Errol Morris: "The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us" | GreenCine
Errol Morris: "The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us" | GreenCine
What I think is so amazing about that is that, through the course of the film, you deconstruct the photos. You interview all these people, you uncover all this evidence from these witnesses, yet the only crimes that were prosecuted were those that were photographed, the ones that had the visual evidence, the ones that were seen by the public.
EM: But it gets even worse than that. I have this essay coming out in the New York Times this week on Sabrina's smile, the photograph of her with her thumb up, the smile and the body of [Manadel] al-Jamadi. Now I remember seeing this photograph for the first time and thinking, "God Lord, what is this? It's monstrous."
She didn't kill him. A CIA interrogator either killed him or was complicit in his death. The brass of the prison was involved in a cover-up. In the log, he's described as Bernie, from Weekend at Bernie's, the body which people have to get rid of. It's an inconvenience because they don't want to be, in any way, implicated in his death. He's the hot potato being shuffled about.
Sabrina takes these photographs as an act of civil disobedience, to provide evidence of a crime. In her letter to Kelly, immediately following this whole deal, she says, "The military is nothing but lies. I took these pictures to show what the military's really, really like." And here's the weirdness of it all. The people responsible for al-Jamadi's death, the people responsible for covering up a murder, skate. Sabrina spends a year in jail.
I think this is the heretical thing. It's not just that the photographs direct us in a certain way, but they actually hide things from us. They make us think that we know a story when in fact we don't know the story at all, or we know the wrong story. It's endlessly fascinating to me and I would like to set the record straight. That represents to me an incredible miscarriage of justice. Taking a picture of a body to expose the military and to expose a crime, to me, is not a crime. Murder is a crime.
...
EM: I kept thinking about baking a cake. I have all my ingredients in front of me. I have the photographs, the digital photographs. I have the digital files from Abu Ghraib so, anachronistically, I put a light border on them. There shouldn't be a light border on them but I wanted somehow to say visually to the audience: These are uncropped, these are the photographs, bam! There they are. They're all squarish, more or less, squares with light borders, you see them floating around and so on. And of course the letters. Sabrina's letters are other pieces of evidence from the Fall of 2003. And I had Sabrina read each of the letters. Then I have the interviews, everyone shot with the same background, lit differently. And then the illustrations or reenactments, taken from the things that people say.
So when Diaz says to me, "A drop of al-Jamadi's blood fell on my uniform," I had this one moment shot in ultra-slo-mo with a thousand-frame-per-second camera, the Phantom V9. It's not reenacting anything, it's bringing you into that moment in his interview. For what it's worth, I remember when it was said, I heard it for the first time, I'm listening to Diaz and he's really trying to explain his own feelings at that moment, his feelings of complicity: I am involved but I'm not involved but I am involved. And I started to identify with him. I think, don't we all feel exactly like that? I'm not involved in this but I am involved in this. And the drop of blood becomes a way of bringing you in, of hearing that line and thinking about it.
What I think is so amazing about that is that, through the course of the film, you deconstruct the photos. You interview all these people, you uncover all this evidence from these witnesses, yet the only crimes that were prosecuted were those that were photographed, the ones that had the visual evidence, the ones that were seen by the public.
EM: But it gets even worse than that. I have this essay coming out in the New York Times this week on Sabrina's smile, the photograph of her with her thumb up, the smile and the body of [Manadel] al-Jamadi. Now I remember seeing this photograph for the first time and thinking, "God Lord, what is this? It's monstrous."
She didn't kill him. A CIA interrogator either killed him or was complicit in his death. The brass of the prison was involved in a cover-up. In the log, he's described as Bernie, from Weekend at Bernie's, the body which people have to get rid of. It's an inconvenience because they don't want to be, in any way, implicated in his death. He's the hot potato being shuffled about.
Sabrina takes these photographs as an act of civil disobedience, to provide evidence of a crime. In her letter to Kelly, immediately following this whole deal, she says, "The military is nothing but lies. I took these pictures to show what the military's really, really like." And here's the weirdness of it all. The people responsible for al-Jamadi's death, the people responsible for covering up a murder, skate. Sabrina spends a year in jail.
I think this is the heretical thing. It's not just that the photographs direct us in a certain way, but they actually hide things from us. They make us think that we know a story when in fact we don't know the story at all, or we know the wrong story. It's endlessly fascinating to me and I would like to set the record straight. That represents to me an incredible miscarriage of justice. Taking a picture of a body to expose the military and to expose a crime, to me, is not a crime. Murder is a crime.
...
EM: I kept thinking about baking a cake. I have all my ingredients in front of me. I have the photographs, the digital photographs. I have the digital files from Abu Ghraib so, anachronistically, I put a light border on them. There shouldn't be a light border on them but I wanted somehow to say visually to the audience: These are uncropped, these are the photographs, bam! There they are. They're all squarish, more or less, squares with light borders, you see them floating around and so on. And of course the letters. Sabrina's letters are other pieces of evidence from the Fall of 2003. And I had Sabrina read each of the letters. Then I have the interviews, everyone shot with the same background, lit differently. And then the illustrations or reenactments, taken from the things that people say.
So when Diaz says to me, "A drop of al-Jamadi's blood fell on my uniform," I had this one moment shot in ultra-slo-mo with a thousand-frame-per-second camera, the Phantom V9. It's not reenacting anything, it's bringing you into that moment in his interview. For what it's worth, I remember when it was said, I heard it for the first time, I'm listening to Diaz and he's really trying to explain his own feelings at that moment, his feelings of complicity: I am involved but I'm not involved but I am involved. And I started to identify with him. I think, don't we all feel exactly like that? I'm not involved in this but I am involved in this. And the drop of blood becomes a way of bringing you in, of hearing that line and thinking about it.
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