The curious reality-probing documentaries of Errol Morris
The cinematic medium of documentary filmmaking is inherently a search for truth in a complex world that so often toys with fiction and myth. Indeed, some of the greatest documentarians ever to grace the industry, from Werner Herzog to Frederick Wiseman to Errol Morris, each concerned themselves with this pursuit of truth, whether they’re tackling grand cultural subjects or specific biographical works.
Known for his idiosyncratic style and consumable documentary works, Morris is known to have made some of the medium’s finest films after taking to the industry with Gates of Heaven in 1973. A filmmaker with a deft human touch, Morris’ debut demonstrated the director’s skill for handling such ponderous and philosophical stories with remarkable focus and genuine empathy.
A touching documentary regarding a pet cemetery in Napa County, California, that was being exhumed, Morris first came across the project after reading about it in the San Francisco Chronicle, with his friend and filmmaking peer Werner Herzog promising to eat his show if the film ever came to fruition. Herzog fatefully gnawed on his own leathery shoe after the film was released, sparking consistent 20th-century success for Morris, with the celebrated police documentary, The Thin Blue Line, following in 1988.
Unafraid of flouting the conventions of documentary, while Morris’ films reside in the category of cinéma vérité, his style contradicts this, going against the stripped-back nature of such films to include stylised camerawork and musical scores. As such, the films of Morris are unable to be categorised and are, in and of themselves, idiosyncratic, embracing the contemporary styles of the 1970s that were inspired by the free-spirited filmmaking of the French new wave.
Sharing many similarities with contemporary documentary filmmaking, Morris’ films pulse with a vibrant identity, using recreations to make the often-criticised stale medium pop with cinematic vigour. Such similarities to contemporary documentaries don’t stop there either, with Morris being highly attuned to the issue of authenticity in modern life, constantly questioning what’s real and what isn’t in each one of his curious movies.
Such can be seen throughout his entire filmography, including 1997’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, his 2003 Oscar winner Fog of War and 2008’s harrowing Standard Operating Procedure, with each one challenging the audience’s opinion on the subject of truth. Morris didn’t achieve this through direct interrogation either. He allowed the honesty to unfold through conversation with his subjects.
As the filmmaker states in an interview with Cafe: “I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much…the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it…the most interesting and most revealing comments have come not as a result of a question at all, but having set up a situation where people actually want to talk to you, and want to reveal something to you”.
Often obsessing over strange people in otherworldly situations, the documentaries of Morris probe into the psyche of the human mind and question why we are who we are and how lives are shaped by fiction. A fascinating mind who seems genuinely gripped by the construct of contemporary life, no one has the ability to focus on the world’s wondrous, terrifying and hilarious reality quite like Morris.
