Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008)

Errol Morris has a fairly unique ability to elicit defensively candid interviews from oft maligned subjects. He did so in The Fog of War and here, again, he has successfully drawn deceptively forward responses from unlikely candidates. While the story – and more importantly the images – of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison have become mental calling cards of our nations collective conscious in regards to the Iraq war, Morris proofs his material, making it seem as important and fresh as the days in which the horrific images first leaked.

There is more at stake here than simply getting the story straight as Morris, who has proven so adept at doing in the past, blurs lines and obliterates comfortable objectivity. With bias firmly in his back pocket, the filmmaker questions the nature of images themselves and in doing so asks obvious questions about the importance we place upon them and our willingness to forget about atrocities that exist in a realms outside of our minds; atrocities that have not been documented. As far as those that have faced the lens, he allows those on camera to speak for themselves.

With hardly a prod – Errol speaks up maybe three times throughout the entire documentary – the perpetrators of the well known war crimes give their own account of what went down. In eerie fashion, none of them seem all too distraught about what happened. Rather than guiding you to pass judgment on the interviewees, their fairly opaque answers point to a darker reality, one in which all are culpable and nearly all are able to point fingers. Where the final finger points is never dictated, giving Standard Operating Procedure the lingering quality that most great documentaries possess.