(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Among many impressions from the Oslo International Film Festival, the portraits of the American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris are again among the strongest. Morris is one of America's leading documentary filmmakers, and fortunately the film festival seems to have made it a tradition to show new episodes of his portrait series. First person. This is a series of shorter portraits where we get to know some very eccentric Americans. The result is a series of thought-provoking insights into some fate out of the ordinary, with Morris letting go of people who are somehow on the edge of what most people would think are rational.
Death Fascination
Many of the films revolve around death; fascination for death, respect for death, fear of death, attraction to death. So also with the portrait The Only Truth (2002), which is about lawyer Murray Richman and is a pure declaration of bankruptcy for the American judiciary. The slightly decrepit lawyer tells almost giggling about all the obvious criminals he has been acquitted. This is good business, "Don't worry Murray" smiles happily, and tells with delight about the time he acquitted a client accused of stabbing his victim seven times to death. "I managed to convince the jury that the victim had fallen back on the knife six of the times, and my client escaped with a short sentence," the lawyer smiles, but at the same time admits that he always knew that the client was guilty as just that. It is not about true or wrong, he sums up, "it is about the right thing being if I win the case, and the wrong thing is if I lose it". This is justified by a longer speech that the truth is relative, a speech that seems to be taken from tabloid column meters more than from the syllabus in a legal study.
Lawyer Murray thus appears to be self-taught and mislearned, a trait that is repeated in several of Morris' portraits. The lawyer denies, despite smiling accounts of his violent clients' escapades, that he is attracted to violence and death. "Not at all," he insists. “Violence is repulsive. I simply only work with criminal cases where violence is an inevitable element. " It is nevertheless difficult to believe that there is no fascination for precisely the violence or evil that underlies the commitment of both Richman and other of the portraits' obvious joy of telling stories about the most grotesque events.
The nature of evil
Narrator joy also seems to be psychiatrist Michael Stone Mr. Personality (2002). He is researching evil, and the first half of the interview is almost a pure rendition of bestial serial killings over the past 40 years. Stone researches the personality traits people who commit various evil acts have. He has ranked these personality traits on a scale of zero to six, where most people are at zero, and mostly trying to live well with themselves and others. However, people on the other side of the scale, in zone six, commit atrocious actions over and over again. Here we find the pure human haters, the criminal psychopaths whom the psychiatrist sees no opportunity to improve through treatment. Zone six is primarily characterized by a total lack of recognition and reflection on the fact that one's actions hurt others.
Interestingly, Morris concludes the interview by asking the psychiatrist why he himself is attracted to violence and evil. "Maybe it's because I myself was beaten up at school," the psychiatrist wonders, and tells how he got a protector who beat up the tormenting spirits in exchange for Stone doing his homework. Maybe that's where the fascination with violence comes from. "But that does not seem like a good enough explanation!" Morris protests, asking again: Why? The psychiatrist, who otherwise in the interview has willingly reflected on all the world's outbursts and articulated all sorts of personality traits, suddenly comes up with nothing to say. He simply becomes dumb.
This is how the interview ends in hesitant whining – the psychiatrist never seems to have asked himself the question of why he does what he does, even though his field has been to analyze others according to their ability to ask themselves exactly the same question.
The dissemination of madness
We also find in the portraits of evil Mr. Death. The rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., from 1999. Here we get a longer portrait of the man who worked himself up by constructing execution machines for American prisons. Leuchter explains how the equipment used in the death penalty could often lead to tedious and painful punishments for the convicted, and states the desire for human death as the motivation for his macabre work.
But Leuchter is being contacted by Ernst Zundel, a Canadian Holocaust denier, to appear as an expert witness in the trial against him. That's when it's going wrong. Leuchter goes to Auschwitz, chops off some samples, and writes a report that quickly becomes world famous: Leuchter concludes that people in Auschwitz have never been gassed to death. He has studied the premises, they are not suitable for gassing – and "if anyone knows how to execute people, then it's me", as Leuchter smiles.
So far, Morris cut the film about Leuchter together and showed it to a test audience, convinced that everyone would come to the same conclusion as himself: Leuchter is crazy. But the test audience was confused by Leuchter's claims. Is it true that there is any doubt that the Holocaust took place? Is the director himself a denier of the Holocaust? Morris acknowledged that he had to continue working on the film. The portrait thus opens up in statements by professionals who do not leave us in the hall in doubt that Leuchter is totally unqualified to draw the conclusions he makes. In the archives in Auschwitz we get an insight into the documentation that what was actually gassed to death thousands upon thousands of people.
Morris faced a dilemma as a filmmaker. On the one hand was his desire to create a subjective portrait First personseries, where he gets individuals to speak without judging them morally. On the other hand, he certainly did not want to doubt that the Holocaust really took place. Morris acknowledged that he had a moral responsibility as a director to disprove what Leuchter claims. Some of the reason may lie in the aura of truth that rests on living images: When a movie is given the tag documentary, we are used to reading its claims as truth. While in theory it should be legitimate to portray subjective views of the world in documentaries, the Holocaust is in practice a too monstrous and, above all, a real historical event to allow one to leave the actually wrong viewpoint contradicted.
Morris himself has remarked that he can still be annoyed by the changes he has to make in the film – because it is obvious to him that what Leuchter says is wrong, and it should be obvious to everyone.
Screwed intelligence
Many of Morris' interview subjects are variations on the very American theme "self-made man" – the one who has worked his way up against the current and against all odds. What makes them such original interview subjects is that their life project at some point seems to have cut itself. In another of this year's portraits, The Smartest Man in the World, we meet the man with the highest IQ in the world.
He was distracted at school and academia, and dropped out to work as a construction worker and bartender. And what does he use his intelligence for? Yes, he spends his time sketching a new religion based on mathematics and logic, which is to prove that we are all equal and therefore profitable to help one another. The term this should get socially pure is that the world should be ruled by an elite with a high IQ who, among other things, decides who should have children with whom. He himself humbly makes himself available to play such a role.
Another exciting variation on the theme of high IQ is portraiture One in a Million Trillion, which is also new this year. It is about the school light Rick Rosner, who finds out that he will take high school again – not to perfect the academic result, but to live a more social life than what he did in his first round in education. The problem is that he is not content to go again once, but goes to high school for a full eleven years, under different names. Rosner makes a living from stripping, and in his spare time he learns facts to fulfill his second big goal in life – to win Want to become a millionaire? on television.
The need to understand
The focus of Morris' entire series of portraits is on the subjective motives people have for doing what they do. The first impression of Morris' project as a macabre thematization of murder and death may thus not prove to be true. Murder and death are admittedly important in many of the portraits, but it is rather because such dramatic events raise a more fundamental question of understanding: We have a need to try to understand why other people do as they do, and especially people who do. we even feel we could never have done. What kind of motivation and motives do these American originals have with such unusual life projects?
On the other hand, this may again be an attempt to explain away. The fact that we are fascinated by the macabre, or worse, the straight out evil, seems to be the last thing we will admit. Sara London stays in The Killer Inside Me (2000), for example, mightily offended by Morris suggesting she was attracted to serial killers. This is despite the fact that she contacts known serial killers who are in prison and initiate relationships with them.
We have a need to understand other people, and often this is due to the fact that we also have a need to understand ourselves. The unpleasant thing about the meetings with Morris' most controversial interviewees seems to be that they do not have this great urge to understand themselves to any great extent. To take Leuchter, the execution expert and Holocaust denier, who in many ways puts this at the forefront by distinguishing himself as totally devoid of such a need or such an ability for self-examination. Throughout the film, the question we ask ourselves in the meeting with Leuchter is not so much "what did he think?" as "did he think?". Leuchter never examines himself and his own ideas, and appears to be the opposite of Morris' empathic attempt to penetrate the skin of some eccentric people to understand. Leuchter first appears as a monstrous human being, but when you follow him in the seams, we are left with the impression that he is ultimately an unspeakable reason. Leuchter's evil is banal in the sense that it is so thoughtless.
Much of the evil in Morris' portraits seems to remain hidden under such a veil of thoughtlessness. The portrait series demonstrates how there is something about the macabre that fascinates us, but also confirms how difficult it is to say what it is.
Errol Morris is one of America's leading documentary filmmakers. He was born in 1948 and studied philosophy and later made his living as a private detective. His groundbreaking documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988) rescued an innocent convicted of execution. Other films he has made are Gates of Heaven (1978) and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997). Current with the second part of the TV series First person, shown at the Oslo International Film Festival. Look out for the portraits on a TV channel near you!
