View image The animated banners, archived, are worth the price of admission alone...
Jonathan Lapper offers an inspired free-associative montage/meditation on the moving part of the movies at Cinema Styles, which you must see. It's called "Frames of Reference," a little under seven minutes long, and it marvelously (too marvelous for words, obviously) orchestrates cinematic motion and memories to Oliver Nelson's "Complex City." (If you suspect you're unfamiliar with the great jazz arranger, think "Stolen Moments" -- which might make a great subtitle for this reference-packed short subject.) My favorite transition: From "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" to "Citizen Kane." You'll see why.
And now, for fans of Richard Lester, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (and Leo McKern and Graham Stark and Norman Rossington...), my own movie reference: "Frames of Reference" is "The Tracking, Exploding, Kissing, Watching, Crashing, Throwing, Fainting, Dancing, Drinking, Flying, Falling Backwards Film," though not necessarily in that order. And that's not the half of it....
The cinema is Max Castle! At least, according to the pompous French scholar Victor Saint-Cyr in Theodore Roszak's spooky-satirical 1991 novel "Flicker," which I'm now in the middle of reading. (I didn't know when I started it, but Darren Aronovsky is reportedly working on a film version -- something that's now announced on the trade paperback cover.) Saint-Cyr proclaims that the fictitious Castle, obscure maker of seriously unclean sexploitation and horror films, "alone of all directors grasped the essential phenomenology of film. In the entire history of motion pictures, only he and Lefebvre have understood the technology so profoundly."
In one of the funniest chapters so far, Saint-Cyr pronounces himself the founder of a new film theory he calls Neurosemiology, which in essence posits that it's all about the flicker. The medium of cinema itself, alternating patterns of light and shadow, is a powerful form of mass hypnosis that alters the brain, quite independent of the images we think we see on the screen. One of Sant-Cyr's students, "a bushy-haired, tautly nerved young man" named Julien, "who smoked incessantly while he spoke and never once raised his eyes," offers an elucidation of the theory:
He seemed to be saying that in capitalist society there is an inherent tendency for the attention span of each successive generation to diminish as the experience of alienation increases, with the proletarian nervous system leading the way toward mental disintegration. New film and musical forms were pulverizing all content into tinier, more purely sensational fragments. Nothing with greater complexity than advertising copy could be understood even by privileged bourgeois youth. In movies intended for adolescent audiences, directors would soon be limiting each shot to a five-second duration at longest and then cutting back from there. [...]
At the current rate of accelerating perceptual shrinkage, Julien predicted that th adolescent generation of the year 2000 would have no attention span whatsoever, hence no capacity to absorb any message longer than a single cinematic flash frame in duration. Even one-line gags and slapstick comedy would be incomprehensible to them. If, for example, they were shown a classic pie-throwing scene from the early silent films, they wouldn't be able to recall, when the pie hit the face, where it had come from.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... "Speed Racer"! (And "Top Gun," for that matter, which was released five years before "Flicker" was published, and which made Ed Wood's movies look like masterpieces of classical storytelling continuity.)
Yes, it's an elaborate version of the jokes (and serious arguments) people have been making ever since the birth of MTV -- or, perhaps, since the opening shootout in Sam Peckinpah's now-40-year-old "The Wild Bunch." But look at Peckinpah's film now: Its astonishing grace and fluidity, the masterful eye for orchestrating chaos and isolating electrifying details in what could have been just a blur of motion, are more striking than ever. And, as you can see from the Average Shot Length database at Cinemetrics, many popular films of the 21st century already average under five seconds per shot: "The Departed" (3.2 seconds), "Dreamgirls" (2.5 seconds), "Casino Royale" (3.4 seconds), "Sweeney Todd" (4 seconds). On the other hand, some films have notably longer ASLs: "The Darjeeling Limited" (8.2 seconds), "There Will Be Blood" (13.5 seconds), "Paranoid Park" (16.5 seconds).
Fortunately, there's still plenty of time to study Neurosemiology, if you speak French....
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" tells you how to watch it in the first shot. Well, actually before the first shot, since the Paramount logo dissolves (as it did in "Raiders of the Lost Ark") from one mountain into another, so that it pokes into the movie for a few seconds. This time the twin peak is revealed to be embossed on a gong -- which establishes the retro-1930s "Oriental"-exoticism theme of the adventure, and kicks off Kate Capshaw's Cantonese "Anything Goes" musical number with a bang, beginning with the extended take that immediately follows.
For movie fans of all ages, this gong instantly evokes fond, resonant memories:
... of the famous logo for J. Arthur Rank, the British mogul who, as it happens, bought the famous Pinewood Studios in 1935, the same year in which "Temple of Doom" is set. The Rank organization (which included distribution and exhibition operations, as well as production facilities) put its gong on many of the most memorable British pictures of the era, including classics by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("Black Narcissus," "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "A Matter of Life and Death," "The Red Shoes") and David Lean ("Great Expectations," "Oliver Twist"), and some of the Ealing Studio comedies ("Kind Hearts and Coronets," "The Ladykillers").
... and of "Gunga Din," the spectacular action hit of 1939, with Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sam Jaffe, based the Rudyard Kipling poem, set in faraway India. (This also puts the film's attitude toward the mysterious "darker races" in proper Hollywood period-fantasy perspective.)
So, when Capshaw launches into Cole Porter's tongue-in-cheek nostalgia number ("In olden days a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / Now, heaven knows / Anything goes!"), Steven Spielberg's leading lady, and his film, are winking directly at the 1984 audience and inviting them to climb aboard a thrill ride through the movies, from Busby Berkeley musicals to boys' adventures like "Four Feathers" and "Gunga Din." Yes, it's dark. Did you ever go on "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" (the craziest, most hallucinogenic attraction ever at Disneyland), where you are sent on a spin through hell? That's dark. But the illusions only work in the dark.
My childhood friends and I spent many a Saturday afternoon watching (on basement TVs), and then re-enacting (on and around tree stumps and backyard picnic tables), perilous stunts involving savage blood-rituals, narrow escapes and (most of all) flaming pits of red-hot lava. What we accepted as family fun in the 1960s and 1970s became the basis for the PG-13 rating in the 1980s. Go figure.
For me, this most cinematically intoxicated/intoxicating of the Indiana Jones pictures (the flawlessly put-together mining car roller-coaster ride adapts gags -- involving a railroad switch, a large piece of lumber, a water tank -- from Buster Keaton!) towers above the others in the series. Like the "Star Wars" trilogy (there's only one trilogy), the "Indiana Jones" films reached their pinnacle in the second installment.
Whiplash: Indiana Jones and the Lowered Expectations
View image "Welcome to the Cannes Film Festival, kid."
"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" screened all over the world yesterday -- on a Sunday afternoon, roughly in synch with the gala unveiling of the picture at the Cannes Film Festival. The usual film-festival and press-screening review embargoes were promptly ignored, so although the movie opens May 22, many outlets ran full reviews on their websites immediately. Because... well, because they could, I suppose. Variety even posted a preview of the review that its reviewer was about to write, in case, after 19 years of anticipating the next "Indiana Jones" movie, you couldn't stand waiting one more minute while he took the time necessary to process and record his thoughts about the film he'd just seen. Not because he believed it was great or a disaster or even because he had anything in particular he wanted to say about it right away, but because... well, Daily Variety knew its readership simply could not do without knowing instantly that the movie "begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish." OK! Doesn't that just whet your appetite for the full-course review?
As Roger Ebert noted on his blog Monday, he saw the film in Chicago and loved it, but at the time he filed his review he suspected he might be going against the critical tide, if there was one:
Why did I think I would be in a minority? Because of what David Poland at Movie City News poetically described as "one idiot." As everybody knows, an exhibitor attended a closed-door screening last week, and filed a review with the Ain't It Cool News website. This single wrong-headed, anonymous review was the peg on which The New York Times based a breathless story on a negative early reaction to the film ["Indiana Jones Is Battling the Long Knives of the Internet"]. That story inspired widespread coverage: Were Spielberg and Lucas making a mistake by showing their film at Cannes? Would it turn out to be a fiasco like showing "The Da Vinci Code" there? The Code got terrible reviews, and only managed to gross something like $480 million dollars at the box office -- suggesting, if not to the Times, that even a negative reception at Cannes might not cut Indy off at the knees.
The Times story was laughable (written by former Los Angeles Times business reporter Michael Cieply, who knows better), but Daily Variety compounded the absurdity in a craven attempt to whip up some false drama about the movie -- I'm sorry, not about the movie, but about what could maybe possibly hypothetically happen if, say, the Cannes reception was deemed to be less-than-orgasmic. They ran a picture with their "Indiana Jones" story, too -- a still from "The Da Vinci Code." (Sub-head: "Spielberg, Lucas aim to avoid 'Da Vinci' scenario." Make your own joke here.)
On Sunday, Indiana Jones faces a challenge more terrifying and dangerous than anything he's encountered onscreen: the Cannes crowd.
The jet-lagged, overtired, cynical mob of critics and executives decimated "The Da Vinci Code" when it debuted here two years ago, with festgoers giving terrible reviews to the film -- and even to Sony's expensive after-party.
Since then, no Hollywood film of that magnitude has screened for the fest crowd.
Wow! No Hollywood film of such magnitude was shown... last year! It was one whole Cannes Film Festival ago since such a thing happened. I mean, in 2007 all they had was "Ocean's Thirteen" and "Zodiac" and "No Country For Old Men" -- Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Pacino, Soderberg, Gyllenhaal, Fincher, Coen, Jones... no big commercial Hollywood talent there. (To be fair, "Ocean's Thirteen" was only the third film in that modern franchise. We'll see what happens if they make "Ocean's Fourteen" in 2027. How cynical will Cannes attendees be by then?)
So, to boldly present the world premiere of the fourth "Indiana Jones" movie at Cannes must have represented a considerable risk, right? Because "jet-lagged, overtired, cynical" mobs of critics and executives are so cranky they can't be expected to like big, glamorous movies at the Cannes Film Festival, can they?
And yet... they didn't hate it. "‘Indiana Jones’ debut survives Cannes critics" read the headline over the AP story at MSNBC.com: "The film received none of the derisive laughter or catcalls that mounted near the end of the first press screening for 'Da Vinci Code.'" That's right, the big news is that derisive laughter and catcalls were not heard. And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Can it be that "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" has now become some people's idea of an underdog because it wasn't booed at Cannes, as people who had no reason to think it would nevertheless unreasonably speculated it might? Is it The Poor Little Mega-Sequel That Could? Is it possible for people, who have already decided to see it or not to see it anyway, to make up their own minds about it when they do? (Yes, those are rhetorical questions, and I don't really want to know the answers.) The fact remains that even phony, umpteenth-generation "buzz" based on no verifiable evidence can spread until it colors people's perceptions of a movie they haven't yet seen -- or even affect the way they see it when and if they do. (Recall earlier discussions of the "Juno" backlash [backlash] and backlash-backlash [backlash].)
On a smaller scale, something similar has happened with "Speed Racer" -- though at least the "hey, it wasn't so bad" responses were based on personal expectations (those marketing department nightmares known as people's "gut feelings") -- or seeing reviews (or review ratings) -- and not rooted in speculation about what somebody else's opinions might be in the future (like the review date). This summary of viewer responses by Peter Sciretta at slashfilm.com is typical:
I saw the film with a group of five people, and the resulting opinions were across the board. One of the guys expected to hate it and ended up loving it. And for another one of my friends, it was the complete opposite. Speaking for myself, I was expecting very little going into the screening, and I had a lot more fun than I ever could have expected.
Yep. That's what happens. Some politicians have based their entire careers on setting low expectations, just so they look better by comparison. It works.
You know, of course, that none of this has anything to do with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," yes? I haven't seen it. I chose not to attend my local Sunday screening for various reasons (mainly because I felt no personal or professional need to see it immediately, though I will probably get around to it eventually), but I believe Roger Ebert is sincere in his enthusiasm for the film, just as I believe Manohla Dargis is honest about her assessment when she writes (in her Cannes coverage -- not an official New York Times review) that the "pumped-up crowd... cheered more enthusiastically during the opening credits than it did at the end":
Whether the audience was disappointed or just wrung out by the two hours of chase sequences and noise is probably less relevant than that so many of us dutifully filled the theater, which of course is the scenario that Paramount Pictures hopes to replicate worldwide when the movie opens across the globe on Thursday. I’ll have more to say on the movie then, by which point it will already have been thoroughly masticated, spit out and chewed all over again in the media that has already sunk its little teeth into Indy’s tired body with early negative notices. I was bored out of my mind while watching the movie, which makes me think that Steven Spielberg was terribly bored while directing it. But that’s a germ of an idea that I would like to actually contemplate for a few days.
I know what she means. Rare indeed is the contemporary action or epic/fantasy spectacular that doesn't bore me out of my crystal skull (exceptions: "The Bourne Supremacy," "The Descent," "Casino Royale" come to mind -- but very little else, really, since 1981's "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior," which made "Raiders" look like a Tonka toy.)
Now, I think Spielberg is a movie genius (and "Close Encounters" and "E.T." are masterpieces about the language of film, written in light), but the idea of him making a fourth "Indiana Jones" movie does not excite me even a little bit. One of the masters of the medium has now devoted roughly one sixth of his feature-film output to Indiana Jones movies. Meanwhile he could have been exploring new territory, as he did with "A.I.," "Always," "Munich"... Spielberg is reportedly doing a "Tintin" adaptation next, and that I want to see. He hasn't already made one three times before and, as an admirer of his work, I appreciate that.
View image Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars...
"One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years... This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of no reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims. Hence, the film is likely to inspire even more heavy thinking on the part of cultural theorists than 'The Matrix' did."
* * *
"A lot of fluorescent, 7-Eleven-tinted images flash by, any of which could easily be removed or re-arranged without significantly disrupting the film's continuity, because it has none. If you can determine the spatial relationship between Speed's Mach 5 (or Mach 6) and any other race car for more than a few consecutive seconds, then good for you. As on the TV series, the pictures don't seem to move so much as repeat -- movement with no momentum."
* * *
"'Speed Racer' is not a feature film in any conventional sense... Whatever information that passes from your retinas to your brain during 'Speed Racer' is conveyed through optical design and not so much through more traditional devices such as dialogue, narrative, performance or characterization."
* * *
"Alas, this radicalization of film language, while certainly impressive to behold, yields heretofore un-dreamed of levels of narrative incoherence, but hey, not every experiment succeeds."
* * *
"One of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's '1900.'"
* * *
""Speed Racer" is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products."
* * *
Three of the above quotations are taken from a three-star review of "Speed Racer." The other three are from a one-and-a-half-star review. Can you tell which is which? Perhaps the tone gives something away, but the descriptions of the movie, what it does and how it works, are strikingly similar. Clearly both of these critics saw the same movie, although one found the experience less daring, less exhilarating, than the other.
My family and friends are discerning movie-goers (we like all genres; we're down with the AFI 100). And we all, family and friends alike, thoroughly enjoyed "Speed Racer." It was a bit cheesy but I loved it as an old "SR" cartoon fan. My kids (16, 19) never really saw "SR" but enjoyed it just as well. My 16-year-old is a "chick flick" teenage girl and she raved about it! What I'm asking is, why do critics pan such movies? Isn't there a place for simple enjoyment and entertainment? Do you think that critiques of films may not always have the most useful criteria for judgment?
I am reminded of the episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in which Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) accidentally reveals to the public that her husband's boss, TV comedian Alan Brady (Carl Reiner), is bald. In the end, he says he's a little relieved after all that he won't have to keep up the pretense. So, Laura suggests, it's actually good that she slipped up, right? Alan is amazed. Not only do I have to forgive her, he exclaims in wonderment, I have to thank her for it! That's kind of the way I feel about comments like the above. It's not enough that a critic accurately describes what he or she sees in the movie. That's almost immaterial to some people. They just get upset when the reviewer doesn't like it as much as they did! (To the Answer Man correspondent -- to everybody, actually -- I recommend this review.)
Star ratings -- the bane of many a critics' livelihood but not mine -- are fascinating to me. They color everything a reviewer who uses (or is required to use) them writes about a movie. Add or subtract one star (especially if it changes the "recommended" status between two and three stars on a four-star scale) and readers will interpret the same review quite differently. More will take issue with the star rating than over anything in the review itself, because they assume the stars themselves have intrinsic meaning, independent of anything the writer has written.
When I conducted my Funny Games Experiment (which was neither disingenuous nor premeditated until I had finished writing the review -- and thank you all, once again, for participating, whether you knew it or not), I chose to give that movie half a star because... well, because that was part of the experiment. Yes, I think the film is a total failure. I believe its premise is not only invalid but deplorable, smug and naive -- all three at once. Not only that, it's Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his own worst film. I'm more angry at him for wasting his time than for wasting mine, the way I would be if Martin Scorsese decided to spend the next couple years doing a meticulous shot-for-shot remake of his own "Cape Fear" remake.
But, come on, "Funny Games" is a film by Michael Haneke, one of the world's major directors, so how bad could it be, right? Not bad enough, I decided, to give it zero stars -- which would have been too much like the kind of transparently cheap provocational stunt that I felt the movie was trying to pull.
In an indispensable piece on the current state of movie critics and criticism ("In critical condition"), David Bordwell writes:
If I say that I think that "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort" is a good film, I might just be saying that I like it. But not necessarily. I can like films I don’t think are particularly good. [...]
The point is that evaluation encompasses both judgment and taste. Taste is what gives you a buzz. There’s no accounting for it, we’re told, and a person’s tastes can be wholly unsystematic and logically inconsistent. [...]
Taste is distinctive, part of what makes you you, but you also share some tastes with others. We teachers often say we’re trying to educate students’ tastes. True, but we should admit that we’re trying to broaden their tastes, not necessarily replace them with better ones. Elsewhere on this site ["The adolescent window"] I argue that tastes formed in adolescence are, fortunately, almost impossible to erase. But we shouldn’t keep our tastes locked down. The more different kinds of things we can like, the better life becomes.
I enjoy discussing, even arguing, about films with people whose taste or judgment differs from my own. It doesn't necessarily change anything, but I want to try as hard as I can to understand and be understood, to listen to what they're saying and to push and refine and articulate my own observations and feelings. (That's why I think writing in a blog format -- that allows reader comments and follow-up posts -- is more rewarding and more challenging than writing for print publication -- although, for me, the improvisational aspect of blogging and newspaper reviewing on a quick turnaround are comparably appealing.)
Many times I have said that I'm not terribly interested in a critic's "verdict" on a film, or where they splat on the TomatoMeter™. All that matters is what the writer has to say. Somebody's star rating doesn't affect the quality of their review any more than it does the quality of the movie I've seen. (Imagine: "Well, that was an unimaginative and unilluminating review that told me nothing about the film except that the writer has an opinion about it. But she was absolutely right about it -- it really is a three-and-a-half-star movie!")
To me, the star rating is the maraschino cherry on the sundae. I have no feelings one way or another about maraschino cherries. But if it's there, fine, I'll swallow it -- and it won't affect my experience of the sundae one bit.
Coming soon: A closer look at what's on the screen in "Speed Racer," regardless of whether somebody likes it or not.
P.S. The first, fourth and fifth excerpts above are from Glenn Kenny's review. The middle two are from mine. And I think 1.5 stars is generous. When it comes to stars, I'm not usually disposed to generosity, experience having shown me that about 80 percent of all movies are below average....)
View image Lesson for the kiddies: Don't take Turkish Delight from an icy Tilda Swinton and don't be fooled into thinking this seemingly innocent underground-dwelling creature has your best interests at heart. Got that?
... Character is not destiny in the "Narnia" pictures. Destiny is. Which creates some moral and dramatic dilemmas for the viewer. With all the dramatis personae Lewis has crammed into his filagreed fantasies, few of the players have the opportunity to leave much of an impression, or acquire significance, beyond what the tale demands of them. (Who's that badger again?) They do what is asked of them -- in the story and by the story. And once we realize that even the leads are predestined to play their parts in fulfilling prophecies, and that all they have to do to meet the requirements is to abide by (or guess) whatever certain mystical authority figures want them to do, the tension deflates a bit.
The moral options, as set forth in the movies so far, are fairly clear-cut: believe the beautiful lion and the friendly beavers; don't trust the sepulchral ice queen bearing Turkish Delight or the hideous dark demons extolling the forces of hate. What could be simpler? A child could do it. And what kind of lesson does that communicate to the child who can? That it's easy to tell right from wrong? Not a wise maxim.
What responsibilities do the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve (how does that work?) bear for their own decisions, and the consequences of their actions, if everything can eventually be set right by some deus ex machina -- the healing properties of supernatural potions, or the corrective powers of magic lion's breath? What becomes of free will, of meaning itself?
In Steve Erickson's novel "Zeroville," a young man with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun" imprinted on his shaved head arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Raised a strict Calvinist (not coincidentally like Paul Schrader, writer of "Taxi Driver"), his hunger for, and obsession with, movies has a religious fervor to it.
He develops protective feelings for a young girl in the Hollywood fast-lane (echoes of Travis Bickle and Iris). He takes her to the Fine Arts for a revival of "A Place in the Sun." The audience laughs at some of the "dated" moments, and the girl (Isadora, who goes by Zazi -- as in "... dans le métro" by Louis Malle, 1960?) thinks it's silly. He is devastated. But one night she watches the movie, alone, on TV. It is a revelation to her.
"The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren't they? Isn't that part of the point of movies -- you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be that different when you don't watch it with anyone else. And that movie... [...]
"That's a movie you see alone and it gets into you. I've been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There's nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply f---ked up, yeah... but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know?
"I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater -- what are they going to do with a movie like that? There's too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it's just you alone. It just seems... radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it's, you know... a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you're one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can't be naked like that with strangers, you can't even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you're finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs... so I just couldn't sleep. That movie's like a ghost. Watch it and you become the thing or person that it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else's."
Yes. Some movies are too personal to be shared with a crowd. You can't let down your guard and give yourself over to them if you're surrounded by a mob of strangers. Sure, at home you may be tempted to take (remote) control of the movie. Or you may become distracted by light or sound (turn off the lights, switch off the phone).
And in the theater you may be distracted by people eating, talking, texting, heckling, getting up to go to the restroom -- or even by the damn exit signs (some are so bright), or the damn twinkly aisle lighting that stays on for the whole movie and leads you to the nearest emergency exit (keep in mind it may be behind you), or the rumbling and hissing of the heating/air conditioning, or the traffic outside or underneath you (people who've survived Southern California earthquakes may wish to avoid the subway-Sensurround of the Angelika multiplex in NYC), or the soundtrack from the movie next door, or the general stinkiness of the people, seats, and floors in your vicinity, and the various disinfectant and deodorizing treatments that have or have not been applied to them...
All those things take their toll in some way. And Zazi is right. For all the talk about the importance of seeing movies in a theater, with an audience ("The way they were meant to be seen!" as the marketeers like to put it), some movies work better -- are deeper, richer, stronger -- in private. It's a scientific fact (he said, more or less quoting "Gregory's Girl" again) that in a familiar environment, our brains don't bother to process much of what's around us. We already know it; we don't need to take it all in again, to be constantly aware (even on a subconscious level) of the surroundings, checking for threats or intruders (or violations of our personal space by strangers in close proximity). Perhaps that leaves us more susceptible in some senses, allowing us the freedom to enter into a movie's world, or to allow it to more deeply penetrate our (un-)consciousness. I don't know. It just feels that way to me sometimes.
Even when going to see movies in a theater, I prefer to see them by myself -- to go to the "old people's matinees," as a friend puts it, where the house is more likely to be sparsely populated, and to not have to think about what the friend next to me is making of it. If you've ever had the experience of suddenly feeling like you're seeing the movie through the eyes of a companion, you know how distracting and dispiriting that can be. (Just as bad: Sitting in a crowd that roars its approval for a movie while you sit seething in silence: "Look Who's Talking," "Steel Magnolias," "Natural Born Killers"...)
I'm not sure I ever want to see, say, "The Night of the Hunter" with an audience again. I've seen it in a crowd containing some of those people who feel they have to audibly express that they find it silly, that it's not "realistic," or that they simply don't "get it." That was a painful experience. And as a campus films series programmer, a film festival programmer, and a rep house habitué, I've had more of of these disastrous (occasionally soul-shattering) experiences than I can count. (I feel the hysterical anguish of Carrie's mom: "They're all gonna laugh at you!") I don't even want to see "Taxi Driver" with an audience, because it's now become too familiar, too much a part of the cultural landscape, for some people to see it as anything more than an assembly of catch-phrases and AFI tribute clips.
So, fine. As far as I'm concerned, all those movies -- the ones I feel so protective about, whether they need it or not -- are mine now. They live in my head, as they always have since they wormed their way in there, and now I can see them on my private screen (video and memory/imagination), where no one else can touch them -- bully them, mock them, reject them. (Not that any audience could ever really touch them, but it's like having people in the most private recesses of your consciousness making fun of your dreams as you're dreaming them. It is, of course, me who wants to protect myself from exposure and ridicule, even while hiding in the darkness.)
For most of cinema's history, few people (except for those in the industry, or collectors of 16 mm or 35 mm prints) could see movies anywhere but in a movie theater. That is no longer the case. I believe home video is the most profound, "paradigm-shifting" development in film history, since the coming of sound. Steve Erickson explores this, and the scene in question from "Zeroville," in an interview with Anthony Miller over at Susan Henderson's Litpark.
... [For] better or worse movies, like books, have become artifacts as well as experiences, and that replaces the social ritual of seeing movies with other people, except in the case of spectacles because spectacles call for crowds and always have and probably always will.
There’s one scene in the novel where Zazi sees "A Place in the Sun" on television after having seen it in a theater with an audience that laughed at it, and she tries to explain to Vikar how seeing the movie by herself was very different from being part of a collective response, in which suspending not just disbelief but rationality and giving oneself over to the dreaminess of the movie was impossible. Though Zazi never uses the term “Cinema of Hysteria,” that’s what she’s talking about—these are movies that work best when seen alone.
I’m convinced that one of the reasons "Vertigo" rose in the pantheon of great films since its original failure when it was released in the late Fifties is that a whole generation of budding young film lovers saw it on TV around 1962 as I did, at the age of twelve, alone in my living room when my parents were down the street at a party, and everything about it blew me away and unsettled me—the surrealism of it, the eroticism, which I understood only as well as twelve-year-olds in my day understood eroticism. And as with Zazi and "A Place in the Sun," I’ve never seen Vertigo “work” with an audience in a theater, and I’ve seen it with an audience at least four times. Kubrick’s "Eyes Wide Shut" is the most recent example I can think of—a movie that seems absurd in the collective dark, shared with other people, but watched alone on DVD has the force of a private dream.
So as we near that Year Zero that you’re speaking of, and as movie-watching becomes more a solitary experience, I can’t help believing it will have some impact on the movies themselves. That social ritual will be lost and it will be a shame, but some more private ritual—maybe like reading—will replace it,
Movie-watching like reading? That's exactly the way I have come to think of it. And I find I get deeper into movies once they're out on DVD and I can stop and go over moments and sequences, see how they work -- just as if I were reading a book and wanted to re-read a page or a paragraph to let it resonate or study how it's put together. I don't always feel that I need to watch a movie in a single sitting, either. Is that bad of me? Maybe. The movie was not necessarily "made" to be experienced that way. Then again, if it's a recent film, maybe it was made with DVD in mind -- not unlike the way that, as far back as "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2," James Cameron composed his movies in widescreen and 1.33:1 (more commonly referred to as 4:3 these days) because he knew even then that, in the pre-DVD days before letterboxing or 16:9 TVs were commonplace, most people would see his films on a conventional TV.
Of course, I enjoy seeing films as an audience member, or an individual viewer. I also enjoy looking at them the way an editor might -- or a director, or a composer. In the first half of the history of movies (so far), that would have been impossible. Now it's not.
Do you have movies you think are too personal to be seen with an audience? Let's talk about what they are, and why you're reluctant to share them...
When I hear the word "middlebrow," I always think of Frida Kahlo. But, wait, that's something else. This post is in preparation for a pending one about "Speed Racer" (and the brilliant appreciations of it by Glenn Kenny and Dennis Cozzalio) -- a movie I naturally assumed would be (re-)viewed as the product of high (avant garde), middle (auteurist work-for-hire) and low (soulless corporate entertainment commodity) culture. It was.
So when I read this in the New York Times Book Review over the weekend, it reminded me of "The Middle Mind" (a book I'd read about five years ago) and it, um, inter-helixed with some thoughts I'd been having about "Speed Racer." (If you saw the movie you'll know what I mean.) But you can read it however you like.
From Rachel Donadio's back page essay, "1958: The War of the Intellectuals":
It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway. At the same time, the distinction between artistic achievement and commercial success, which American intellectuals had long assumed to be mutually exclusive, was losing its hold.
From their redoubts at “little magazines” like Partisan Review and Commentary — whose cultural authority far surpassed their low circulation — writers like Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling were trying, in their different ways, to preserve the idea of serious literature against the rising tide of mass culture. “The ’50s really was a period when to be a highbrow meant that you had to really have problems with middlebrow and lowbrow and commercial culture,” said Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker who is writing a cultural history of the cold war. Among the intellectuals, for example, “there was a feeling the Beats were not serious,” Menand said. And back then, “serious” was the benchmark of high praise. [...]
The highbrow New York intellectuals... found the Beats intellectually bankrupt and politically incoherent. In “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” an essay in Partisan Review, the young Norman Podhoretz wrote that “the Beat generation’s worship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well.” Podhoretz detected a “suppressed cry” of “brutality” in the Beats, which he summarized as “kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.”
Yet for all their differences, the Beats and their intellectual critics were both in open rebellion against middlebrow culture and values, which Dwight Macdonald saw epitomized by the Book of the Month Club and the New York Times best-seller list. [...]
[Dwight] Macdonald would go on to defend this line even more vigorously in his 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult,” an exhaustive taxonomy of the American cultural scene, from high literature to middlebrow magazines to low arts like television. This was a moment of uncertainty for critics. The leveling process taking place in the culture “destroys all values, since value judgments require discrimination, an ugly word in liberal-democratic America,” Macdonald wrote. Masscult, he added, “is very, very democratic; it refuses to discriminate against or between anything or anybody.”
There's a battle that's still going on half a century later.
In Curtis White's 2003 book "The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves" (interesting and provocative book, woefully ignorant on movies -- about which more some other time), White proposes that what he calls "The Middle Mind" is "a form of management" that reinforces the (capitalist) status quo:
The dominant order arranges for the appearance of a "serious" culture, apart from the entertainment biz, but what it provides is usually not all that different from the entertainment industry in the end. The great vehicle for that duplicity is what I call the Middle Mind. The culture informed by the strategies of the Middle Mind promises intelligence, seriousness, care, but what it provides in reality is something other. What the Middle Mind does best is flatten distinctions. It turns culture into mush. [...]
Let me say this directly: the high/low culture distinction is not what I'm interested in and does not provide a useful or revealing register for talking about contemporary culture. [...]
To get to a point where freedom and centrality for the imagination are possible and the kind of corporate culture represented by Clear Channel can be meaningfully confronted, we will also need thought.... Instead we endure a situation in which we are free to think and say what we like so long as what we think and say doesn't matter, doesn't threaten the dominant state/corporate/military narratives. In a world dominated by [the likes of] Clear Channel, it is very difficult to say something large and loud enough that it might begin to matter.
The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration, but if we must have one more (and the Evil Marketing Geniuses at Marvel MegaIndustries will do their utmost to ensure that we always will), "Iron Man" is a swell one to have. Not only is it a good comic book movie (smart and stupid, stirring and silly, intimate and spectacular), it's winning enough to engage even those who've never cared much for comic books or the movies they spawn. Like me.
"Iron Man" begins on dangerous ground: in the harsh terrain of Battleground Afghanistan. A convoy of Humvees (inadequately armored, no doubt) speeds through the desert carrying ultra-bazillionaire Death Merchant, and notoriously dissolute playboy, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), scotch in hand, flirting with the female driver.
Right on cue, an IED detonates, the Hummers are ambushed by Taliban-esque fighters, the American soldiers are slaughtered, and Tony is kidnapped. It won't be the first time that this gaudy piece of summer-movie pulp fiction strays a little too far into bloody Mess o' Potamian reality for comfort. Is this political commentary of some kind, or just exploitation? Like its hero "Iron Man" takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.
The reason it's so nimble is that director Jon Favreau ("Elf," "Zathura") and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy. (Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It's difficult to tell how much of what they're doing is taken directly from the script (credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they're reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play....
My review of "Speed Racer" by the Wachowski Brothers™ is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:
"Speed Racer" is not a feature film in any conventional sense -- although there is nothing so conventional in today's marketplace as a corporate product based on a campy vintage TV show that is developed for extremely brief exhibition in multiplexes on its way to more appropriate platforms such as DVD and video games, which provide the principal justification for its manufacture in the first place.
Neither is "Speed Racer" a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to be cutting edge. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there's nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William S. Burroughs' "cut up" technique -- with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti.
Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity, unless the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008. The faux naivete on display here -- right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring -- is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.
Seeing behind the images: Standard Operating Procedure
View image Lynndie England and Charles Graner. In... happier times?
I. What's Past is Prologue
"What are Arabs seeing, and what does that mean for us?" asked Duncan McInnis, the US State Department official in charge of fighting "the war over America's image in the Middle East," in a "Frontline/World" documentary, "News War: War of Ideas" (broadcast March 27, 2007).
"For instance in Iraq. Because Arabs are upset about the presence of armed forces in an Arab country, there are no good images of an American soldier. An American soldier building a hospital in Iraq is still an American soldier in Iraq. In that case, all images are bad. And we need to know that, we need to know that's what they see."
The image is the world's only remaining superpower. Understanding their power of images -- not just what's in the pictures themselves, but what they signify -- is the key to understanding the world and our place within it. It's also, recently, the source of the most deadly and dismal failures in American history. From the attacks of 9/11 through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Americans' inability to comprehend what they were seeing -- or even to recognize the primacy of the image itself as the representation of events -- has had catastrophic consequences.
German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was pilloried when he said, shortly after 9/11: "What happened there is—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever... Against that, we composers are nothing.” Whatever it was, precisely, that Stockhausen intended to convey (and he immediately regretted saying it in the fever of the time), his words should have shocked us into seeing what was before our eyes, something to which the hypnotic, endless-looop repetitions of the crashing planes and collapsing buildings on every TV screen, may have blinded us: These images were carefully planned, and executed -- composed not so much as "art," as Stockhausen framed it, but as visual propaganda on a spectacular and terrifying scale -- the epitome of "terrorism" as imagery, and vice-versa.
View image Symbolic imagery -- and all-too-real at the same time.
By focusing upon and recycling certain images (the explosions, the dust clouds coming at the cameras) and repressing or censoring others (the unbearable situation of those trapped in the buildings, the ones who jumped or fell and the ones who stayed, the flesh-and-blood carnage on the streets below), the media lodged indelible images in our brains that we thought we understood ("This is an act of war"), but couldn't quite wrap our heads around.
And what we didn't fully get was the nature of the spectacle. To the perpetrators the human toll was almost incidental -- collateral damage. Far deadlier attacks were possible, but this one had grandiose symbolic potency that, like the footage of the explosion of the Hindenburg, would implant terror in the mind of anyone who saw it. And in the case of 9/11 (before it was given that label), that was the point of creating the images in the first place. It wasn't about the casualties but the pictures.
By keeping the cameras at a distance and focusing on the spectacle, the media made it easy for the disaffected to cheer the abstract assault on American power that the smoking, collapsing towers represented. They didn't have to think too much, or feel too much, about the real-life victims. Of course, that's also exactly how the "embedded" American media would later treat military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the caskets of soldiers killed in combat became, officially, invisible for the first time in American history.
II. Standard Operating Procedure
"America has never been perceived as more isolated and less influential.... The reality is that America's position is undermined, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans."
-- David Marash, Washington Anchor, Al Jazeera English, in "News Wars: War of Ideas"
View image "Re-enactment" image of an Abu Ghraib interrogation from "Standard Operating Procedure."
Images have as much power as policy. Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure," an investigation of the photographs of American soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of images, and how the amateur photos with which we have become familiar (the ones that undermined American power and influence in the world more than anything since the decision to invade Iraq itself) came to be what they are. The digital shots are powerful propaganda tools, shocks to the conscience, but they are also common photographs -- taken at a particular time and place by individuals, almost instinctively or routinely and without thought, for reasons perhaps even they don't understand.
View image Manufactured symbolic imagery, courtesy CIA PSYOP.
"America has never been perceived as more isolated and less influential.... The reality is that America's position is undermined, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans."
-- David Marash, Washington Anchor, Al Jazeera English, in "News Wars: War of Ideas"
One of my ongoing themes is: photographs can be misleading -- without context we are free to interpret the photographs any way we choose. It's one of the odd and interesting things about photography. You look at a photograph, you think you know what it means, but more often than not you could be wrong. Photographs provide evidence, but usually, it takes some investigative effort to uncover evidence of what?
Morris could be talking about the "evidence" some 9/11 conspiracy theorists claimed to find in the photos taken that day, or about the staged toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, opposite the Baghdad hotel where the press was hedquartered, with expatriate Ahmad Chalabi supporters flown in the night before to act as liberated demonstrators, even as guerilla warfare was taking place in the streets only blocks away. (And that symbolic covering of Saddam's face with an American flag? Whoops. Get an Iraqi flag up there, pronto!)
The most important element in any picture is the frame. What is included, what is left out, the arrangements of elements within the composition, the technology used to capture it, the context in which it was captured, the perceptions and rationalizations that participants and viewers bring to the image after it is recorded... Those are the subjects of "Standard Operating Procedure." (Roger Ebert's review is here.)
Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" was also about a frame -- a man who was falsely convicted of murdering a police officer. A confession by the real killer in the movie itself helped solve the crime. "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" brought together four figures -- a topiary gardner, a lion tamer, a naked mole rat specialist and a robot scientist -- at let you figure out how to fit them into the film's framework. "Mr. Death" (probably the closest to "Standard Operating Procedure") investigated an American inventor of legal execution devices through the larger frame of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the man's connections with Holocaust deniers. And the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War" re-framed U.S. involvement in Vietnam through the experiences of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who said that the project was doomed from the beginning by America's failure to understand that what we viewed as an aspect of the Cold War, the Vietnamese saw as a civil war.
Late in the film, Morris shows us a cell spattered with blood. The images are nauseating, damning. And yet, they are not at all what they seem.
Through his Interrotron, Morris (and we) look the subjects right in the eye. Their "eyewitness testimony" is, by turns, confused, self-serving, self-deceiving, earnest, defensive, resigned, indignant -- sometimes all in the same interview. Strangely, the only interviewee who seems genuinely angry is Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general in charge of prisons all over Iraq who was made a convenient scapegoat by Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. She burns with rage, and consequently comes across as one of the more sympathetic and relatable voices in the film. If these photos don't provoke anger, something is wrong.
View image Young lovers Lynndie England and Charles Graner preside over a pyramid of prisoners they've arranged at Abu Ghraib.
Morris interviews all the "seven bad apples" except for Charles Graner, the shutterbug and alleged "ringleader" who appears in so many of the photographs, who made discs of them to give out to friends and fellow soldiers, and who was sexually involved with two of the women in the pictures. (The interviewees include Lynndie England [pregnant by Graner at the time], Megan Ambuhl [now married to Graner], Sabrina Harman, Jamal Davis and Jeremy Sivitz.)
Watching "Standard Operating Procedure" is like exploring a cave. The mouth feels like it's opening into an abyss, and the deeper you venture, the more contours and passageways you begin to make out as your eyes adjust to the darkness.
I often think that if cameras had not been present, these events would not have occurred. [Consider the timed attacks on the World Trade Center in that light.] The pyramid is an example. Graner, in all likelihood, orchestrated these events for the camera. [...]
The photographs do two things at the same time. They provide an exposé and they provide a cover up. They showed the world that these things were going on, but they point the finger at a very small group of people. They make you think it's these people who are the culprits. These are the people who are responsible for everything. That is a misdirection. It gives you a false picture.
"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases?' (Laughter.) 'Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' [...]
"It is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, "Oh, my goodness, you didn't have a plan." That's nonsense! They know what they're doing, and they're doing a terrific job. And it's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things! They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here."
View image From "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters."
The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his script for "Taxi Driver" was rooted in -- and, no wonder, since he had been raised a strict Calvinist (is that redundant?) and, as he put it, "Christianity is a blood cult" that glorifies sacrificial suicide. In "Mishima" it's the act of seppuku; in "Raging Bull" it's boxing; in "The Last Temptation of Christ" it's crucifixion... To writer-director Schrader, they're all manifestations of the same bloody thing.
Initially, he said, he doing doing a film about "another semi-literate American" and martyr figure, singer Hank Williams, but decided he was too much like Travis Bickle. When faced with all the music clearance problems, and the prospect of writing about another white American from the underclass, he chose instead to "go clear to the other end of the bookshelf" -- "to the Japanese, the artist, the homosexual." Inspiration, he said, is just another word for problem-solving, and "Mishima" presented him with the opportunity to undermine the Western illusion of life as a series of problems, and the existence of definitive solutions that view implies. There are no solutions, emphasized the author of the landmark "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer." Life presents conundrums to explore, he said, but we should not think of it as something that can ever be fully understood.
Schrader saw Mishima as an outsider, an individualist in a "consensus culture," a post-war military reject who embraced the glory of Imperial Japan, and an artist who relished his role as pop star. Eventually, he came to believe that his image as a public figure eclipsed his works, that his life was his art. His meticulously planned ritual suicide was envisioned as the climax to his greatest fiction -- himself.
View image The real Mishima, giving a speech shortly before his suicide.
Appearing on stage with his costume/production designer Eiko Ishioka, a film novice at the time of "Mishima," Schrader recalled the difficulties of finding an approach to Mishima's life and work, which he broke down into four sections and various interwoven styles: black and white for episodes from Mishima's past, including his childhood; pseudo-cinema verite for the last day of his life; and theatrically stylized, exaggeratedly artificial sets for excerpts from three of Mishima's novels: "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (1956), "Kyoko's House" (1959) and "Runaway Horses" (1968).
Schrader had brought his personal 35 mm print of "Mishima" with him, and although it looked as dazzling as I'd remembered on the enormous Virginia Theatre screen at Ebertfest (projected to perfection, as always, by James Bond), he said the upcoming remastered Criterion DVD actually sounded better (in a Dolby 5.1 remix). He also added one scene and did a sky replacement (in the mostly day-for-night seaside seppuku sequence from "Runaway Horses" in part 3, to make it look more artificial).
Errol Morris's new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.
The film reflects Morris's desire to make another "investigative film" in the vein of "The Thin Blue Line." "I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie," he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib."
The title refers to the often (and sometimes deliberately) blurred distinction -- the thin invisible line, if you will -- between behaviors that would be classified under U.S. military law and/or the Geneva conventions as torture, abuse, or "Standard Operating Procedure." And its method grows out of the concerns Morris has been exploring in his New York Times column/blog, Zoom, beginning in 2007. In the first installment, he wrote:
Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?
I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often –- when they appear in books or newspapers -– there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.
I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing.
Morris echoes his own words in the "SOP" Q&A:
It all starts with the photographs. They are at the core of this whole project. 270 photographs were given to the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and many of them appear in the movie. "Standard Operating Procedure" is my attempt to tell the story behind these photographs, to examine the context in which they were taken. People think they understand the photographs, that they are self-explanatory. They think they know what they are about -- but do they really? That's the question. Megan Ambuhl, one of the soldiers in the movie, asks: have we looked "outside the frame?" This film is an attempt to do that.
Or, as Morris has written of photographs in general:
We look at them. They are nothing more than silver halide crystals arranged on paper or with digital photography, nothing more than a concatenation of 1’s and 0’s resident on a hard-drive. Yet we believe they have captured something of our essence – something of the stuff that is in our heads.
In other words, consciously or not, we tend to see what we want -- or expect -- to see.
View image From the official "Standard Operating Procedure" web site.
One area the film does not get into is how these amateur photographs -- taken with three personal digital cameras -- came to light, first on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and in Hersh's article. For more about that, see this "60 Minutes" story about Army Reservist MP who became the Abu Ghraib whistleblower:
And then one day, when Joe Darby wanted scenic pictures to send home, he spotted the unit's camera buff, prison guard Charles Graner.
"So I walked up to Graner and I, you know, 'Hey do you have any pictures?' And he said 'Yeah, yeah, hold on.' Reaches into his computer bag and pulls out two CDs and just hands them to me," Darby remembers. [...]
"I don't think he realized what was on, but I don't think it would have mattered either way. I knew Graner and Graner trusted me."
That trust was about to change Darby's life forever. He copied Graner's discs and gave him back the originals. Later, when Darby looked at the photos he first saw scenic shots of Iraq, but then he came upon the pictures that launched the scandal.
Darby handed over the photos to the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) -- at first "in an envelope with an anonymous letter." His anonymity did not last long -- especially after Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld "commended" him by name in front of a congressional committee investigating the scandal: "There are many who did their duty professionally and we should mention that as well," Rumsfeld said in televised hearings. First, Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted appropriate authorities that abuses were occurring." (Graner, former boyfriend of the infamous petite poser Lynndie England, and father of her child, is now imprisoned himself, and was the only major figure unavailable for scrutiny through Morris's Interrotron.)
According to a print version of the story (also viewable on video) at the "60 Minutes" web site, reporter Anderson Cooper asked Darby if he wished he hadn't been given the photos:
"No, because if they had been given to somebody else, it might not have been reported," Darby says.
"And would that have been so bad, if it had never been reported?" Cooper asks.
"Ignorance is bliss they say but, to actually know what they were doing, you can't stand by and let that happen," Darby replies.
"There's still a lot of people though that'll say 'Look, you know, so what they did this. You know, Saddam did things that were much worse,'" Cooper remarks.
"We're Americans, we're not Saddam," Darby says. "We hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our soldiers hold themselves to a higher standard."
Asked if he'd do it again, Darby says, "Yes. They broke the law and they had to be punished."
"And it's that simple?" Cooper asks.
"It's that simple," he replies.
As Morris's film demonstrates, that may be the only "simple" thing about the photographs from Abu Ghraib.
* * * *
More background (and foreground):
View image Specialist Sabrina Harman with the corpse of a prisoner killed during a CIA interrogation.
Morris and collaborator Philip Gourevitch are publishing a 304-page companion book (available May 15, 2008) that reveals more of the research that went into the making of the film. Part of it has already been excerpted in The New Yorker:
Later, [Sabrina Harman, one of the soldiers in the photos] paid a visit to an Al Hillah morgue and took pictures: mummified bodies, smoked by decay; extreme closeups of their faces, their lifeless hands, the torn flesh and bone of their wounds; a punctured chest, a severed foot. The photographs are ripe with forensic information. Harman also had her picture taken at the morgue, leaning over one of the blackened corpses, her sun-flushed cheek inches from its crusted eye sockets. She is smiling—a forced but lovely smile—and her right hand is raised in a fist, giving the thumbs-up, as she usually did when a camera was pointed at her.
“I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah,” Harman said. “Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands, so I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo you want to smile.” There are at least twenty photos from Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up: bathing in an inflatable wading pool; holding a tiny lizard; standing at the foot of a wall that bears a giant bas-relief of Saddam (the button of his suit jacket is bigger than her head); fooling around with her best Army buddy, Megan Ambuhl, who is giving her the finger and flashing a tongue stud; holding a tiny figurine of Jesus; holding a long, phallic melon; mounting the ancient stone lion of Babylon at the ruins of King Nebuchadnezzar’s city; leaning over the shoulder of an M.P. buddy who is holding a Fanta can on top of which sits a dead cat’s head; and so on.
See video clips, outtakes and other background material here, including Seymour Hersh's original New Yorker article exposing the torture and abuse of prisoners by American soldiers, and later reporting on the "chain of command" and the gray zone" created by policymakers like Donald Rumsfeld to allow vaguely defined "extreme interrogation measures" while preserving plausible deniability for the higher-ups.
ERROL MORRIS: What I find…I mean what I find really interesting about the first letter, is you sort of…you’re addressing all of these questions. You somehow know what you’re seeing is not right, in fact is wrong. There’s something wrong here. The need to take pictures, to expose that fact at some future time to the public, so that they can see another face of America, that’s all, all in that letter. I find that interesting.
SABRINA HARMAN: It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV. It’s not something you really thought was going on. At least I didn’t think it was going on. It’s just something that you watch, and that is not real.
ERROL MORRIS: What does that do to your head?
SABRINA HARMAN: Again, I don’t even know where I was at that point. I put everything down on paper that I was thinking. And if it weren’t for those letters, I don’t think I could even tell you anything that went on. That’s the only way I can remember things, is letters and photos.
ERROL MORRIS: So it’s a way of creating memory?
SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know what it was. I really think I put it all down to forget, in the letters, and then just to prove what was going on, was the photos. Because really, if anybody came up to you and was like, “Hey, this is what’s going on,” there’s no way anybody would believe what was going on. So that’s why the photos were taken.
ERROL MORRIS: And in fact, there would have been no Abu Ghraib scandal without the photographs.
