The trailer for the Silver Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, is out! I’ve been waiting for it for quite some time. Watch it below (or for a more high quality version go HERE ).
Also, be sure to
to learn more about the film and how you can take part!
Also of note is a great article that Errol Morris wrote for this week’s issue of The New Yorker called Exposure : The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib.
All that the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, a Reserve unit out of Cresaptown, Maryland, knew about America’s biggest military prison in Iraq, when they arrived there in early October of 2003, was that it was on the front lines. Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. “Like something from a Mad Max movie,” Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. “Just like that”like, medieval.” There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, “it’s nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot.” [The New Yorker]
CATEGORIES: Ethics, Global Health
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Yes! This is so cool. I love how Morris adds all this high production value - it really makes the viewer engage, and I don’t think in too much of a manipulative or showy way. In a way, it’s a stronger choice than just showing faces, because you’re forced to reconcile your thoughts and opionions with *his* images, instead of having the people’s words conjure up a bunch of stuff that is going to be pulled solely from your personal experience with the media. And then you have something to discuss, instead of the ether of 1st hand description. I dunno, it’s interesting, to say the very least.
Also, check this week’s newyorker.com for more footage from this. http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/03/24/abughraib/?xrail