With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

You're probably thinking you don't need another documentary about the Iraq War. But you're wrong, because Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is finally being released, and the film is one of three necessary docs dealing with Iraq. The triad, which would make a great box set if only the same company distributed all three films, also includes Charles Ferguson's very highly acclaimed Sundance jury-award-winner No End in Sight (on which Gibney was a producer) and Patricia Foulkrod's under-appreciated 2006 work The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends.

What do they have in common? Well, if you put them together and watch them all, you'll feel like an expert on three important aspects of the war and its most significant repercussions. They may not tell you everything there is to know about the Iraq War, but they're more thorough and informative than most. No End in Sight is the most directly involved with the actual conflict, from its causes to its effects (read Kim's review here). The Ground Truth more specifically deals with the American soldiers, but in an all-encompassing, training-to-homecoming portrait of modern combat and its consequences (see my review here). Taxi to the Dark Side is sort of like a flip side to that film, though it doesn't necessarily focus on the enemy combatants. Instead it deals with suspected enemies, soldiers or otherwise, who are held and oftentimes tortured in prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

Taxi to the Dark Side somewhat falls outside the box (set), though, in that it really isn't about Iraq. In fact, Gibney insists that his documentary is not an 'Iraq film.' Yes, it does feature a lot of details about, and footage of, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, which is probably the best-known prison of its kind, but it also prominently features Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the two other facilities used in the detention and interrogation of individuals presumed to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency or any other enemy of the U.S. in its "War on Terror."

I like reading blogs from filmmakers, whether they're periodic reports on how a specific film is going, discussions about movies the filmmaker has been watching, or essays about anything that catches the blogger/filmmaker's attention. So you can imagine how pleased I was to learn that documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) has just started a new blog over at the online version of The New York Times. Morris's blog is called Zoom: A Filmmaker Uncovers the Hidden Truths of Photos -- the tagline tells me that this isn't going to be a "Today we edited that scene with the banana" type of filmmaker blog.

Morris has only posted one entry thus far, but it's thought-provoking and is spurring discussions around the film-blogging universe. (I am not using the word "blogosphere.") In fact, it's already received more than 140 comments. He brings up the topic of whether a photo is "true" or "false" and demonstrates why he feels that is a ridiculous label to attach to any image. It is an interesting debate for anyone who watches documentary films, especially in light of the criticism heaped upon Michael Moore for showing footage in films like Sicko that is sometimes considered to be taken out of context or otherwise labeled as "false." Anthony Kaufman (on whose site I found the link to Morris's blog) wonders if the entry was inspired by the Abu Ghraib photos. Morris's upcoming documentary, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, is about the Abu Ghraib scandal. I hope Morris will post more blog entries along the same lines, although I also wouldn't mind hearing about the film he's working on, as well.

Whatever you might think about the war in Iraq, it has created an entire subgenre of films in the past few years, mostly documentaries. We've seen films focusing on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, films shot from the point of view of ordinary Iraqi citizens, films about Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, and last year I even saw a documentary about USO comedians entertaining troops in Iraq. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair is one of the latest in this series, and it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from the comedians' point of view. The documentary examines the experiences of a prisoner of war sent to Abu Ghraib.

Yunis Abbas is a longtime journalist and photographer in Iraq. In 2003, U.S. military invaded his home on the grounds that it was a suspected terror cell. Abbas and his brothers were thought to be making bombs to assassinate Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair. Abbas spent nine months in Abu Ghraib even though no evidence could be found to support the allegations, and the U.S. was aware that he had no useful information to impart about terrorism plots.

There's an infamous essay about David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, which was financed in part by Canadian tax dollars: "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is; After All, You Helped Pay For It." A paraphrase of that title rang in my mind as I watched the Sundance documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: We should know how bad this situation is; after all, we've all helped pay for it. Director Rory Kennedy combines interviews, photos and on-site footage from Iraq's infamous prison -- which went from being Saddam Hussein's execution factory to being the site of an American scandal -- to make a potent piece of documentary filmmaking that demonstrates a clear chain of lawless, inhuman cruelty and corruption that went from the gleaming conference tables of the Oval Office and Pentagon to the blood-spattered, shit-smeared halls of a prison in Iraq.

Kennedy's methodology is meticulous and human -- many of the ex-service people who served time for the documented prisoner abuses captured in the infamous photographs speak on-camera about what they did, and why; several Iraqis are interviewed as well. Soldiers talk about how superior officers gave them minimal or conflicting guidance on how much pressure was too much pressure to induce captives to talk; ex-captives of Abu Ghraib talk about how, for example, they watched as their father was beaten so severely it lead to respiratory illness, which led to death -- with medical attention denied every time it was begged for by a weeping son.

It is no surprise that someone is planning a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal; there will probably be a few. Already there is Robert Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, which deals with one aspect of the prisoner abuse, and the PBS series Frontline has included the incident in its recent episode titled "The Lost Year in Iraq". However, there's a good chance that no others are or will be as good as the one Errol Morris is set to make. The project was announced Sunday by Diane Weyermann of Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth) during the American Film Market.

Morris has a habit of making docs that stand out even in the non-fiction genre, which despite having a seemingly general form is still comprised of distinct and divergent subgenres and styles. It is also important to point out that there is no way of knowing how this film will look or sound, considering none of Morris' films are anything alike. It is interesting, though, that he is going for another politically-tinged subject after making The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, for which he finally won his first Oscar (his most worthy, The Thin Blue Line, was ineligible for unfair reasons). As much as I will look forward to his take on Abu Ghraib, I kind of hope that he'll follow it with something less topical. There's enough political docs out there already, and Morris doesn't, or shouldn't, require such marketable subject matter.

Sony Classics, which also released The Fog of War, is already on board to distribute the film when ready.