Errol Morris

A graphic from Morris' site that conveys his thought process but also reflects the disorganized layout of the site.

(Assignment #2)

Errol Morris is a documentary filmmaker like no other. Roger Ebert has stated, "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more...Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini." His favorite themes are self-delusion and moral complexity and these are evident in films like The Thin Red Line, Gates of Heaven, and his Oscar-winning The Fog of War. These films often start out by trying to delineate and explain certain phenomenon--like Robert McNamara's involvement in WWII and Vietnam in The Fog of War or the inner workings of a pet cemetary in Gates of Heaven--but end up only as arguments for the complexity of human existence because of the moral dilemmas, innumerable perspectives, and subjective nature of experience that Morris presents. Despite this ambiguity and backwardsness of reality, Morris is completely devoted to the idea of objective truth.
Morris' website is a hodge-podge of his writing, interviews, sample video clips, ramblings, truisms, and updates on his new works. The layout of the website itself is visually pleasing, if not equally as jumbled as its content. But let me emphasize, the life and work of Morris is much more the focus of the site. This seemingly random collection of media and content may appear unrelated, disorganized, and thus unimportant, but it offers a good glimpse of what Morris' approach to art and life is.
As awesome as I make Morris appear to be, he is a hopelessly pessimistic and misanthropic person. But his view is definitely valid, especially in the face of all the unwarranted optimism that people console themselves with. Morris writes, "I am a secular anti-humanist." Perhaps what sets Morris apart from other rambling fatalists is the intelligence and wit of his presentation of ideas.
One amazing ability that Morris has is getting people to say things in interviews and on film that are truly revelatory. In 3 minute interview with Donald Trump on the website, Trump discusses the Citizen Kane and the corruption of wealth and unhappiness that it can bring. There is an awful and awesome irony because of Trump's obvious similarities to Kane. For most of the video, Trump seems to admit his own unhappiness and insufficiencies in a way usually hidden under his hyper-masculine and successful exterior. In the last seconds though, Morris asks Trump what advice he would give to Kane, and Trump replies, "Get yourself a different woman!" and alas, the contradictions of Trump's persona come full circle with a beautifully succinct, misogynist comment.




In a series of essays on the website that were also written for the New York Times, Morris explores the nature of truth and photography. Can a photo be true? What exactly can one determine from a photograph? Morris explores the origins of 2 famous early war photographs taken by Roger Fenton in the mid 1800's. The photos are nearly identical pictures of an empty field and deserted road with canonsballs lying on the ground. In one photo, there are canon balls on the road and in the other, there are not. The great mystery behind these photos is which one came first and which one is staged. One assumes that somebody moved canon balls onto the road or off after the first picture to create dramatic effect. Morris becomes obsessed with this mystery and over the course of 3 extremely long articles, he interviews and enlists an array of art historians and forensic specialists, travels to Crimea where the photos were taken and ruminates on the nature of art and photography. The article is unbelievably engrossing, so I won't ruin the ending here. In Morris' new movie set to come out in April, Standard Operating Procedure, he embarks on a similarly obsessive search for truth in the famous torture photos taken at Abu Ghraib. In this video, Morris talks briefly about this.
But, let's not forget Morris' great comic side. In his reinterpretation of the story of Pandora's Box (Pandora opens a box that unleashes all the evils of the world, but at the bottom of the box is hope, which is supposed to make up for the evil), Morris posits that hope is the final most evil pestilence released from the box.
Morris on natural selection and intelligent design:

I look at the world of fauna and flora around me, and it becomes completely obvious that it can not be explained by the processes of natural selection. Natural selection would have done a better job. That's why, I believe in unintelligent design. The sheer idiocy of it all has to be explained by something, doesn's it? A mentally retarded creator? A flawed plan? An idea improperly thought out? Or an idea enacted hastily? (Six days, by the way, has always seemed to me to be rushing things.)