AWARDS/
ERROL MORRIS
PERSISTENCE OF VISION
Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award
This award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker whose work is crafting documentaries, short films, animation or work for television.
An Evening with
Errol Morris
Tuesday, April 29
7:30 pm
Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
1881 Post Street (at Fillmore)
Singular documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, recipient of this year’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, will engage in an onstage interview followed by a screening of his latest work, Standard Operating Procedure.
Fact and Friction
By Pamela Troy
A few years ago, during a screening of Errol Morris’s Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a woman in the audience walked out. When asked why she was leaving, she replied that the film was so biased against the death penalty that, as a death penalty supporter, she had no interest in sitting through it.
The subject of that documentary is no death penalty opponent, nor is the film a denunciation of the death penalty. It is a portrait of a weirdly humane designer of electric chairs who became a propagandist for holocaust revisionists. And yet one facet of this multifaceted film, Fred Leuchter, Jr.’s unflinching description of the physical realities of an execution, had struck someone so forcibly that she’d interpreted it as a direct attack on capital punishment.
Watching an Errol Morris documentary is like listening to a gifted storyteller. His movies engage and mesmerize, whether they involve pet burial, a chair-bound physicist or the Vietnam War. With the precision of a juggler, Morris juxtaposes images and interviews so deftly that traditional narration is unnecessary and his films move forward with the momentum of well written fiction. Errol Morris documentaries are ultimately essays that nudge his audience towards ideas that can fascinate, amuse and outrage.
Now that Errol Morris is one of America’s most well known documentary filmmakers and the winner of an Academy Award for his 2003 film, The Fog of War, it’s easy to forget that his approach was originally seen as either revolutionary or an affront to documentary filmmaking. His first film, Gates of Heaven, about a bankrupt pet cemetery business, was described as “impertinent” by Alan Berger of the Boston Herald, who also called Morris’s spare, unsentimental style “a cinematic reincarnation of Flaubert.” Roger Ebert flatly declared Gates of Heaven one of the ten best films ever made. Vernon, Florida, which followed in 1981, was accused by some of mocking its subjects, the residents of a small town in Florida, while Janet Maslin defended his depiction as “humorous, idiosyncratic and fond.”
But it was The Thin Blue Line—Morris’s 1988 film about a man unjustly convicted for murder—that made him famous. In an era where most people still considered a documentary to be a longer version of a 60 Minutes segment, with a straightforward premise and colorless objectivity, Errol Morris’s filmmaking included dramatic reenactments, an eerie score by Philip Glass and even playful clips from old films. Though it was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as the best feature documentary of 1988, awarded the D.W. Griffith Award by the National Board of Review and ultimately resulted in freeing the accused man, Randall Adams, from death row, The Thin Blue Line was snubbed by the Oscars, garnering not a single nomination. Some appeared to doubt whether nonfiction offered in the style of a narrative film could be reliable, or indeed qualify as “documentary.”
Errol Morris, who was born in Hewlett, Long Island in 1948, has a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin. He’s studied science history at Princeton, philosophy at UC Berkeley and worked for a while in the ’80s as a private investigator. This background may offer insight into the work of a man who has so altered our conception of the documentary. History, science, philosophy, private investigation, all involve the compilation of facts leading to a conclusion that can be as abstract as theoretical physics or as concrete as the accusation of a crime.
After The Thin Blue Line came A Brief History of Time, Morris’s portrait of physicist Stephen Hawking, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a celebration of the obsessions that drive such disparate individuals as a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robot engineer and a man who studies mole rats; Mr. Death; and his Academy Award–winning documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a riveting exploration of the anguish of a man who now regrets his own impact on history. Morris’s latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, deals with the scandal at Abu Ghraib by focusing and musing on the shocking photographs that made the name Abu Ghraib a byword for the darkest aspects of American power.
The common thread in these documentaries is the pursuit of something as close as possible to the truth. To achieve this, Errol Morris combines showmanship and research with almost ruthless detachment. He simply allows his subjects to speak. “What we are concerned with” Morris has said, “is how they see the world instead of whether what they say is right or wrong.”
Whether the result is mockery or dignity, banality or surprising insight, can depend entirely on the viewer. Like any truly gifted storyteller, Morris knows that a story is best told with respect for the audience, and a willingness to allow them to draw their own conclusions.
Pamela Troy is a freelance writer who has published in The Nob Hill Gazette, Culturevulture.net and Space and Time. She works as the CinemaLit Coordinator at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco.
FESTIVAL SCREENING
Standard Operating Procedure
Selected Filmography
2008 Standard Operating Procedure
2003 The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
2001 First Person (TV)
1999 Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
1997 Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
1991 A Brief History of Time
1991 The Dark Wind
1988 The Thin Blue Line
1982 Vernon, Florida
1980 Gates of Heaven
Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award previous recipients
2007 Heddy Honigmann
2006 Guy Maddin
2005 Adam Curtis
2004 Jon Else
2003 Pat O’Neill
2002 Fernando Birri
2001 Kenneth Anger
2000 Faith Hubley
1999 Johan van der Keuken
1998 Robert Frank
1997 Jan Svankmajer
