The consensus of opinion here seems to be that the Berlin Film Festival is a bit bland, a bit unremarkable. Even the weather, usually at a Scott-of-the-Antarctic level of bitter snow-swirling cold, has been mild.
But I can't agree with this. The reason is the extraordinarily traumatising new film here by documentarist Errol Morris called Standard Operating Procedure. It is about the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2003, in which young US soldiers in the notorious Iraqi jail took photos of their prisoners being humiliated and de-humanised while they grinned and clowned around for the camera. And more than this: one photo shows a soldier doing a goofy grin next to the ice-packed corpse of an Iraqi who had died while in the "stress position" - in short, a man who had been tortured to death. No-one higher than the rank of staff sergeant was punished. Morris gets interviews with seven of the soldiers in the notorious pictures, including the sinister, dead-eyed and entirely unrepentant Lynndie England.
Not everyone admires this film. The influential American critic Todd McCarthy, writing in Variety, feels that the approach is too emotionalist and that the music by Danny Elfman, is excessively sucrose. This may well be true. But it doesn't stop the images themselves from being soul-chillingly horrible. I thought I knew what they looked like. In fact, only a few have been used in the papers, and those have been blurred and cropped to protect our sensibilities. Shown at cinema-screen size, they are truly horrendous. Their existence is not just a shame on the US military, but a catastrophe for humanity. And I am now astonished at how casually they are reproduced in the newspapers, as if they are just any old publicity stills.
It's as if someone had found the semi-mythical cine-film that Josef Goebbels is reputed to have made, showing the Stauffenberg plotters being hanged. Or someone had got hold of the audio tapes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley torturing children and released them as a download.
Of course, horrific abuses have always occurred in war, photo mementos are nothing new. What the Americans did was probably comparable to Saddam's butchery in this same prison. And it hardly compares to what the Allies thought expedient at the end of World War II: Hiroshima, Dresden. But none of these considerations stops the pictures from being uniquely appalling. Watching this film is an occasion for using that over-used and little-understood word "evil".
Arguably more disturbing, however, is the interviewees themselves. Some are truculent and unforthcoming. The soldiers were young, bored, stupid, excitable and scared. They had a green light from above (very high above); a vaguely defined suggestion that "fucking with" the prisoners was acceptable. So it's all too easy to see how the situation could degenerate into a cross between Lord Of The Flies and The Stanford Experiment.
But some of the interviewees are likeable, intelligent. It's not at all clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Errol Morris quotes a letter home from one, claiming that her photos were the only way of proving the abuse, and that encouraging people to clown around was the only way to take pictures without getting the camera taken away. Is that true? Maybe. Either way, one of the uniquely horrible thing about Abu Ghraib was that the picture-taking, vital for proof, was part of the abuse itself.
And you can never be sure which of the interviewees are simply lying. The final photos show empty cells, floors awash with blood. What happened to the prisoners? One of Morris's interviewees claims that an Iraqi guard smuggled a handgun into the cells and gave it to a prisoner, who shot it at an American soldier (who allegedly took the bullet safely "in the vest") and then the guards returned fire. A bloodbath. A mess. Is that what happened? Or a convenient explanation?
Errol Morris doesn't challenge his witnesses; he just lets us brood on their testimony. It's an effective method in its deadpan way and probably the only way of getting people to be interviewed. But I can't help thinking that an interviewer like Gitta Sereny would have probed further, would have wanted to confront the soldiers with the implications of what they had done.
With this film living inside my head like a hellish snuff movie, the Berlin Film Festival is not exactly bland.
