Errol Morris is about as accessible as his movies. That is to say, very accessible, but only in a roundabout sort of way. The eccentric American director has made only seven films and an 11-part television series – all of these characterizing his own brand of peeling-away-the-layers documentary. They blend seemingly unrelated people and their off-kilter interests and obsessions with Morris’ own scientific, philosophic and whimsical musings on the most unexpectedly fascinating human subjects. His consistently engrossing takes on the everyday and the inherently universal, are taking Cinma du Parc by storm this month and next. The theatre’s programmers pay homage to his genius in representing everyday cultural phenomena by offering an extensive retrospective of his work that includes just about everything except his mostly sub-par big name-brand commercials.
Morris’ unique tendency toward kernels of truth unearthed through his otherwise surrealist, tongue-in-cheek filmmaking tactics are unmistakable. They tend to flavour his films in a way that belies life’s many-veined disparities while speaking to its overarching connections. In an interview – a rare thing – with The New Yorker, the filmmaker said, “I like the idea of making films about ostensibly nothing. That’s what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we’re in a position of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we’re just a bunch of apes running around.”
The apex of Morris’ films-about-nothing-which-are-really-about-everything – or at least the one you, dear reader, might know him best (or at all) for, is The Thin Blue Line, which is not, under any circumstance, to be mistaken for Malick’s “Red” one. Blue Line is Morris at his best – telling a story that’s already been told, but from his manic, detail-obsessed and “greater truth”-seeking brain. The movie rehashes a real-life murder case in the American south and makes the outcome of its subsequent trial seem implausible, unfair, stupid. My synoptic breakdown ends there since you’ve probably already heard about the film and you’re waiting for this article to get to the good stuff. If not and you keep asking yourself “Who’s Errol Morris? Why should I care?” you’re in for a treat. You don’t have to be a cinephile film nerd to appreciate the madness of Morris. But it helps.
Perhaps the most interesting of the sacrificial offerings to the God of Errol at Cinma du Parc next month is their presentation in two parts of First Person, Morris’ television mini-series spotlighting the subjects/characters of his past films and the bizzaro aspects of their freakishly captivating lives in direct interview form. Sound boring? Fool! Morris is famous for a device he created whereby the strategic placement of a series of cameras and teleprompters allow the interviewer and his subject to maintain eye-contact while looking into the camera’s lens and appearing, somewhat disarmingly, to address the audience directly. None of this sideways glance, CBC news interview junk. Morris has officially registered his invention, fondly referring to it as the Interrotron (I call this arrangement, with 20 or more cameras, the Megatron) and it is just this kind of traditional form (the interview) with a stylish quirk (Interrotron) that lends so many of Morris’ films their completely absorbing air of outlandishness.
Also not to be missed is Vernon, Florida, his 1982 documentary about the inhabitants of this sleepy swamp town who regularly get together to discuss – what else? – “turkey-hunting, gator-grunting and the meaning of life.” If you’ve ever found yourself swept into one of Morris’ movies – glued to the big screen by his stories, scores, sarcastic subtlety and reverence for Every Man – then you will likely be so-enamoured of his other works. The playful seriousness with which Morris displays Stephen Hawking’s whole life as if it was also the entire universe’s in A Brief History of Time is shivery and amazing. His intricate portraits of executioner and holocaust denier Fred Leuchter Jr. in Mr. Death and of Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara in this year’s Oscar nominated The Fog of War are brilliant and terrifying.
I’m not ashamed to admit I haven’t seen Fast, Cheap and Out of Control or Gates of Heaven, the other two Morris works playing at Cinma du Parc, and therefore can’t assure you of their greatness. But you can bet your bag of overpriced popcorn I’ll be glued to my seat in coming weeks: transfixed, skeptical, gazing into the yawning abyss of the infinite, reflected in the whimsical glint in the eyes of each of Morris’ zany subjects. Nothing is to be missed
