Errol Morris

State of the Art

by Peg Aloi

Just as Errol Morris's latest documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., is poised to open nationwide in mid December, the Harvard Film Archive is offering a retrospective of his work. Morris cannot be defined as a mere documentarian: his films are quirky, provocative, often shocking, and frequently hilarious. His first feature, Gates of Heaven (1978), the saga of a defunct pet cemetery (and one of Roger Ebert's "10 best films of all time"), more or less established the Morris style, what he calls "anti-vérité," a rejection of the handheld, fly-on-the-wall immediacy of many documentary films. "That whole argument seemed wrong," he explained last Thursday at an HFA press conference. "It didn't appeal to me, so Gates was shot with carefully composed and lit settings, and with people talking into the camera."

Morris's reputation is born of critical acclaim and cult status (particularly for Vernon, Florida, which he filmed in a town where many residents had their own limbs cut off to collect insurance). He is perhaps the most influential nonfiction filmmaker of all time, and no doubt the only one whose work has freed an innocent man from death row. The Thin Blue Line, his 1988 documentary that investigates the murder of a Dallas police officer, has a shocking scene in which the actual killer all but confesses to Morris that the wrong man is in jail. The wrongly convicted Randall Adams was later released. Although this film is credited with having spawned the "re-enactment" craze on television cop shows, Morris is very clear about his methods: "TV tries to somehow show what happened, but The Thin Blue Line is the opposite of that -- it is dismantling what supposedly happened." Asked to comment on his part in Randall's vindication, Morris says, "I am proud of my film, but I am even more proud of my investigation."

The portraits in Morris's 1990s films, A Brief History of Time and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, show that the director is obsessed with, well, obsession. The former movie, an adaptation of the book by physicist Stephen Hawking, contains unusual visual effects that illustrate Hawking's passionate theories of the universe. Morris says, "The way we used sets and weird angles, every shot looked a tiny bit off. Now, whenever anyone shoots him, they repeat it, so it's become the basic grammar for how you shoot Stephen Hawking." Fast, Cheap and Out of Control profiles four men -- a lion tamer, a gardener who trims topiary hedges, a robotist whose creations resemble insects, and a man who knows everything there is to know about mole rats -- whose occupations connect with one of Morris's favorite subjects, animals. Back when that film opened, in 1997, Morris said that if he had to pick the most obsessed individual of this obsessed quartet, "I would have to say the mole-rat guy."

But obsession cannot even begin to describe the subject of Mr. Death, which promises to be one of Morris's most disturbing works. Fred Leuchter was so fascinated by the electric chairs his father, a Massachusetts Department of Corrections employee, showed him as a child that he later became a self-described "expert" on execution devices and eventually invented the lethal-injection machine. Leuchter's own simple faith in his abilities led him to participate, at the request of a revisionist group in Canada, into an investigation of the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Morris says, "I don't think Fred sees himself as an anti-Semite . . . but I found myself wondering again and again, what on earth was he thinking?"

"A Curious Cinema: An Errol Morris Retrospective" runs December 10 through 19 at the Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square. Errol Morris will be present to introduce Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. on December 18 at 8 p.m. Call 495-4700.