April 25, 2008 08:00PM EDT

Film Junkie Reports: Errol Morris, Abu Ghraib, and Werner Herzog's shoe

My first thought at the Tribeca Film Festival was that the world has been blessed by the loss of Werner Herzog’s shoe. The story, by now, has been passed down enough to virtually become a myth, but it goes that the famous German director came in contact with a brash young fellow by the name of Errol Morris who was so brazen in his boasts of his filmmaking prowess that Herzog, the elder and wiser man, vowed to eat his shoe if Morris ever actually got off his duff and made a movie. This had the right effect, and the result was Morris’s masterfully bizarre Gates of Heaven (1978), a documentary investigating a California pet cemetery, and a short little piece in which Herzog does, indeed, eat his shoe.

Last night I attended the New York premiere of Errol Morris’s latest film, the much-anticipated Standard Operating Procedure. The film is an investigation of the photographs taken at the now notorious military prison at Abu Ghraib. As a documentarian, Morris was interested not only in the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners but also in the mentality of those who carried it out, particularly in their desire to record their behavior in pictures. Rather than taking a sweeping look at the justice and injustice of the Iraq War in its totality, Standard Operating Procedure takes an in-depth look at one individual moment in the conflict. By doing so it makes the Abu Ghraib scandal into a microcosm of the current administration’s entire foreign policy. 

Much has already been written about the film, which opens today, including an excellent piece in the March 24 New Yorker and Morris’s ongoing blog at The New York Times, so I’d like to just say a few words about the discussion that took place after the film. With this screening the Tribeca Film Festival launched a laudable new series called Conversations in Cinema, wherein filmmakers take the stand to discuss their work with the audience. Here are just a couple of thoughts I took away from the discussion:

Morris said that in conducting interviews, you should be constantly surprised by what the interviewee has to say. One instance he cited was when the man who investigated the scandal indicated that the infamous picture of a hooded man (“Gilligan”) with a bag over his head and wires on his outstretched hands did not indicate torture but, in fact, standard operating procedure.

Late into the process of making the film, Morris realized that Standard Operating Procedure is, in a way, the reverse of his last film, Oscar® winner The Fog of War, in that one looks at the military from the top down, the other from the bottom up. The film I kept thinking of was Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. In both cases Morris profiled people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time but ultimately weren’t the ones responsible for the crimes for which they went to prison. His current intent, he stated, is not to completely exonerate the military personnel present at Abu Ghraib, but to show, at least indirectly, that the chain of responsibility went all the way up to the top tiers of the Pentagon and the White House; hence the title of the film.

There was, of course, much more said, and it was an engaging and fitting way to kick off this year’s festival and the Conversations series. Like Night and Fog or The Sorrow and the Pity, Standard Operating Procedure may not be popcorn-munching fare, but it is an engaging and important film that essentially every concerned American should see.