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When Morris told Werner Herzog about his debut, Gates
of Heaven, the German director scoffed and said if the
documentarian could get it made, he'd eat his shoe. Les
Blank later shot the payback, Werner Herzog Eats His
Shoe (1980).
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A Brief History
of Errol Morris
Guild
Theatre, 829 SW 9th Ave, 221-1156 all shows are $6
Gates of Heaven
7 pm Friday-Saturday, March 17-18.
Vernon, Florida
8:45 pm Friday-Saturday, March 17-18.
The Thin Blue Line
6 pm Sunday, 7 pm Monday, March 19-20
A Brief History of Time
8 pm Sunday, 9 pm Monday, March 19-20
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (with Stairway to Heaven)
7 pm Wednesday-Thursday, March 22-23
"If you let people talk, you avoid interrupting them, they
will reveal to you, in short order, who they really are." --Errol
Morris
There's an easy way to look at Errol Morris documentaries.
In fact, when you simply describe them to people, it sounds
like a Ripley's Believe It or Not freak show. There
are the residents of Vernon, Fla., for example. There's
the fixated turkey (or, as he calls them, "gobblers") hunter
who claims their sounds cause diarrhea, and the couple who
thinks sand grows because of radiation, and the man who
calmly looks into the camera, points to his pet turtle and
says, "You may think that's a turtle, but it's a squirrel."
There's Fred Leuchter, the focus of Mr. Death, a
proud man who's spent his life repairing capital-punishment
machines so that inmates' deaths will be more "humane."
And there's Dan, the hippie son of a pet cemetery owner
in Gates of Heaven, Morris' humorous, poignant look
at the bleak lifestyles of pet cemetery owners, who nonetheless
endure through the power of positive thinking. Dan's going
nowhere, and his ideology is all screwed up. But Morris
captures one triumphant moment: In the late afternoon, Dan
sets up his 100-watt speakers, aims them at the emptiness
of Napa Valley, plugs in his electric guitar and sonically
rages against it all. Is Dan strange? Yes. But underneath,
he's as frustrated as the rest of us, and his solo rock
concert doesn't just make us laugh, it makes us want to
weep.
As anyone who watched, say, American Movie can attest,
dismissing documentaries as boring presentations of facts
and data is like saying you don't like foreign films because
you have to read subtitles. This description may summarize
documentaries honored by the Academy, but innovative, influential
documentarians like Morris don't win Oscars. Starting with
his 1978 debut, Gates of Heaven, Morris steadily
evolved into not just a great documentary filmmaker but
simply one of the world's greatest filmmakers, period. His
movies raise ethical questions about heady subjects like
death, the validity of justice and the existence of space
and time, and remain ambiguous about the answers. He populates
his work with everyday and extraordinary people, rich and
thought-provoking moments that seem deceptively simple,
and yes, they're some of the weirdest, most off-center characters
this side of David Lynch--except very, very real.
If you've never caught an Errol Morris film, or if you're
a fan who hasn't seen his eye-popping visuals on the big
screen, gear up for the next couple of weeks. Morris-mania
is hitting Portland for two weeks, starting with a weeklong
retrospective at the Guild on Friday. After that, Morris'
latest work, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A.
Leuchter, Jr., finally opens here at Cinema 21. Need
more Errol? You will. His new, weekly television series,
First Person, runs on Bravo every Wednesday night.
The show is pure Morris; he records people talking about
their lives, including an autistic woman who came up with
a more "humane" way of slaughtering cattle and another woman
who married two serial killers (in succession).
It's appropriate, in fact, to watch Morris' films in this
over-saturated manner, all of them clumped together, seeing
one screening after another. Not only do overlapping themes
and ideas emerge, but his work, driven by obsession, rewards
such compulsive behavior. Before he became a filmmaker,
Morris was a private detective. Though the two vocations
don't seem to connect (Morris is very much about finding
connections where they don't seem possible), investigation--the
need to dig continually deeper--controls the center of all
his work. Morris once said that, when it comes right down
to it, detective work is really just people talking to each
other and their willingness to give you information about
themselves. The same idea exists in his filmmaking approach.
From Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line--his
famous portrait of Randall Adams, an innocent man on death
row--to his unusual biography of philosopher-scientist Stephen
Hawking, A Brief History of Time, to the tiny profiles
of odd strangers on First Person, Morris makes movies
that feature people who talk and then talk some more. His
interview process is always the same: Morris just turns
the camera on and lets them go. You rarely hear his voice
and never see him, because he wants absolute intimacy between
his subjects and his audience. What's perplexing about these
interviews (well, besides how and where Morris found some
of these people) is how candid and confessional they become.
Regardless of his subject matter, Morris' unobtrusive interview
style allows his subjects ample room for revelation and
confession, and in the case of Leuchter, plenty of space
to suffocate themselves.
His inspiration varies from film to film. Gates of Heaven
sprung from a newspaper article about pet cemeteries; Vernon,
Florida started as a film about a bizarre form of insurance
fraud, by which an unusual number of the city's residents
suffered "accidental amputations," but turned into a hilarious
yet ultimately respectful profile of small-town eccentricity.
Sometimes Morris will talk with subjects for years with
a theme in mind, as he did with Fred Leuchter; other films
emerge after he shoots random subjects, such as the thematically
driven Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a tale of
four men--a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a robot designer
and a mole-rat specialist--consumed by their work and trying
to alter nature. Some critics say Morris patronizes his
subjects and mocks them, but in all of these movies he never
takes sides with any position he examines. He does, however,
align himself by returning to similar subjects. The pet
cemetery owners, the wild turkey hunter, Randall Adams,
Fred Leuchter, Stephen Hawking--who possesses a brilliant
mind but can't control his own body--and the four men in
Fast, Cheap are linked by power (or lack thereof),
obsession and a desire to control the uncontrollable. In
this way, you can add Morris to his own list of restless
eccentrics, because camera in hand, the director is very
much like his subjects.
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 15,
2000
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