the black angel's death song

A frame from The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris's greatest film.

The first Errol Morris film I saw was 1997’s Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. I couldn’t have been older than fourteen as I came across it on IFC; all I knew about Morris was that he had made one of Roger Ebert’s favorite films of all time (Gates of Heaven, 1978), but being that I hadn’t been able to track that one down, I settled for what I could see right then. At first, I was just utterly mystified. My knowledge of documentaries was limited at best, so seeing a film as wildly inventive—and true!—as Morris’s shocked me as much as, say, Godard’s Breathless (1960). By the end of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, I knew I had seen a masterpiece, something that would become ever clearer on subsequent viewings.

Some months later, I finally tracked down Gates of Heaven, which while a fascinating (and fascinated) portrait of a group of eccentric people, lacked the formal integrity of Morris’s later work. After watching those two films repeatedly, I kind of forgot about Morris and documentary filmmaking in general. I was just getting into avant-garde filmmaking, silent film and the nouvelle vague, so I had no interest in finding the other works by Morris that I knew were out there.

Cut to two months ago and I come across The Thin Blue Line (1988), a film I’d read about extensively but had never gotten around to watching. I knew the basic story—it involved the murder of a police officer and in the process of making the film, Morris had been able to build a convincing case in defense of the person who was in jail at the time. I sat through it, completely amazed (even more so than I had been during my first Morris film), trying to figure out how this guy had managed to get such a captivating—not to mention cinematic—story from what appeared to be just a mundane crime, the sort that wouldn’t even fill an hour-long episode of Law and Order. Morris’s mind-boggling insight, coupled with an irresistible score by Philip Glass, assured me that this was quite possibly one of the great films of the 1980s.

Following my experience with The Thin Blue Line, it was imperative that I seek out the rest of this man’s work. In the meantime, I began reading a series of brilliant essays Morris has been writing for the New York Times since last August, mostly concerning the subject of photography and the issues of truth and validity that it raises (i.e. the prime subject of all of his films). I also knew Morris was working on a film about Abu Ghraib, titled Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which I haven’t been able to see just yet. Yesterday, however, I did manage to catch up with three Morris films previously unseen by me—1991’s A Brief History of Time, 1999’s Mr. Death and 2003’s The Fog of War—all but confirming that he is one of the great film directors working today, documentarians or otherwise.

A Brief History of Time takes its title from the 1988 book written by the film’s subject, Stephen Hawking. It is not, however, an overview of Hawking’s ideas, but instead a character study of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century (and maybe of other eras, as well). It starts in 1942, with Hawking’s birth and carries us through his rather normal childhood and his years at Oxford as an apathetic undergraduate. At age 21, Hawking develops Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis just as he was arriving at Cambridge to be a research student. Morris illustrates some of Hawking’s ideas about the origin of the universe through the use of charts, graphs and even a falling tea cup, although it’s clear that he’s not trying to instruct us or turn us into experts on theoretical physics. Instead, I would argue that Morris’s aim is to let this man’s journey into brilliance wash over us, thereby understanding something about what drives all humans to excel. The film’s last words, spoken by Hawking, may be the most eloquent ever spoken about the beauty of science.

Mr. Death (subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter”) was a clear change of direction for Morris. He tackled a controversial subject—Holocaust denial, among other things—that many people were interested in and knew about before seeing the film, which differs from the shocks of The Thin Blue Line, since it’s likely that even people who lived in Dallas County weren’t aware of the crime analyzed in the film. Fred Leuchter is an extermination technician—he calls himself the world’s foremost expert of the field—who, precisely because of the esoteric nature of his work, was contacted by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel to travel to Auschwitz and find sufficient evidence that gas chambers were not used there or at any of the other concentration camps. Clearly way above his head, Leuchter goes to the camps, comes back to the U.S. with wall and floor samples personally chiseled by him, and testifies before a Canadian court that gas chambers couldn’t have been used by Nazis during World War II. For someone who went into this whole debacle without any moral stake, Leuchter certainly got the short end of the stick (whether he is to blame for this is the major dilemma addressed in the film). Following the controversy, his wife leaves him; he is labeled an anti-Semite and can’t find any work. Filled with Morris’s usual striking images (one, of an electrocuted elephant, may be the most disturbingly memorable) and brilliantly scored by Caleb Sampson (who also did the music for Fast, Cheap and Out of Control), Morris crafts yet another important character study that is likely to captivate for many years to come.

Morris’s next film, The Fog of War (subtitled “Eleven Lessons From the Life or Robert S. McNamara”), is the first of his films to receive an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and though far from his strongest work, it certainly deserved it. Other than Henry Kissinger, Robert Strange McNamara is the best-known and most controversial cabinet member to have been involved in the structuring of the Vietnam War. Unlike every other Morris film, where various people are always interviewed, The Fog of War’s sole subject is McNamara, although there is supplemental information in the way of archival footage—as in all of Morris’s films—as well as recorded conversations of McNamara with Kennedy, Johnson and others. Like A Brief History of Time and Mr. Death, it begins by giving us some background information about the subject before delving into the issue at hand. Morris structures his films into different segments, each illustrating a different lesson learned by McNamara, including “Empathize with your enemy,” “Belief and seeing are often both wrong” and “You can’t change human nature.” Surely you could apply all of these to virtually every war ever fought in all of human history, but Morris’s focus seems to start with WWII (particularly through the decision to bomb basically all Japanese cities, quite literally burning the entire country) and moves into Vietnam, all while drawing comparisons to Iraq—although that particular war nor Donald Rumsfeld are ever mentioned.

After watching mostly all of Morris’s feature films, with the exception of 1981’s Vernon, Florida and his current Standard Operating Procedure, I came to the conclusion that the most remarkable thing about them is that he’s been able to, through all of his distinct projects and subjects, continue exploring themes that appear to be very personal to him, namely the sometimes untrustworthy human perception and judgment. More than anything, however, all of his films—yes, including Mr. Death—are about lives being lived, and maybe that’s all we can rightly ask of a documentary.