Punishment and Crime

Errol Morris, the Cambridge documentarian, turns his lens on Abu Ghraib – the abuse, the perpetrators, and the scapegoats.

"Everyone had seen these photographs. No one had any real idea who these people were," says Morris, here on set at the Abu Ghraib prison. (Photo from Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection)

There's a moment in Standard Operating Procedure when you almost feel bad for Lynndie England. Despite a makeover, the private first class is immediately recognizable from photographs of the Abu Ghraib scandal. She's the one who was smiling and pointing at hooded and bound Iraqi prisoners – an unsympathetic type, to be sure, until Errol Morris points his camera at her.

Those photographs, more than anything else, are the subject of Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure, which is scheduled to open this week at the Kendall Square Cinema. In an interview in a Manhattan hotel, Morris says that he was actually thinking about making a film based on a photograph before Abu Ghraib was in the press. His idea was to re-create the story behind an 1855 photograph from the Crimean War, Roger Fenton's black-and-white "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." The project's costs looked too high (and its audience prospects too poor), but Morris had a concept he liked. "The idea was: What if you could enter history through a photograph?" he says. "History is always written in chronology, but what if you could dispense with all of that? What if you could enter history through something very specific . . . and then reach out from that point and see what else you can find?"

Although he's never shied away from politics or controversy – The Thin Blue Line convincingly condemns capital punishment by tracking the wrongful conviction of a man on death row, while The Fog of War indicts the military mind-set through an extended conversation with former US secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara – Morris has rarely tackled a sensitive issue head-on, the way he does now. But Standard Operating Procedure "is not another addition to the series of movies about the Iraq war," he says. "It's a movie about photographs of people. It's an attempt to find out who these people were and what they were doing." Like The Thin Blue Line, which uncovered layers of error and perjury in Randall Adams's Dallas murder trial (his conviction was eventually overturned), Standard Operating Procedure seeks to unravel the mystery of Abu Ghraib. "Everyone had seen these photographs," he says, but "no one had any real idea who these people were."

Thus far, the film has received much praise and a few negative reviews. It won a jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival, but, writing in Variety, critic Todd McCarthy said the film added "relatively little insight to the public understanding of wayward military behavior." Peter Scarlet, artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival (now going on in New York, the festival includes the film in its lineup), says people want to see if Morris can do for Abu Ghraib what, in a sense, he did for Randall Adams. "It will be interesting to find out whether the evidence he's turned up in Standard Operating Procedure at least succeeds in raising questions about why the outrage over Abu Ghraib has, so far, failed to produce the conviction of anyone with a rank higher than sergeant."

Morris is among the filmmakers credited with popularizing documentary films, helping the genre break away from art-house-only runs and into multiplex theaters. "Errol Morris, Michael Moore, Steve James – these are the guys who enabled me to get my movies into theaters," says Morgan Spurlock, who directed Super Size Me, a 2004 documentary that was nominated for an Oscar.

But Morris is still an art-house favorite, too. "Whenever we do a documentary series, his films are among the number-one choice," says Ned Hinkle, creative director of the Brattle Film Foundation in Cambridge (and programmer for the Brattle Theatre). He says Morris's films are unique within the genre because they're so strikingly cinematic: "He's thinking about his films as films, and not necessarily as news pieces."

The filmic quality Morris is able to achieve, avoiding an onslaught of monotonous talking heads, is born to an extent out of his expert use of reenactment. Josh Seftel, a documentary filmmaker whose War, Inc.(a nondocumentary feature starring John Cusack) is also screening at Tribeca, says people often think of Morris as the inventor of the technique. "Some people feel like he created the reenactment documentary, which led to some horrible TV shows, but he did the real thing," Seftel says.

But it's not just the reenactments that engage viewers. More than anything, Morris captivates audiences with his character portrayals. Even in his commercials – he has shot many, in what he calls his only moneymaking endeavor – you can sense it. "Obviously all documentary filmmakers have some control over the way they portray their characters," Seftel says. "Somehow Errol has even more control." And according to Spurlock, whose own movie tracked his month of eating only McDonald's food, Morris has a special ability to create a relationship between his subjects and his camera. "When his characters are interacting with him, they're interacting with us," he says. "And that's really fascinating."

In Standard Operating Procedure, that interaction becomes slightly uncomfortable when the audience is brought face-to-face with the Abu Ghraib torturers we recognize from their photographs – some, like England, are also portrayed as the scandal's scapegoats. Of course, if we learn one of the lessons Morris delivered in his movie about McNamara, we already know there are no easy villains and the "fog of war" will blind us.

Rachel Deahl is an editor at Publishers Weekly in New York. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.