It's not true. Doc-a-Day is not dead. It's just been sleeping while I worked my fingers to the bone finishing up two contracts while starting a new project. Finally, in this brief window between work and vacation, I've managed to watch a film.
I'd long been meaning to see Iraq in Fragments, which I missed at Hot Docs and during its theatrical run. And so, when reader Contessie mentioned it in a comment last month, I figured it was time.
Directed, photographed, written and scored by James Longley, Iraq in Fragments is an anthology film - three stories, from three different parts of Iraq, documenting the impact of the war on people from three main groups: Sunni in Baghdad, Shia in Sadr City, and Kurds in Kurdistan. The three segments are united primarily by Longley's remarkable cinematography. The first thing you notice is the super-saturated colours - everything is more vivid, more intense than you expect. But that's not the most important thing. The camera roams the streets, constantly shifting point of view from observer to participant. It's as if, in the midst of the chaos, it's impossible not to be a participant.
The style is particularly effective in the first segment, a profile of an 11-year-old boy who works at an auto repair shop in Baghdad. This is a near-perfect short film in itself: intimate, full of surprises and remarkable access. The camera is in the middle of the action, seemingly invisible to the participants, who never give any sense of playing to it. The boy speaks only in voiceover, a technique from the days of film that's sadly little used today, when tape is cheap and all interviews have both sound and picture. The drama is as much in the contrast between what the boy says and what we see happening. Longley clearly stuck around long enough to become part of the scenery. The camera is just there; the boy, his boss and the men who sit around drinking tea and talking politics seem to just go on with their lives, oblivious to it.
Part 2 takes place among the followers of Shia cleric Mukhtada al-Sadr, known as the Mehdi Army. The strength of this piece is the access. Longley gets amazing footage of a nighttime self-flaggelation parade, but even more remarkable is a raid by a group of armed, masked thugs on a street market, where they beat and arrest everyone they suspect of selling alcohol. The scene is punctuated by the constant sound of gunfire - it's terrifying. Later, the wife of one of the arrested men pleads for his release, her child crying from hunger. And all of this is on camera. But on the whole, this segment doesn't work as well as the first one, mainly because there's no central character. At the beginning, a man tells his story in voiceover. We think we'll see him soon enough, but we never do. "Is it him?" we wonder every time the camera settles on a new person... but we never find out. Other voices appear and disappear, but we never really get to know anyone. Longley is a distant observer in the Shia community; it seems like he never got close to anyone, although they let him witness some amazing things.
The third segment, in Kurdish territory, starts off beautifully -- two boys, best friends, playing together and dreaming about the future. Somehow, the scene reminded me of Satyajit Ray, who had a way of capturing the languor and innocence of childhood just before things get serious and ugly. But again, as soon as Longley veers away from the boys, the segment becomes confused and unsatisfying. There's an election. But what does it have to do with the story of the boys? Eventually, he brings the story back to the kid who will never get to medical school... but not as elegantly as he might have.
On the whole, Iraq in Fragments is an incredible achievement, both for its cinematography and the access Longley was able to get. I'm looking forward to seeing Sari's Mother, the fourth chapter of Iraq in Fragments, which he turned into a stand-alone short.
One more thing, to answer Contessie's question in the comments to the previous post. The reason this film works with three separate stories is that Longley doesn't try to interweave them. Each stands alone, and the filmmaker doesn't try to mess around with parallel storylines, segues, etc. The effect of the three stories is cumulative - and, for me at least, this works much better.
It's been a busy couple of weeks, quite apart from the hilarity of the comments posted all over this blog by the pseudonymous Winston and my e-mail correspondence with Korbett Matthews, producer-director-writer-cinematographer of The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, who desperately wanted to know my real name, so that he could look up my films and take his revenge. My advice to Korbett: stop obsessing about what other people think of you and make a better film next time. Success is the best revenge.
All this, especially the work I get paid to do, distracted me from posting about the film I'd been looking forward to most this year, Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure.
Morris's previous film, The Fog of War, is one of my favourite docs of all time - as close to a perfect documentary as I have seen. Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line are also on my personal top-10 list. And the buzz around Standard Operating Procedure - reported $5-million budget, a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a simultaneous book release - suggested this film was expected to make a big impact.
Instead, the film is already gone from theatres here in Toronto. When I saw it two weeks ago, in its second week of release, there were six people in the theatre on a Thursday evening, including my group of four. Across North America, SOP isn't even close to matching the box office success of this year's Canadian doc sleeper hit Up the Yangtze. What went wrong? As far as I can see, a lot more than just the fact that it's damn near impossible to get the public to watch yet another documentary about Iraq.
It's difficult not to judge Standard Operating Procedure against Morris's other work, and by the standards he himself has set. Compared to most films by mere mortals of the documentary world, it's an extremely impressive work: Morris throws his unparalleled interviewing skills and visual imagination at the story, and these things carry it a long way. But it's not his best film. Far from it.
The story is one of the biggest American scandals in modern times, about which everyone thinks they know something. If anyone can make us re-think our opinion, it's Morris, who once proved the innocence of a man convicted in Texas of killing a cop. And just as importantly, it's a story about photographs, which gives Morris a lot more to work with than Alex Gibney had in Taxi to the Dark Side, his Oscar-winning investigation of a killing at Baghram prison in Afghanistan.
Morris attacks the story with his usual mix of interviews, carefully staged re-enactments and metaphoric visuals. The interviews, conducted via his Interrotron device, are by far the best thing about the film. Morris may be the best interviewer working today. His subjects aren't just answering questions; they're invariably telling stories, reflecting, revealing. I have to admit that for a long time I thought the Interrotron was just a gimmick, but after watching a few of Morris's films more carefully recently, I can see its impact, and would love to try using it myself.
But the Interrotron, which really can enhance the connection between interview subject and viewer, is not a magic bullet: I've also seen films that have used a similar device with far less interesting results. The key to Morris's success is that his questions force the subjects to think on camera: you can see them considering a question or changing their mind – that's what makes the interviews dynamic and exciting. The achievement in Standard Operating Procedure is that he gets interesting, revealing answers from the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses. In Fog of War, his subject was a highly intelligent, charismatic man reflecting on a 60-year career; in SOP, Morris gets similar results from a half-dozen army grunts who've been reviled in the media and have little reason to trust anyone with their story. (I guess it doesn't hurt that Morris paid them for the interviews.) I'd love to watch his rushes and see how he does it.
But here's the problem: there are so damn many of these interviews - something like a dozen - that Morris loses control of the film. A few of the subjects - Sabrina Harman, the lesbian solder; Javal Davis, the African-American one; Tim Dugan, the contract interrogator - are so engaging, I thought each of them was worthy of a film of his or her own. But the result of this embarrassment of riches is an unfocused film: Standard Operating Procedure has too many strands, which Morris never quite brings together. Clocking in at almost two hours, the film has one false ending after another. At least half a dozen times, it feels like the film has reached a natural conclusion, only to lurch onto another point. If only Morris had struck to the central questions: how the events in the photographs came about, what really happened, and why. Instead, he dwells on too many related events, and too many stories from minor players. It's a heavy barrage of claims and ideas, difficult to keep track of, and 90 minutes into the film, rapidly becoming overwhelming. The Thin Blue Line methodically built a case for the innocence of Randall Dale Adams; SOP just doesn't have the same storytelling discipline.
And there's another element that took me out of the story. Morris is famous for his dramatic re-creations. In The Thin Blue Line, they were disciplined and sparse, and used for a specific reason: to examine the conflicting stories told by several eyewitnesses, and to expose the implausibility of some of these accounts. In Fog of War, Morris mostly used metaphoric imagery and archival footage. But now, working with a huge budget, it's as if he's lost all sense of restraint. The torture of Iraqi prisoners is meticulously re-created based on the infamous photos. Actors play soldiers and prisoners, and there is even a close-up of a vicious, snarling dog, complete with scary growl. It doesn't work. Most of these scenes are much too literal, serving only to break the connection between the storyteller (i.e. the interviewee) and the viewer.
I had a discussion this morning with a producer who's pitching a hybrid documentary-dramatization series, and so I had to think about what bothers me about the use of literal dramatization or re-enactment in documentaries. I think the problem is that such a hybrid serves neither documentary nor drama. A retrospective documentary such as this one (as opposed to what Allan King calls an actuality drama) relies on a connection between the storyteller and the viewer, and the engagement of the viewer's imagination. Cutting to an overly literal dramatization breaks that bond, and invariably interferes with the imagination. Full-out drama, with actors and a script, relies on a suspension of disbelief and an immersion in the world created by the filmmaker. Cutting to an interview in the midst of this breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes the drama feel contrived. A successful blend of the two needs to show just enough to give viewers something to hang their imagination on. In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris shows too much.
Standard Operating Procedure is not a bad film. Morris is too skilled to mess things up completely. But it looks like, in trying to do too much, he lost control of the story. One clue to how things went on this production is in the credits: there are three editors listed, and three "co-editors." Two of the co-editors were the editors of record on five of Morris's best-known films. Reading between the lines, I would guess there was a lot of unhappiness in the Standard Operating Procedure cutting room.
