what kind of a society we want to have in this country. Right now, we have a society that's deeply polarized. People are semi-hysterical, I might add, including myself. There seems to be a paucity of any kind of rational discourse. And the whole government doesn't seem to be working. It's a very odd time. It seems very different to me than Vietnam. I can't quite put my finger on it.

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