The war on film: reanimating the post-9/11 Viewer in the prisoner, Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair.

Gibson, Brian

"We have done nothing. ... Yes, you see that in the camera."

--Yunis Khatayer Abbas

The war in Iraq, officially launched in March 2003, has become the most filmed war in cinema's 114-year history. In its first six years, there have been news photos and footage, videorecordings of hostages and their executions, civilian-shot images, Army photos and images of air-strikes and other attacks, leaked photos and video-camera recordings of prisoner humiliation and abuse in Abu Ghraib, documentary films, and feature films. (1)

The audience for those films about the war, at least those shown at theatres or released on DVD, has been remarkably small. Even this paper's focus, the documentary The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair (2006-07) (2), although it followed the directors' critically-acclaimed Gunner Palace (2005), saw limited release in the United States and in Canada, only coming out on DVD in many cities; the directors' third Iraq war documentary, Bulletproof Salesman (2008), has not yet even been picked up for distribution in North America. Not only did polls find that, two years after the horrific photos were released, in "the summer of 2006 ... a majority of respondents hadn't heard of Abu Ghraib," but in cineplexes or rental stores, "given opportunities to see more of the war ... American audiences appear markedly averse". (3) Critics have focussed on an American, even North American (Canadian soldiers have been in Afghanistan since 2002), audience that hasn't been willing to watch the war through a film lens. But what if that is because they have been so used to watching war through a camera all along?

SETTING THE STAGE:

FROM FALLING TOWERS TO HUMAN PYRAMIDS

Jeff Birnbaum, a company president and a former fire chief and emergency medical technician, remembers what he saw on September 11, 2001 because of what "he says seems almost like a 'videotape in my head'": (4)

  The sight was amazing. I was just totally awestruck. ... I have seen
  plenty of death in my life, and burned bodies and so forth, but this
  was incredible. ... [Near the South Tower,] I stood there for a
  second in total awe, and then said, 'What the F[uck]?' I honestly
  thought it was Hollywood.

Birnbaum later cried at images of death on TV, was plagued by nightmares, and talked to a priest at a counseling center. But his initial reaction was a kind of "whoa! cool!" sense of awe, and he felt what he saw did not just resemble a movie, but was a movie. Then there is the memory of Lakshman Achuthan, who escaped from Tower 1, as reported in The New York Times the next day: "I looked over my shoulder and saw the United Airlines plane coming. It came over the Statute [sic] of Liberty. It was just like a movie." (5) The collapse of the towers and killing of thousands may have been "unthinkable," as the article's headline puts it, even unimaginable, but it was not, apparently, uncinematic. Cinema replaces the imagination here, the mind's eye and memory become cameras, and New York City is the screen onto which a disaster- or war-film is projected. Movies provided the precedent, especially three years earlier, when Armageddon (1998; dir. Michael Bay) showed meteors striking the World Trade Center. And most people saw the planes strike the towers on TV, over and over, in slow-motion replays, on all kinds of networks (I first caught the horrible news on MuchMusic). Bill Schaffer notes, "Viewers around the world found themselves cast in the role of real-time witnesses" with one Australian TV network miniaturizing the "moment of impact" "as a small animated icon permanently displayed in the corner of the screen, automatically resetting itself at the end of each momentary cycle" (6); did this repetition benumb viewers, creating a kind of atrocity boredom?

Five years later, then, the stage seemed largely set for a wide non-response to the Abu Ghraib photographs. Far from a massive event likened to a blockbuster movie, unfolding in recorded time that could be rewound, slowed down, and paused, the already frozen photographs seemed like small, amateurish snapshots (there were some videorecordings, as noted by reporter Seymour Hersh in an interview and June 2007 New Yorker article, but these received little mention and most were not released). The photos were obviously set-up, the camera like a weapon participating in the humiliation and abuse, and the soldiers all-too-knowing actors; here was choreographed tragedy, not a real-time glimpse of sudden horror. After all, didn't the prisoner, infamously photographed with a hood on and hooked up to electrodes, seem to be in an "obviously contrived and theatrical" pose, "a deliberate invention" for the camera (7) ? Many would not need to imagine what it was like for this man not only because they cannot see his face but because there is no sense he is in serious danger--it is all "a scene staged for the camera". The pictures seem somehow unreal, with the abundance of photos making the abuse and humiliation seem more fragmented, diffuse, and murky, nothing like the two crisp, clear, almost concrete images, replayed over and over, "awesome" in their scale and effect, of two airplanes crashing into and bringing down two landmark, seemingly indestructible buildings. The symbolism is much more potent, too--phallic symbols of modern architecture and Western financial power are toppled by feats of aeronautic engineering.

Both events were immediately differentiated by the American government, the September 11 attacks quickly classified a war--not a criminal act--connected with a vast and shadowy network of jihadists, launching two military invasions in response, while the Abu Chraib photographs were labeled breaches of military conduct and quickly connected to a few bad low-ranking soldiers in the prison--no person ranking above staff sergeant was convicted and "No one has ever been charged for abuses at the prison that were not photographed"--who could be seen in the images. As Susan Sontag pointed out, the Bush "administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs--as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict" (8); the problem of whether or not the torture was "systematic" and based on government "policies" ("Regarding the Torture of Others") was, as Sontag points out, ignored. Specialist Ben Thompson, a key figure in The Prisoner, has said that the photographs became diversionary and remarked in a 2008 interview, "'the culture and the political reality that turned Abu Ghraib into a concentration camp was never addressed.'" (9)

Both events were mediated and distanced by the camera, connected with them and so the photos were not seen as "us". (10) And even if viewers were variously enthralled, horrified, fascinated, or repulsed, if they were watching on a screen, they were removed and safe, as in a theatre (all the more reason, perhaps, to support those over there, in danger). And theatres are where, especially since World War II, we have become used to seeing "war."

As Lawrence Weschler has explained, following ex-Marine and First Gulf War chronicler Antony Swofford's point, Marines pump themselves up by watching war films, avidly following the battle scenes, and they can quote countless lines from them: "There is talk,' Swofford noted [in Jarhead], 'that many Vietnam films are antiwar ... But actually, Vietnam films are all pro-war [for the soldier], no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.'" (11) Weschler wonders if the "(mediumless) medium of cinema is simply incapable of projecting such measured and tentative reconsiderations" of war.

War photographs and other "[i]mages of dead civilians" can "quicken hatred of the foe," (12) as the Abu Ghraib images must have for those groups already fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, but for the American public, the images did not seem to inspire substantial indignation, shame, guilt, or self-examination. (13) As Sontag predicted in May 2004, shortly after some of the photographs were shown (though many, many more were apparently not shown or published), "it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America". If anything, perhaps, the photographs removed the war further from Americans' sense of reality--here was a strange, unreal, posed, decidedly un-American and foreign show being enacted far away.

Documentaries and feature films about Iraq, then, often face a two-headed problem--how to supersede the "real" images of pain and suffering that have already little swayed the majority of the American public, while also avoiding any pornographic glorification of war for the minority going off to fight? And if the soldiers who cheer at Coppola's movie at the Twentynine Palms (14) base theatre in the film adaptation of Jarhead do so in a scene where, as the film's screenwriter (and ex-Marine) Bill Broyles Jr. explains, the theatre's "'screen in this context is both preparing them and shielding them'", a viewer not going overseas to fight will likely only feel that, ultimately, the screen is shielding him or her from reality. Yet is the difference between soldiers in a war and viewers of a documentary or feature about a war more a matter of degree than participation?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The prisoner in the most infamous photo leaked from Abu Ghraib, where he is standing on a chair and has been told that, if he steps off, he will be electrocuted to death (the person who told him this, Sabrina Harman, says "she wasn't sure if he believed her threat and "'He was laughing at us towards the end of the night'"), (16) was nicknamed "Gilligan" by soldiers in Abu Ghraib's 372nd Military Police Company. Another was "sometimes called Mr. Burns, after the scrawny villain on 'The Simpsons'" (17). Sergeant Javal Davis recalled Abu Ghraib as looking "[l]ike something from a Mad Max movie" (18) and said, "'Everyone in theatre had a digital camera ... That was nothing, like in Vietnam where guys were taking pictures of the dead guy with a cigarette in his mouth." Here, he may be further muddling reality and film--in Full Metal Jacket (1987; dir. Stanley Kubrick), one soldier lifts a seemingly sleeping man's hat to reveal an enemy corpse for a photographer to shoot. Art and life and war swirl together in memory.

As Gourevitch and Morris point out, "The nicknames made the prisoners both more familiar and more like cartoon characters, which kept them comfortably unreal when it was time to mete out punishment." The soldiers, stuck in a foreign prison being mortared and in a job without clear operating procedures and no luxuries, mimicked their comfortable unreality, projected it onto their prisoners in order to externalize and lessen their own suffering, setting up a controlled posing in the theatre of war--the Abu Ghraib photos are like a series of tourist souvenirs of how to humiliate the enemy; indeed, on many of the digital photo-cards, they were scattered among sightseeing photos of Iraq.

Sabrina Harman, who took many of the pictures in part, she says, to expose what was being done, also "liked to look," even writing to her father from Iraq, "On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!" (19). The same kind of awe in Jeff Birnbaum's eyewitness recollection of September 11 is echoed here. It is an awe--perhaps borne of Hollywood blockbusters, video-game scenarios, and computer graphics--that makes no sense precisely because it does not consider context. The sight itself is cool, regardless of its situation or reality. Harman would give a thumbs-up pose in any picture: "bathing in an inflatable wading pool;... mounting the ancient stone lion of Babylon at the ruins of King Nebuchadnezzar's city; leaning over the shoulder of an M.P. buddy who is holding a Fanta can on top of which sits a dead cat's head" or "posing with the corpse" of a man beaten to death in Abu Ghraib (20). '"I guess we weren't really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered,' Harman said. 'It was just--Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a photo next to a dead person ... people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they'll take photos of it'" (21). The camera records the strange reality for the soldier, but also removes them from it, keeps them out of the frame, or poses them in control of the situation. Harman, as Gourevitch and Morris point out, did not have a "choice to be the witness to the dirty work on Tier 1A; it was her role. As a woman ... just by her presence, [she would] amplify [the prisoners'] sense of powerlessness." Presumably, if any prisoners knew they were being photographed, that would add to their humiliation, too. And Harman's intent cannot be gleaned from the images, an intent that veered from eager complicity to supposed documenting, as she noted in a letter home to her lover:

I walk down stairs ... to find "the taxicab driver" handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started "poking" at his dick. Again I thought, okay that's funny then it hit me, that's a form of molestation. You can't do that. I took more pictures now to "record" what was going on. What Harman was really doing, Gourevitch and Morris suggest, was using her "memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions to a [photo card or file or] document, she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact." Photography and filming become a way to freeze, stuff, and control reality, confining it to a framed past; the main reason she snapped pictures of the man murdered in custody "'was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to'". The photographs and videotapes settle and comfort the person behind the lens; they do not try to bring justice and truth to the human being they should be asking us to behold. The camera is a narcissistic mirror for the person holding it, an extension of Self and not a reaching out to the Other.

And so if the enemy has become film itself, how to make a film about war or, even more awfully, about Abu Ghraib? As director Michael Tucker noted in an interview, "'People are so jaded with basic human suffering that unless it is sensational, they don't respond to it.'" (22)

The Prisoner

Or: How Three People Made an Anti-Film War Film

Tucker and Petra Epperlein's documentary The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair follows an Iraqi journalist who, with his brothers, is arrested in September 2003 after a raid by American soldiers and accused of plotting to assassinate the current British Prime Minister (on his forthcoming visit to Iraq); after the man was abused, humiliated, threatened, and "interrogated," he and his brothers were held until May 2004, in the inhumane conditions of Camp Ganci, part of Abu Ghraib, before being released, while the Army claims to have no record of Prisoner #151186 or those accusations against him. The film begins with a photograph, but it is nothing like those infamous Abu Ghraib photos, shown again in Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure. This is a photograph of a man holding a videocamera, pointed at us, and he's standing next to a lampshade. The photo itself seems a little unreal, almost animated, and it's pinned to what may be a manila file folder. Below the photo, in a typewriter-like font, are the words of a "Coalition Spokesman": "If they were innocent, they wouldn't be at Abu Ghraib." The camera zooms in and the photo becomes a video image, an image of the same man pointing the camcorder at what definitely seems like us now, waving, and saying "hello." An establishing shot shows what he is shooting--people on a beach, swimming and relaxing and generally having a good time. Then the film's half-whimsical, half-spy music score surfaces. We have been taken from a photo to a videorecording, but one made by the Iraqi man whom, we will soon discover, was at Abu Ghraib, yet he is welcoming us and showing us not only that he's happy--not a simple "victim"--but a side of Iraq we do not expect to see: partly unclothed Muslim men and women on holiday (in sharp contrast to the forcibly unclothed Muslim men in Abu Ghraib). What is redacted here is not information in a file but the identity of a bikinied woman in the water--her privacy protected by a black bar--and then the title of the film, "The Prisoner," is shown next to the man with the camera, now posing as a muscleman on the beach, an image rendered as an animated silhouette (the animations were done by co-director Epperlein). The pose is not a humiliating one, forced upon him in jail, and his playful show of strength is at odds with what we expect from the title. After the Dr. Strangelovesque subtitle appears next to another pose, the unanimated man breaks his exaggerated posture with laughter; this laughter, born of a wry refusal to succumb to the seriousness of tragedy, is one of the main ways this documentary's main character fights, confronts, and co-opts the army's and audience's expectations throughout the film while asserting a distance between subject and viewer. (The theme music and animation also illustrate the surreal, nearly comic nature of the grandiose charge against the man and his brothers--that of plotting to assassinate British PM Tony Blair--a charge as grotesquely cartoonish as the actual Army illustrations on documents representing detainees "without intelligence value" as ghost-robed smiley faces. The animation throughout this documentary also looks ahead to Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, a 2008 kind of "docudranimation" where an ex-soldier sifts through the trauma of his past war, his animated recollections finally turning into actual video footage of massacre.) We are being asked to interpret this scene with little context, but it is a scene that an Iraqi controls, one where he wields the camera.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The radio chatter that began the film returns, and then Tucker and Epperlein return to footage from their previous film, Gunner Palace, where the man who had been holding the camera--Yunis Khatayer Abbas--is now kneeling and handcuffed, and confronted by a camera held by Tucker, embedded with the 2/3 Field Artillery Unit in Baghdad. Yunis protests that he is a "journalist" and a soldier tells him to "shut up. I don't care. We've got a journalist with us, filmin' us right now." Yunis looks at the camera and says, "Yeah, you see that in the camera. ... The mistake of this. ... Yeah, just 'shut your mouth' in Iraq. ... I know that 'shut up'." Here the film asks us to consider persecuted vs. embedded journalism, (23) and suggests not only that journalists can easily be seen as threats, perhaps even the "journalist" shooting the film (indeed, two soldiers soon take the talking Yunis away, perhaps because of a concern about how he could be seen on camera; Yunis later says that, when working as a freelance cameraman, holding the camera was like holding an "RPG' rocket launcher--"very dangerous; you must be careful"--and, indeed, the soldiers who raid his home seize videotapes and CDs, seeming to interpret them as part of a bomb-making kit), but that it is the reader's/viewer's critical interpretation of the piece or video of journalism that matters most. Later, Yunis notes that the equipment the raiding soldiers found only marked him out as a journalist and that many people in the world have "tapes, and camera, video, photo." Yunis and others are shown with cameras, Yunis on the beach pretending to fire his camcorder as if it is a gun. Now the filmmakers, previously embedded with the occupiers but now aligned with the occupied, point their camera at Yunis and reanimate him, only adding to his power, to Yunis' ability to fire back with his images and memories in ways that US forces cannot control or confine.

Yunis' refusal to "'shut up'," along with his sarcastic quoting-back of his captors' orders, epitomizes both a film centred on his verbalized recollections of what happened to him--a constant rebuttal of the official, all-too-brief Army file on him (that manila folder at the beginning)--and his constant talking, writing, and filming back against power (what good journalism should do). We soon hear Yunis' sense of history: he knows that "'shut up'" because, it turns out, he was jailed by Saddam Hussein's son Uday for his journalism, and his sense of what has happened to Baghdad is not a movie-inspired awe but puzzlement ("I can't believe Baghdad. 1000 years. ... Now Americans have Baghdad. Why?"). We soon hear of Yunis' photography and journalism as participation and activism--"I must do something"--and see his photos of a burning, occupied Baghdad (to choral music, another odd subversion of our expectations, merging a traditional Christian form of elegy with an Arab man's documents of his home city's destruction). And we soon hear of Yunis' writing accounts of his imprisonment, while in prison, on cigarette foil, on his underwear, and on his skin, writing over the abuse inflicted on his body. The names, numbers, and fates that Yunis recorded on his underwear, for instance, are crosscut with and opposed to the official typed military reports on prisoners. The ultimate, triumphant importance of Yunis' words are emphasized by isolated captions of dialogue--as Yunis is taken away by the two soldiers, some of his words from his interview, in voiceover, appear on the screen next to the images of him, frozen from the film footage into snapshots. Thus The Prisoner constantly reminds us that the prisoners in Abu Ghraib cannot be reduced to mere images of victimhood and humiliation--they had their own thoughts and words against and about what was being done to them, thoughts and words that can be summoned up and opposed by us, the viewer, to the official statements and sharp orders {"shut up") that also appear as captions sometimes on screen. And then, too, there is trauma that cannot even be hinted at or communicated--Abbas pauses, tries to speak, but then says "I can't--," unable to speak of the arrests or his memory of his father during the raid. His silence voices the inexpressible, denying the ability of any sound or image to even echo a person's past trauma that still aches through them in the present and on into the future. And the structure of the film, this word-, photograph-, video- and silence-collage of Yunis' memories, divided as it is into "Chapters," like parts of a book, photo album, or even comic book, further emphasizes this sense of a man's ongoing, complex, personal life which can only make some sense based on their honest look back, not on any official, outside judgment or reduction of them to an identity as a "prisoner."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Yunis recalls the electric shocks he was tortured with in Uday's Al-Radwaniya prison, there is the animation of a man alone in a small, bar-silhouetted space, the sound of dripping water, and then the sound of buzzing electricity as Yunis mimics what was done to him on his hand. Here, crucially, the animation and non-diegetic sound ask us to more compassionately imagine--not simply see a recreation of--Yunis' trauma. Apocalypse Now and Jarhead editor Walter Murch has commented,

  "The central dilemma of film compared to all other narrative media is
  that it's literal, in that what you see is what was literally there,
  and yet we as filmmakers have to create a spaciousness, a sketchy
  ambiguity, that allows the audience themselves to piece it all
  together and make it powerfully their own."... "The danger of a well
  made bad movie, in this sense, is that it crushes the imagination of
  the audience." (24)

The Prisoner gives Yunis' memories their own space and respect by not superimposing recreations or stark images on them, while allowing the viewer to simply listen to his words and try to extend their imagination a little, with the slightest of artful prompting, to him and his past suffering.

When Yunis recalls the US invasion, he remembers seeing an American soldier and thinking, "Oh, this is an American soldier like Rambo. Wow. I didn't see that before. Just on TV." An animated representation of Stallone's movie character, holding an RPG, flashes on screen. Later, a female interrogator chats with Yunis, trying to coax him to give information by leading the conversation to Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and Clint Eastwood's cowboys in California, selling an image of an America he can move to if he cooperates. Film or TV characters are not used to strip anyone of their humanity here, but to show the cultural stereotypes that the US promoted and set up for themselves as cartoonish ideals (Yunis takes far greater care than any of the soldiers in Gourevitch and Morris' article, for instance, to differentiate between people, asking about the American soldiers abusing and terrorizing him: "Why American do that with me? Not American civilian people, but this guys"). Yunis' dry delivery of his thought about Rambo suggests not only the disappointment of this action hero-stereotype that he soon realized but that many Iraqis' notions of "America" and its soldiers were based on popular images, images soon to be replaced by those of Abu Ghraib; his assertion that "I am not Clint Eastwood, I am not James Bond" defies Americans' cartoonish stereotyping of Iraqis. The sudden, horrible reality of an occupation or invasion is not likened to television or film; instead, Yunis realizes the sharp difference between mediated reality and real life in front of him: "I didn't see that before. Just on TV. I told myself, 'This is the war. Now.'" Then he decided that what he can do is film back, film his non-Hollywood, homeland reality, photograph and recording what he sees around him, not someone else's posed version (The Prisoner shows American soldiers instructing Iraqi children in the street to pose enthusiastically for the camera, making them seem liberators, not occupiers).

Even the interview that makes up the bulk of the film counters the act of interrogation. Yunis reasserts his twin identities of "journalist" and "civilian," not "prisoner." Instead of confession, Yunis offers exposure, revealing through his halting English and occasional pained silences, along with his own re-creations of abuse he suffered, a talking- and taking-back of power. He tells what happens in order that the American military system's official version and their secret, behind-doors abuse not remain the last words or images but are replaced by the perspective that matters most--his (and, by extension, the Iraqi people's). Again, the viewer is asked to slowly realize, to translate for themselves, just how difficult (and perhaps cathartic or therapeutic) it must be for Yunis to recall, reanimate, and re-create these ordeals. But the viewers' interpretation is not prioritized--Yunis' account remains most important; after all, he was actually an interpreter himself while in Camp Ganci, Specialist Ben Thompson recalls in the film, helping to translate between the soldiers and prisoners (Thompson amplifies the sense that Abu Ghraib cannot be reduced to images or words, saying he just doesn't "know how to ... express it"; Thompson is one of the soldiers whom Yunis mentions as a good soldier and their relationship in the film, though they are interviewed in two countries, far away from each other, is mediated by the camera to suggest a link between American Self and Iraqi Other that is a link of respectful difference). It is Yunis who tells the story, Yunis who chooses what to recall or not, Yunis who finds relief or not in certain images, memories, and words, saying in response to the "sorry" he received from a general just before his release after nine months in Abu Ghraib, having never been charged, "I don't need this 'sorry'."

Yunis' refusal to blame "American people inside America," who "didn't know anything about this," he says, stands in marked contrast to the images that provoked widespread blame and led up to the entirely unjustified invasion of Yunis' country, "my country," he reminds the viewer. His analysis, based on his situation, is simple and sharply counters the military tribunals' punishment of low-level officers: "The big generals. They know. The small soldiers, they didn't know. Just 'Yes, sir.' [Those above them,] they must know what happened inside the jail, You see [patting the writing on his underwear]." And so Yunis asks us, the post-9/11 viewer, to see, to see what he recorded and saw, to see from the point of view of an Iraqi civilian and journalist what so many Americans refused to see, that there was an approved system of abuse and torture, perpetrated mainly against innocent Iraqis during the occupation. And then, after the film has prioritized Yunis' account above all, suggested that film itself is not the answer--but only one response (along with writing, photography, even silence), and a response that requires a viewer's careful consideration of who is filming and why they are filming--it offers Yunis' ultimate, triumphal overturning of the occupying forces' imprisoning expectations and impositions. Yunis, this "decent man," as he says and we clearly see, recalls, "Sometimes, thinking, I told myself, maybe when I'm going outside the jail, maybe when I see Tony Blair, I kill him. And cut his head. But when I'm released, [tsks], I can't do that." This innocent man was forced to the point of imagining he would take on the identity pinned on him, yet this confession, coming after his account of imprisonment, interrogation, abuse, sickening food, mortar attacks, and unlawful detention in the camps, defies our judgment as viewers even as it reverses the assumption of guilt. For if a viewer imagines that detainees are guilty, why can an innocent detainee not imagine fulfilling his guilt to spite us?

It's Thompson who reminds us, near the end, "It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a story. It's real." Trauma and horror and death are not just images or words or eyewitness accounts, but actual, visceral pain and suffering that film cannot contain and that we viewers cannot know--"this 'we' ... who has never experienced anything like what they went through" (25)--but should still regard, deeply consider, struggle with, and feel the urgent responsibility to stop, or at least not support or dismiss. [xvi] In its admission of the gulf between real-life participant and film-viewer, the gap between a lived truth and a documentary claim to truth, in its basic refusal to be merely "film, [that] technology ideally suited to the dynamic representation of closely observed reality" (26), The Prisoner acts as a constant counter-insurgent to a containing or comforting or rationalize-able image of horror, one that allows the post-9/11 viewer to numb or detach or offer a cinema-inspired, vengeful response to torture or murder. The Prisoner offers no direct, live (even re-created) images of abuse or suffering because they are too easy to make our own and stamp an official judgment on. They are not yours, Tucker and Epperlern and Abbas's film proclaims. They are Yunis' and the other prisoners', to remember and recover and reclaim as much as they can or want to, for their own sake. For, as Yunis says, turning Bush's meaningless ideals into a personal, pointed plea, his mistaken plural most fitting: "I need peace in Iraq. Freedom. I am not terrorist. I am civilian people and I'm journalist. And I have a heart. You see?" As he pats his arm, a part of a body whose abuses we are, at most, only allowed to imagine, we can, at least, see a little of his point of view, of his truth, and of his reality. And if a viewer does not, it may be less through any flaw of this film than through a deepening fault of war-films, in general, and a failure of compassion within the post-9/11 viewer. It is these twinned abuses of imaginative power--the potential artistic power on screen and the potential sympathetic power in the audience--rather than any "war on terror," that most need to be fought against

Brian Gibson teaches English literature and film studies at Universite Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia; he has also been a longtime film critic for Vue Weekly. He contributed an earlier piece to Cineaction on the concept of "bearing witness" in the Dardenne brothers' films and Michael Haneke's Cache. His essay "'Black guys, my ass': The Queerness of Racism in The Sopranos".

Notes

(1) The following repeats, revises, and adds to the list by Susan Carruthers in her article "No one's looking: the disappearing audience for war," Media, War & Conflict 1.1 (2008); 70-76. In addition to The Prisoner, here are some of the most prominent American-made documentaries dealing with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to appear in the past six years: Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004; dir. Michael Moore); Gunner Palace (2005; dir. Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein); Occupation: Dreamland (2005; dir. Garrett Scott and Ian Olds); The Blood of My Brother (2005; dir. Andrew Berends); The War Tapes (2006; dir. Deborah Scranton); Iraq in fragments (2006; dir. James Longley); Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006; dir. Robert Greenwald) My Country, My Country (2006; dir. Laura Poitras); The Ground Truth (2006; dir. Patricia Foulkrod); Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007; dir. Richard E. Robbins; 2007); No End in Sight (2007; dir. Charles Ferguson); Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007; dir. Rory Kennedy); Taxi to the Dark Side (2007; dir. Alex Gibney); Jerabek (2007; dir. Civia Tamarkin); Body of War (2007; dir. Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro); Standard Operating Procedure (2008; dir. Errol Morris). Then there have been the British and American feature films: Home of the Brave (2006; dir. Irwin Winkler); The Road to Guantanamo (2006; dir. Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom); The Situation (2007; dir. Philip Haas); The Kingdom (2007; dir. Peter Berg); Rendition (2007; dir. Gavin Hood); In the Valley of Elah (2007; dir. Paul Haggis); Badland (2007; dir. Francesco Lucente); Battle for Haditha (2007; dir. Nick Broomfield); Redacted (2007; dir. Brian DePalma); Lions for Lambs (2007; dir. Robert Redford); War, Inc. (2008; dir. Joshua Seftel); Stop-Loss (2008; dir. Kimberly Peirce); The Hurt Locker (2008; dir. Kathryn Bigelow). There have been two American TV series about the second Iraq war: Over There (2005; created by Steven Bochco and Chris Gerolmo); Generation Kill (2008; written by Ed Burns, David Simon, and Evan Wright).

(2) The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006 but an extended version, with footage from an interview with ex-soldier Ben Thompson after he contacted the filmmakers, was released in March 2007. See Michael Tucker, "My Prisoner, My Brother," Vanity Fair online (vf.com), February 20, 2007, <http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/fea-tures/2007/02/abughraib200702>. 10 pp. Accessed March 13, 2009.

(3) Susan Carruthers, "No one's looking: the disappearing audience for war." Media, War & Conflict 1.1 (2008) 73

(4) Jim Lucy, "Broadway Electrical Supply's Jeff Birnbaum recounts his experience as an EMT at the World Trade Center on 9-11," CEE News and Electrical Marketing [now part of EC&M Magazine], February 1 3, 2002, <http://September11.ceenews.com/microsites/newsarticle.asp?mode=print&newsafticle id=285875& releaseid=&srid=10210&magazineid=26&siteid=l3>. Accessed March 11, 2009.

(5) "Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush That Became the Unthinkable," The New York Times, September 12, 2001, <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/nyregion/12VIGN.html?ex=l23708 9600&en=907622a3de96c96d&ei=5070>. Accessed March 5, 2009.

(6) "Just Like A Movie: September 11 And The Terror Of Moving Images," Senses of Cinema 17 (November-December 2001), <http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/l7/symposium/schaffer.html>. Accessed March 13, 2009.

(7) Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, "Exposure," The New Yorker, <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_Iact_goure-vitch>. 13 pp. Accessed March 11, 2009.

(8) "Regarding the Torture of Others," The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html7ex=1400644800&en=a2cb6ea6bd297c8f&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND>. 7 pp. Accessed March 13, 2009.

(9) Shawn Doherty, "Former Abu Ghraib guard says prisoners were treated even worse than was reported," The Capital Times, September 30, 2008, <http://www.madison.com/tct/news/307209>. Accessed March 5, 2009.

(10) At times, even when "we" were considered, it was to make light of what "they" were shown doing in the photos; as Sontag notes, "To 'stack naked men' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh," who replied, "'Exactly! ... and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time'" ("Regarding the Torture of Others"). The "we" and "they" become a patriotic "'our military effort'" that the American audience should rally behind. (This cavalier, not-so-different-from-what-we-do-at-home attitude was epitomized by Donald Rumsfeld's handwritten comment next to his signature on a September 2002 memo concerning new interrogation techniques at Cuantanamo: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limit ed to 4 hours?") Sontag notes the pornographic nature of many of the Abu Ghraib photos, another connection to "sexual humiliation in college fraterni ties and on sports teams" and also to Internet smut; in their dingy, on-thescene poses, the photos perhaps smack a little of the backroom and nightclub nudity-coaxing and -posing Girls Gone Wild videos. In one sequence in The Prisoner, a blackboard in a US Army building in Iraq shows some of the pornographic names for various operations that will be or are being carried out, such as Operations "Gunner-Spank," "Bulldog Gang Bang," and "Big )ism." "Operation Grabass" netted the innocent man at the heart of The Prisoner.

(11) "Valkyries Over Iraq: The trouble with war movies," Harper's Magazine 311.1866 (November 2005): 65.

(12) Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003: 10. Sontag notes that Ernst Friedrich's collection of war photo graphs, "Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!)" (14), was acclaimed by many left-wingers and anti-war activists, "who predicted that the book would have a decisive influence on public opinion" (15), and French director Abel Cance included close-ups of "hideously disfigured ex-combatants" (16) in J'accuse only for World War II to still erupt a year later. Likewise, Weschler notes that, around 1979, when Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Cimino's The Deer Hunter appeared, "There was a lot of talk at the time about how these films were at last going to confront the moral depravity of the Vietnam War" (69).

(13) There are, of course, many other possibilities as to why the most horrifying photographic exposures of military corruption, abuse, and human-rights violations in American history did not result in a great public outcry, a wide spread investigation or reformation of Abu Ghraib, the prison's chain-of-command or interrogation procedures, or even the voting-out of the Bush administration in the national election just six months after the photos appeared on newscasts, in newspapers, and on the Internet. These may include many viewers' sense of the incidents' far-awayness in place and remoteness in time, a kind of 24-inspired idea that harsh tactics are necessary at times of war, the childish notion that, "after all, they (the terrorists) started it" (Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others"), sentiments that the prisoners were still guilty (although many high-ranking officers have commented that around 90% of detainees in Abu Ghraib were innocent, guilty of only minor, noncombat-related charges, or never found guilty of any crime), and a kind of "at least" response ("at least" they weren't killed--although a number of prisoners did die while in detention, from beatings or other torture, mortar attacks on Abu Ghraib, or aggravated medical conditions).

(14) Bruno Dumont's Twenty-nine Palms (2003), while a highly artistic, philosophical, existential-horror film, may also be one of the more disturbing war or anti-war films, culminating as it does in one man's murderous, patriarchal externalization of trauma, after being the victim of a seemingly random act of violence. The film is set in that desolate area of California near the military base and the man has shaved his head, Marine-like, just before emerging from the motel door (echoes of Psycho) to commit his horrific revenge.

(15) Weschler, op.cit.75

(16) Gourevitch and Morris op.cit.

(17-21) ibid

(22) Christine Kearney, "U.S. documentary shows everyday abuse of Abu Ghraib," Reuters, March 25, 2007, <http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN2326524820070326>. Accessed March 15, 2009.

(23) The Self also identifies with and helps the Other here, for not only do Epperlein and Tucker raise the implicit question of which film, the embedded Gunner Palace or mainly one-man interview The Prisoner, is more journalistic, but the directors suggest that Yunis' plight--a journalist attacked in a war zone--could as easily be theirs. As Michael Tucker noted in an interview with me--for Gunner Palace but while he was making The Prisoner--the overlap between Self and Other breaks down any mediated sense of detachment: "It's really chilling--he's 38 years old, just like I am, he's a cameraman, just like I am. Using a word like 'moving' wouldn't even do it justice. You're just sitting there, going, 'I cannot believe that this happened.' I mean, from a dis tance you can believe that it happens, but when you see it up close and per sonal ..." ("Dispatch from Operation Grabass," Vue Weekly, July 7, 2005, <www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id= 2194>. Accessed March 15, 2009.)

(24) Weschler op.cit. 68

(25) Sontag op.cit. 125

(26) Of all the poor reviews of The Prisoner, all of them misunderstanding its form or aim or both, Andrew O'Hehir's shrugging capsule was most unintention ally on the mark in its assessment of the documentary as a "pretty anti-cine matic experience." ("Beyond the Multiplex," 5alon.com, March 22, 2007, <http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/03/22/btm/index3.html>. Accessed March 5, 2009.)