Errol Morris: Interviews (review)

Abstract

Livia Bloom, Editor Errol Morris: Interviews University Press of Mississippi, 2010 224 pages; $50.00 For its series devoted to conversations with filmmakers, the University Press of Mississippi could not have chosen a more pertinent and inquiring innovator in the nonfiction motion picture world than Errol Morris. The collection boasts three decades worth of interviews that illustrate a remarkable genesis of the documentary format. Morris envisioned, as early as his first feature Gates of Heaven (1978), the macabre tale of two separate pet cemeteries in California. Morris eloquently speaks at length on the art of the interview itself, the decidedly bizarre content of his works, the state of non-fiction filmmaking in general, and his very gradual transition from suffering as an unemployable student to being one of the world's most surprising masters of cinema. Editor Livia Bloom's selection of work does credit to her reputation as a documentary curator and writer, and this volume represents a diverse mapping of Morris's unshakable dedication to his subjects and the bewildering nature of their characters. The book's introduction and filmmaker chronology sections cover a character profile of Morris himself, first as the boarding school student in Vermont who received an 87 on an LQ. test (a low score, indeed), and later as a Berkeley PhD candidate who was repeatedly caught trying to sneak into screenings at the Pacific Film Archive. The selected pieces that follow this intriguingly humorous introduction include a profiling of Morris's career by Roger Ebert, articles and interviews by Bloom herself, a transcribed question and answer period with Morris and Werner Herzog at Brandeis University, and a penetrating, previously unpublished conversation with film scholar Paul Cronin. The spirited conversations consistently comment on the noteworthy technical facets found in nearly all of Morris's films. The most memorable of these is his version of a talking head interview, where the subject stares directly into the camera's lens rather than off to the side where the interviewer is usually located. This candid subject/viewer relationship is achieved by using a device designed by Morris called the lnterrotron, a two way set of video-equipped monitors, so that both the interviewer and the subject may look at each other while the person in the hot seat gazes into the camera's lens. Although inspired by the works of documentarian Frederick Wiseman and other similar artists of the 1960s and 70s, Morris is quoted numerous times as saying that he tries consciously to avoid the usual nonfiction technical standbys. …