Voice By Matt Zoller Seitz @ Roger Ebert

Errol Morris’ documentary “Separated” is about an act of cruelty carried out on a massive scale: the forcible division at the US-Mexico border of immigrant parents from their children. It’s illuminating in the most chilling way. Morris’ characteristically cool, analytical approach contains the inherent emotion of the subject matter. Horror arises from the uninflected presentation of information. The movie feels less like a prosecutorial document than an autopsy of a government’s conscience, pinpointing the time of death.

A lot of the movie is about correcting misinformation and obfuscation purveyed by the first Trump administration in presenting the policy to the media and the citizenry. A big one is the insistence that the policy was not new; that it was functionally no different from anything that other presidential administrations had done at the border through the unaccompanied children program, which is part of the Office of Refugee Resettlement; and that it’s ultimately not really any different from what happens to a US citizen with children who gets arrested for a crime and incarcerated.

But as Morris’s movie points out, the unaccompanied children program was intended to help children who had come over the border on their own, without adults, or whose parents had warrants and got arrested by US authorities. It was never meant to deliberately separate parents and children in every family that came over the border, resulting in what is described here as state-created orphans. The Trump administration changed that as part of what it described as a “zero tolerance” policy. The point was to scare anyone thinking of coming to the US without authorization (despite the fact that there have always been laws and due process to deal with such incidents).

The change, says Jonathan White, former Deputy Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, meant that “harm to children would be part of the point. They thought it would terrify families into not coming.” Elaine Duke, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, says the ORR quickly ran out of “beds for babies” and there are statistics showing a tenfold rise in the number of children being put into the system, often kept in facilities with no beds, out of contact from their parents. “We were very concerned that some children’s separation would be permanent,” Duke says.

White debunks the idea that what happened to parents and children at the border under Trump was no different from a mother or father getting arrested in an American city and put in jail. “When an individual is arrested for a crime, yes, they may be taken away from their child,” White says, “but they know where their child is.” Illegally entering the United States is a misdemeanor that is typically processed in a matter of days, he says, but under Trump there was an effort to get children into what were essentially incarceration facilities more quickly, “before the parents’ processing could be complete,” so that the parents would emerge from the processing having lost their children and being unable to find out what happened to them.

Morris’s mode here is reminiscent of some of the classic documentaries he made in the early aughts, including “The Fog of War” and “Dr. Death,” in that it often leans on graphic elements or abstractions (such as zoetrope cartoons of people crawling through fences) and some re-creations. The latter are shot like an action-adventure movie and are the only stylistically discordant or distracting note; the verbal descriptions of what happened to parents and children, and the voices and faces of the former government officials describing it, are so intensely moving that the dramatizations are putting a hat on top of another hat, so to speak.

But this is a minor complaint in context of what Morris has achieved here. One additional, though admittedly minor, tragedy is that the people most in need of seeing “Separated” will have no interest in it, having already accepted the official version of what happened and why.

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Subtitles:English

The post Errol Morris – Separated (2024) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. He quickly became a renowned expert in capital punishment. When the notorious Nazi sympathizer Ernest Zündel was arrested in Canada, he needed an expert witness to corroborate his assertion that the Holocaust was a hoax; and Leuchter soon found himself chiseling chunks from the gas chamber walls in Auschwitz — on his honeymoon. His illegal samples showed no significant residue of cyanide, so he concluded that the Holocaust did not happen. He soon became a celebrity of the neo-Nazi set: he testified on behalf of Zündel, gave lectures around the world, and published the Holocaust revisionist tract Leuchter Report. Much to his surprise, his death-machine business began to flounder, his marriage collapsed, and he found himself pursued by Jewish organizations and creditors. This film was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival.” — Jonathan Crow

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The post Errol Morris – Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Unlike many of the filmmaker’s subjects, John le Carré knows who Errol Morris is, and more importantly, the author of spy literature also knows Morris’ techniques of getting to some core of the person whom he’s interviewing. Le Carré, the pen name of former intelligence agent David Cornwell, has been on Morris’ side of an interview many, many times, too, but if he was talking to a subject in an enclosed room, that discussion was usually an interrogation.

In other words, there’s tension from the very start of The Pigeon Tunnel, which documents a series of question-and-answer sessions Morris had with le Carré before the latter’s death in 2020. Neither man knows what’s to come in this talk, because Morris is a director who admits at the beginning of this film that he wants the course of the conversation to guide the narrative and purpose of his face-to-face documentaries. Meanwhile, le Carré is certain that, if Morris has any interest in him, it must be on account of something he has done that has earned the ire of the filmmaker for some reason.

The thick air between the two men is probably unwarranted, because each of them admires the other’s work in ways that are both implicit to the film’s existence and explicitly vocalized at different points throughout it. It’s tough to call the tension a kind of theater, though. For all le Carré knows, Morris might have done some additional digging into his past, found some connection in his fictional writings to some real event or person of some disagreeable nature, or uncovered something in some recently declassified document that puts him in the middle of a scandal.

It’s not as if le Carré, who’s in his 80s at the time of filming and feeling quite nostalgic and retrospective about his life, has anything to hide, but for those who know the director’s work, Morris’ reputation proceeds him. His precise interview techniques, slicing like a scalpel and probing toward often uncomfortable depths, can get subjects, not only to obtain the rope, but also to fashion the noose. Morris ensures there’s an audience for the metaphorical hanging.

Even if le Carré knows there isn’t any dirt on him for anything he hasn’t already confessed by way of his spy literature, who’s to say Morris won’t strike with something unexpected at any moment? It’s pretty clear early on and throughout the documentary that such a thing isn’t on his mind. It’s equally apparent that the underlying worry about the possibility makes le Carré, sitting in comfort in his home library (where he and the bookshelves are framed at such canted angles that one wonders if the architecture of the room is crooked) and at a cozy dining table, more honest than he might have been with any random interviewer.

That honesty here goes deep—deeper than just memories of childhood, stark admissions about le Carré’s difficult relationship with his con artist father, his opinions on the Cold War and his participation in it while working for both MI5 and MI6, how much of his own life and way of thinking define the plots, characters, and themes of his fictional works over the course of six decades. Le Carré is a man is who isn’t sure if he—or anyone else, for that matter—possesses any firm form of character, morality, or belief system.

Most people, he believes, act in, at, and based on any given moment in time, depending entirely on what they want or need at that particular moment. Maybe one’s past experiences come into play in the decision, but can memories of them even be trusted? Le Carré, for example, is certain that, as a child, he waved to his father from outside a prison, but when he told this story to him, the father pointed out that there were no windows looking out on the street at that prison. Both le Carré and his father are right about what happened, even if only one of them is factually correct about the fact it couldn’t possibly have happened in the first place.

Does a false memory held by le Carré say as much about him as any true one, or is it just a private fiction that he told himself to make some kind of sense of the relationship with his father? Does it matter at all, since none of that changes what actually happened between the two men or the stories the father would tell about his rich and famous son who treated his old man so poorly?

There are times that it seems Morris is almost at a loss for just how honest his subject here is—not because he admits to anything controversial about his professional lives as a spy and a writer, but simply on account of how few questions he has to ask to get le Carré talking at length. The man’s genius is self-evident from listening to any of these passages, and Morris keeps up with him—offering some pointed observations or follow-up questions to keep him talking, intercutting read sections from le Carré’s novels and short stories or film/TV adaptations of them to match the content, providing silent dramatic re-creations of key moments from the author’s personal or professional life to fill in the gaps.

The Pigeon Tunnel isn’t a traditional biography by any means. It’s simply watching and listening to a man, as he dissects the obvious intersection of art and life, the uncertainty of memory, the apparent certainty of human nature, and how he arrived at this personal philosophy. It’s an intimate portrait of le Carré as a writer and, if he’s at all right—as he often seems to be—about any of observations, a haunting thesis on what makes people tick.

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The post Errol Morris – The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Gates of Heaven is a documentary film by Errol Morris about the pet cemetery business. It was made when Morris was unknown and did much to launch his career.

1.89GB | 1h 23m | 768×576 | mkv

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Subtitles:English

The post Errol Morris – Gates of Heaven (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common…

1.32GB | 1 h 22 min | 862×466 | mkv

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Subtitles:English

The post Errol Morris – Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fear all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. (1848)

— Lord Thomas Macaulay, History of England.

In the 1970s, D.A. Henderson and a group of determined scientists successfully eliminated smallpox — at least from the general population. How did they do it? Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring — small villages in Asia and Africa — and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts.

But did they really eliminate it? The answer — and I hope I’m not giving anything away here — is no. Not really. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. How can you say it’s eliminated when it’s still out there, somewhere…? The demon in the freezer.

In the story from classical Greece, Pandora was warned: Don’t open the box. She opens it anyway. The various pestilences are unleashed on the world but Hope remains at the very bottom of the box. Today there are microbiologists who want to continue to research smallpox. If they are given a free hand, what might they unleash?

There are those who insist that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. New viruses, new vaccines. New vaccines, new viruses. An escalating arms race with germs.

Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there’s neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, “I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation.” It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?

Errol Morris: ‘Demon in the Freezer’ at The New York Times

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The post Errol Morris – Demon in the Freezer (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:
In The Fog of War, Errol Morris interviews an 84-year-old Robert S. McNamara, who served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson and is widely regarded as the architect of the American war in Vietnam. There’s something undeniably masterful about the film, which also includes archival footage, but that mastery is what sticks in my craw: it’s a capacity to say as little as possible while giving the impression of saying a great deal, a skill shared by McNamara and Morris. I’m not sure what we have to gain from this — the satisfaction that we’re somehow taking care of business when we’re actually fast asleep?

This sleight of hand takes many forms, including the film’s title, repeated shots of dominoes lined up on a map of Southeast Asia, and the “eleven lessons from the life of Robert McNamara” dispensed in intertitles to introduce the various segments — portentous platitudes ranging from “Rationality will not save us” and “Maximize efficiency” to “Get the data” and “Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.” More generally, throughout the documentary Morris sprays charts and figures across the screen in rapid montages that we can’t process as data — and aren’t supposed to. Then there’s a score by Philip Glass (a standby to which Morris has become very accustomed), a metronomic New Age pulse that encourages not thought but the impression that one is thinking. “No one does `existential dread’ as well as Philip Glass,” Morris has offered by way of explanation. “And this is a movie filled with existential dread.” But “doing” existential dread is a far cry from understanding it or, better yet, addressing it.

I used to be a big fan of Glass’s music when I heard it performed live, largely because of its meditative qualities. But one might question the use of meditating on Robert McNamara as opposed to thinking analytically and critically about him. If we meditate on charts and figures or feel existential dread about them without even knowing what they say, there’s a danger that we’ll think we’re doing something serious just by gaping at what’s in front of us. The same thing applies to gaping at McNamara even when we know what he’s saying, in part because of the high gloss of that chugging Glass music. It’s almost as if Morris were characterizing McNamara’s discourse as “Glassy” (rather than simply gassy), the same way Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins tried to make Richard M. Nixon seem Shakespearean.

I won’t deny that the film is watchable as well as informative; it held my attention both times I saw it, four months apart. Morris has learned a lot over the years about how to tell a story while gradually unveiling a personality. But I wish I had a better notion of what story he’s trying to tell. (The personality in this case is fairly transparent, so the gradual revelation of that transparency may be part of the story.)

I’ll never understand the appeal of political films that try to reveal the truth about something years after it could possibly make a difference to anyone. I appreciate the benefit of hindsight, but not when it precludes doing anything — or anything much — to affect the present. McNamara has valid insights into the mistakes made by the U.S. in Vietnam, and he’s fairly direct in his objections to unilateral invasion (albeit without naming names). But one could also argue that if you have to go back half a century to criticize American foreign policy, you may not be paying close enough attention now. The smoke screen deployed by the current secretary of defense has a lot in common with the one McNamara contributed to during Vietnam — and on this subject McNamara has practically nothing to say.

How could it be otherwise? Denial should be the man’s middle name, not Strange. As Johnson’s secretary of defense he was expected to cover for the president, and in the news footage of LBJ presenting him with a Medal of Freedom in 1968 — at least tacitly for helping carry out Johnson’s dubious policies and concealing basic facts about them from the American public — McNamara gets so choked up that he’s unable to speak. The medal was awarded just after McNamara left the defense department, though in a rare moment of candor he admits that he wasn’t sure whether he’d resigned or been fired until a friend told him, “Of course you were fired!” He also admits — far more offhandedly, while exploring a different train of thought — that he no longer remembers whether he or someone else in the defense department authorized the dropping of Agent Orange over Vietnam. (Poor guy, he was so busy at the time.)

That he’s vague on both subjects but vaguer about the use of a chemical that destroyed countless lives, American as well as Vietnamese, is certainly telling. Morris is skillful enough to register that point, but McNamara isn’t likely to reveal anything that we don’t already know about him. When push comes to shove, he’s running the show, even if he allows Morris to score a few points now and then.

In some ways the film’s Web site (www.fogofwarmovie.com) is more useful than the film — maybe because there’s less to meditate on and more to think about. Morris, in the course of defending himself against criticism leveled by Eric Alterman in the Nation, writes, “Santayana is well known for saying: Those that are unfamiliar with history are condemned to repeat it. He is less known for a far more interesting quote: History is wrong, and always has to be rewritten.”

This is a useful point, but an incomplete one: history always has to be rewritten, but some rewrites are more urgently needed than others, and one also has to ask who’s doing the rewriting. In The Fog of War, Morris seems to argue that McNamara’s culpability in Vietnam should be reevaluated relative to Kennedy’s and Johnson’s. I’ll agree that this revision may be warranted but not that it’s urgently needed by anyone except McNamara and his friends, relatives, and admirers. It’s interesting but hardly essential — especially given the brief we keep hearing, that The Fog of War will help us to understand wars being fought now. And if Morris made a movie about the relative culpability of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney in the miscalculations of the Iraq war, it might not be all that helpful either.

McNamara also tells us that he was partly responsible for introducing seat belts to American cars during his 14-year career at Ford Motor Company (he took over as president there only a month before joining the Kennedy cabinet). So theoretically he might have saved as many lives in the United States as he unwittingly squandered in Southeast Asia. Oddly his memory on this point seems much clearer than on the matter of Agent Orange, though it happened seven years earlier. I guess that’s something to muse over, maybe even a cause for existential dread. Whether it prompts much useful thought is another matter.

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The post Errol Morris – The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara [+Extras] (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.