In all of his nonfiction films, Errol Morris
reveals what it means to be human.

ELLIOT WILHELM
Special to the Jezvish News

S

cene: A little more than 21 years ago, I was
planted in my seat at a press preview screening
during the New York Film Festival at Lincoln
Center. I was there looking for films to present at
the Detroit Institute of Arts' Detroit Film Theatre series.
Usuqlly such screenings are packed with working jour-
nalists. Not on that day, however. A newspaper strike was
well under way in New York, and therefore the film that
was about to unspool — which had been unappetizingly
described in advance as "a documentary about pet ceme-
teries" — was given its premiere in a cavernous room that
contained hundreds of empty seats.
The 88-minute film that was shown that day, Errol
- Morris' Gates of Heaven, went unmentioned in the New
Ybrk Times — there was no Times being printed.
The New York newspaper strike was bad news for
every filmmaker who was represented in the festival that
year. But in the cage of Errol Morris — a 30-year-old for-
mer philosophy student and movie enthusiast whose
debut film had, turned out to be an unclassifiable, wholly
original and utterly inspired masteryiece — the strike
delayed the news of a great newOector's arrival.
Release of Morris) film was
complicated by the
simultaneous premiere of Terrence .10-dei
',.
similarly titled
Days off-leaven. And, two years later, When Gates of
finally reached theaters, it was instantly confused with
Michael Cimino's newly released, disastrous Heaven's Gate
Despite its troubles finding an audience, Gates of eaven
remains a film that can still serve as the perfect example of
an observation that critic Roger Ebert was to make years
later: "A movie isn't about what its about," remarked Ebert.
"A movie is about how its about what it's about,"
How Gates of Heaven works — indeed, what Gates of
lIeaven is — is still a subject that intrigues Ebert to this
day, Recently; in describing it as one of the I0 greatest films
ever made, Ebert wrote: `I have seen this film perhaps 30
times, and am still not anywhere near the bottom of it. All
I know is, it's about a lot more than pet cemeteries."
We hear a lot these days about "independent film,"
but the expression usually refers to movies that have sim-
ply been made on a low budget or have been created out-
side of the traditional Hollywood "studio system."
Yet true independent film has nothing to do with bud-
get and everything to do with the vision of its creator.
There have been many great artists who have worked
within the narrative feature film format and have created
bodies of work which represent unique and highly per-
sonal views of the universe we all share. Jean Renoir,
Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Luis 13ufiuel and
Martin Scors--se, for example, have given us movies suf-
fused with their unmistakable way of seeing the world.
As did the characters in Kurosawa's Rashomon, each of
these filmmakers could tell the same story, yet each would see
To SEE OURSELVES on page 76

Elliot Wilhelm is founder of the Detroit Film Theatre and
curator of films at the Detroit Imtitute of Arts.

P,AA

2/18
2000

74

Behind the scenes of filmmaker
Errol Morris' latest documentary.

from page 69
JN: What do you like about your film?
EM: I like the fact that it raises questions about
the nature of evil, how people can do truly bad
things and somehow imagine to themselves that
they are engaged in something altogether differ-
ent, maybe even something good.
Ultimately, it's a movie about self-deception,
and I find that to be a very powerful and inter-
esting theme. I certainly have wanted for years to
make a movie about the Holocaust, and
although I wouldn't exactly call this explicitly a
film about the Holocaust, it does raise all of
these questions that make me think about the
Germans some 50 years ago.

MORRIS

they think they were doing? How did they envi-
sion what they were doing? How did they
explain what they were doing to themselves?

JN: How did you think about thii subject
when you contemplated making your film?
EM: I have said quite often that the Holocaust is
the great mystery of the 20th century — not
whether it happened but how it possibly could
have happened. How could people have acted
this way? What were they thinking? What did

JN: Do you think your film answers any of
those questions?
EM: I don't think it provides definitive answers
in the sense that I can say evil is this or evil is
that, but I think I can say that self-deception
plays a very important part in evil. Evil, in part,
is made possible by people construing what they
do in a way that makes it palatable.
I still find the Leuchter film very disturbing. I
find Leuchter himself very disturbing. He has
published a report that is devoid of any intellec-
tual content, and it has been used by anti-
Semites, Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis as
proof that the Holocaust is Jewish myth.
What he's done is very bad, but he's been able
to do these things by somehow imagining to
himself that he's the good guy. In his own story,
as defined by himself, he is a heroic figure, and
that is very frightening.

Suzanne Chessler is a Farmington Hills-based
freelance writer.

JN: What made you interested in Leuchter?
EM: Fred first came to my attention through

Execution expert
Fred A. Leutcher
is an obsessive
gure who drinks
40 cups o
coffee ay.

