Recreation as Truth: Errol Morris

Continuing down the rabbit hole that is documentary, I’ve been watching some of the works of Errol Morris. I’ve found his style of crafting a documentary to be highly engaging, something consistent across all of his work that I’ve seen. While this is admittedly a limited amount of films (because as yet I’ve only seen Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008) and The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)), there were consistencies across the two films that speak more to Errol Morris as a filmmaker rather than the films themselves specifically.

Errol Morris has had a consistent directorial style throughout his different feature documentaries, which can be most succinctly expressed as ‘director as detective’. Throughout his documentaries, Morris guides the audience through the investigation of a crime, using evidence and testimony as the key driving forces to push the film forwards. To achieve this style, Morris first triangulates the crime. The amount of research and investigation that must go into these films before any cameras are even touched must be astronomical, for to guide the audience through the confusing mix of crime, investigation, evidence and truth the filmmaker has to fully understand everything about these details in their entirety.

In the actual content of his documentaries, Errol Morris has a relatively clear formula which works very effectively to keep the audience engaged. First, The circumstances of the crime is outlined, informing the audience of the people involved and their relationships to the case. This then moves into taking the audience along the journey of the investigation that was carried out, moving gradually but consistently towards the truth.

To Errol Morris, truth is all in the interpretation. He himself says: “As I like to point out, truth isn’t handed to you on a platter. It’s not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It’s a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means” (Morris, 2004). Rather than dictate the truth over the top of the people involved in the incident he is investigating, Morris allows his subjects to speak about their experiences, and consequently their interpretation of the truth. He does the same with images and video evidence, allowing the subjects he is interviewing to apply their perspective to the images presented to them, rather than forcing judgement upon them.

A way that Errol Morris makes this process seem personal to the audience is by trying to create a first person viewing experience, having subjects appear to make eye contact with the audience through the camera (Poppy, 2004). This is achieved through the use of the ‘Interrotron’, a piece of equipment that essentially places a teleprompter between the interview subject and the camera upon which a live video stream of Morris is shone (Dewhurst, 2012). This can be seen by the interview subject but not by the camera, and so when the interviewee makes eye contact with the subject, they also look directly into the camera. This makes all the interviews feel incredibly personal, as though the interviewee is having a personal conversation with each audience member without all the distractions of the camera, lighting, and time and distance differences.

Errol Morris is an incredibly interesting documentarian, not only because of his investigative style, but also because he acknowledges that he does not want his work to be seen as true just because it has a distinctly ‘documentary feel’ to it, the feeling usually associated with cinema verite (Poppy, 2004). Instead, he shifts as far away from this style as possible, and I for one believe his films are far stronger for it.

References:

Ahlberg, J. (Producer), & Morris, E. (Director). (2008). Standard Operating Procedure [Documentary]. United States: Participant Media.

Dewhurst, B., (2012). Interrotron: an Interviewing Tool Essential to the Documentaries of Oscar Winner Errol Morris. http://nofilmschool.com/2012/09/interrotron-errol-morris-documentary

Lipson, M. (Producer), & Morris, E. (Director). (1998). The Thin Blue Line [Documentary]. United States: Miramax Films.

Poppy, N., (2004), Errol Morris [Filmmaker], https://www.believermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris

Truth and Documentary

So I’ve just begun a subject about learning how to construct a short documentary, and more broadly understand the documentary genre and is nuances through deconstruction. I admit, it’s a subject matter which I am unfortunately not passionate about at all. I’m not really a fan of the documentary genre in general, but I may be going through a eye-opening experience by being forced to consume so many and create my own. I tend to prefer fiction films, because, as it was so elegantly put by people with vastly more experience than me in the documentary “Capturing Reality”, documentary is just another type of fiction, but almost one that is deceitful towards it’s audience, because it seeks to identify itself as he ‘truth’, when it is instead a biased retelling of a true story, as it is understood by the director in charge of the documentary. This is still how I feel now, but I fully acknowledge that this view is subject to my previous bias, and lack of experience and personal enjoyment with watching documentary format pieces.

Even the statement I made about documentary being deceitful towards it’s audience, is flavoured from my bias. I don’t like documentary, so I picked out a quote painting documentary in a negative light. I could have chosen from a number of positive grabs which speak to the good parts of documentary, about how it aims to inform and educate the public, highlight real issues being faced in the real world, right wrongs, about how documentary aims to change the world for the better. These are good, strong ideals and I fully endorse any film that is trying to achieve these. I just feel that, in my very limited experience, the documentaries that I watch get flavoured too much by the documentarian, and  the stories being told get twisted to fit their agenda.

But this is just my limited and biased understanding of the genre. Surely there’s more to it, right, otherwise no one would watch these films. So lets go back to Capturing Reality, and see what some of the experts have to say. What is documentary? The Capturing Reality user guide explains “filmmakers see documentary as an archive of human experience, a conversation, a provocation […] but not necessarily the way to ‘truth'”. To get more individual, Syvain L’Esperance describes documentary film making as “an art form that offers a way of looking at the world, or giving it shape.” I really think this captures the essence of what documentary is at it’s heart. It doesn’t invent a fantasy world as fiction film making does, but instead looks at real world situations. This quote does not insist that documentaries are presenting some overarching truth, but instead are used as a lens to examine the real situations captured on film and share this experience with others.  As Errol Morris says: “They’re not meant as pure fiction, they’re meant as stories about real events, real people. We piece together reality, each one of us, from bits and pieces of stuff. Reality isn’t handed to us whole.” The ‘reality’ in Morris’s documentaries (e.g. The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Standard Operating Procedure (2008)) are piece together with real hard evidence (interview, photos, documents) mixed with recreations that create an enthralling narrative experience for the viewer. But does this recreation taint the ‘truth’ that Morris and other documentarians are imparting?

Both fiction and non-fiction film work with a script, use staging, can have very similar pacing and story structures, and can contain reenactments and performances by actors. We can see similar stories in both. So why are documentaries seen as ‘true’, with fiction therefore relegated to being ‘false’? In his book, Introduction to Documentary (2010), Bill Nichols suggests that it is the “different assumptions about purpose” that the filmmakers are making, and that documentary involves “a different quality of relationship between filmmaker and subject, and they prompt different sots of expectations from audiences.” However, mere purpose doesn’t provide an unbreakable defense for the filmmaker, and certainly doesn’t automatically authenticate all the material presented in documentaries as absolute truth. Nichols addresses this by putting forth that “the documentary tradition relies very heavily on being able to convey an impression of authenticity.” He goes further, and asserts that “we believe what we see at our own risk.” By the same standard, however, documentaries do not become lies just by being in documentary format, and the documentarian’s purpose to describe the truth of the situation means that what is presented should be at least their perception of the truth. After all, as Jessica Yu states in Capturing Reality (2009) “only a high degree of “personal curiosity” can justify “the very long, enervating process that is making a film”” (Nelson, 2009), and after all that effort why would the filmmakers lie to themselves?

My truth is that I’ve only really been exploring the genre of documentary in more depth over the past 2 weeks and have been watching more documentaries in a shorter span of time than I ever have previously. I think it’s starting to grow on me a little. I still don’t really like the genre in general, but I’m realising it has a lot more to offer than I’ve ever seen. Certainly, the documentaries I’ve been watching all do have a bias. It’s natural, and human, to apply your own understanding to a story when you tell it. But there are documentaries that make this influence as non-existent as they can, and I’m becoming more excited to find all of these different documentaries and documentary modes I’ve never thought existed.

 

Bibliography

Aufderheide, P. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary User Guide (1st ed.). Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

Ferrari, P. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

Nelson, M. C. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. PopMatters. Retrieved from http://www.popmatters.com/review/115575-capturing-reality-the-art-of-documentary/

Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN, US: Indiana University Press.

 

Images Sourced from:

Notes on Truth (Or, Documentary in the Post-Truth Era)

http://www.altfg.com/film/the-art-of-documentary-jessica-yu-werner-herzog-truth-reality/

http://www.documentary.org/feature/messy-truth-behind-day-job-documentarian