Paul Arthur, an influential film scholar and critic (and author of A Line Of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965) died recently; one if his last pieces has now appeared in Artforum, in which he examines the techniques of "nonfiction filmmaker" Errol Morris, whose forthcoming Standard Operating Procedure is about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Arthur finds Morris guilty of choosing "to substitute metaphor for analysis"; he compares Morris's approach to that of Alex Gibney's in Taxi to the Dark Side--whose "gritty reenactments, lush landscape shots, interviews lit like Dutch portraiture, and ... ominous music track replete with vaguely religious wailing suggestive of cries of another sort... never supersede or distract from Gibney’s inflamed political indictment"--and find Morris's approach wanting.
Morris himself has called his film "a nonfiction horror movie;” Arthur, taking note of the contributions of the cinematographer Robert Richardson and composer Danny Elfman, and describing Morris's penchant for interrupting interview testimony with creepy imagery, writes, "These visual aperçus, which Morris refers to rather sophistically as 'impressions' rather than reenactments, are undeniably gorgeous. Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning. We aren’t prompted to contemplate the Iraq occupation’s signature scandal as the product of a mercenary chain of executive decisions, cultural attitudes, venalities, and personal pathologies; we are, as it were, let off the hook. It’s only a movie." The article, which will inflame Morris's most devoted fans--and he has lots of them--is provocative and spiky enough to remind those who knew Arthur's work what a valuable man he was in an argument, whether he was on your side or not. With any luck, it might also inspire some who are unfamiliar with his writing to try to find out more about what they've beeb missing.
