Word: prison
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...features. Errol Morris is acutely aware of this defect, and he likes to liven things up by bringing what Hollywood has always called ?production values? to his docs. His new movie, Standard Operating Procedure, about the shocking photographs that revealed the horrific conditions at Iraq?s Abu Ghraib prison circa 2003, offers a compendium of these techniques...
...which was distributed to American troops in Iraq, Images of some of these cards, very handsomely photographed against black, fly artfully, abstractly across the screen in a manner that is distinctly at odds with the essential grubbiness of the extant stills and videos of the actual events at the prison. Finally, there are the ghosts - shadowy evanescent figures that are supposed to represent the unseen forces that ordered up the torments inflicted on the Abu Ghraib prisoners. All of this seems to me at odds with the very sordid story Morris is trying to tell. It distracts from, even vitiates...
...come off as young, ill-educated, and very suggestible - almost as premoral as children - and he is not without a certain human sympathy for them. Their unseen higher-ups wanted intelligence (particularly about Saddam?s whereabouts) and did nothing to discourage any behavior that would degrade and terrify their prisoners into supplying that information. That most of them had no connection with Iraq?s dark side was either not clear or of no consequence to the upper ranks; they were simply in a bureaucratic frenzy to supply their political masters something that could be made to look like plausible intel...
...original idea came from HBO's successful drama Oz, which focuses on a U.S. high security prison. The writers also based some of the story on real-life events and characters, drawing most of the inspiration from Mexico City's infamous Santa Marta women's prison. The result is a series that is as grim, bloody and chaotic as actual Latin American prisons; it is world where children live with their mothers behind bars until they are six, where corruption is rife and where killings are commonplace. But aside from portraying the misery of prison life, the producers also aimed...
...realization - in those few words, a little chat about things of no real consequence, this fine American of 75 years had lost his right to self-determination. He was to be consigned, in his own eyes at least, to the rest of his life in prison. For not remembering...