The Justice

Media Credit: David Sheppard-Brick SEEKING THE TRUTH: Filmmaker Errol Morris spoke at Brandeis about the importance of seeking truth over awards. Morris' most recent documentary, SOP: Standard Operating Procedure, recently made its Boston premiere at Brandeis. The film is about the Abu Ghraib prison photo scandal and includes interviews with some of the soldiers.

According to Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, making his latest documentary, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, about the infamous photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison, was like baking a cake. "There are certain ingredients in this movie: The evidence that came from the photographs … retrospective interviews … and then images that I have abstracted from what people tell me in the interviews," he explained at a screening at Brandeis on April 17. Unfortunately, there isn't any 30-minute Shake 'n Bake box for this formula, and it took a two-year-long grueling investigative process that included shooting over 200 hours of footage totaling a million and a half words of transcript.

A regular at Brandeis, Morris also came almost exactly one year ago to screen a 40-minute montage of his work in progress and returned two weeks ago to show the film in its entirety at the Boston premiere in the Wasserman Cinematheque. In interviewing five of the seven "bad apples" associated with the pictures that exposed the horrific abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, Morris hopes to give context to pictures that have previously been captionless.

Considering the never-ending flow of not-so-reality TV shows, we should be accustomed to the idea that the camera does not always depict the truth, but altering the adage that "seeing is believing" is a lot harder in practice than theory. "I believe that Abu Ghraib is horribly misunderstood, and I believe that the photographs were not understood at all," Morris explained in a Q & A following the screening. As one of the "bad apples," Specialist Megan Ambuhl Graner says in the film, "The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don't see forward, you don't see backward, so you don't see outside the frame."

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