GROUNDBREAKING FILMMAKER ERROL MORRIS RECEIVES COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Program Includes New York Premiere of Morris’s Latest, Mr. Death,
And Earlier Nonfiction Films, Along with the Complete Interrotron Stories and Other
Television Work, And a Conversation with the Filmmaker
Errol Morris
November 18–29, 1999
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
From his first film, Gates of Heaven (1978), Errol Morris has proven to be one of the true innovators of the documentary format, pushing the boundaries of both the genre’s form and its content. The Museum of Modern Art salutes this groundbreaking filmmaker with a complete retrospective, Errol Morris, which runs from November 18 through 29, 1999, in the Museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. Morris will introduce the opening night program, the New York premiere of his latest film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999). The program includes all of Morris’s earlier documentary films and most of his television work, as well as a conversation with the artist on November 19, conducted by Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist for the New York Observer and the author of Explaining Hitler (1998).
Among the highlights of the series are The Thin Blue Line (1988), the film that made Morris famous for solving a murder mystery and saving a man from wrongful life imprisonment; A Brief History of Time (1992), about the physicist Stephen Hawking’s quest to know the mind of God; a sneak preview of the television series Interrotron Stories, to be aired in the United Kingdom later this year; and a selection of commercials and public service announcements that he has directed.
Over the course of his career, Morris has filmed some of America’s most eccentric and wondrous characters. His subjects have included an autistic woman who designs slaughterhouses (Stairway to Heaven, 1998), a retired couple who keep atomic sand in a jar (Vernon, Florida, 1981), a researcher who believes the path to self-knowledge lies in the study of the African naked mole-rat (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, 1997), and a cryonics expert who cut off his mother’s head and froze it so she can be revived in a hundred years (I Dismember Mama, 1999). The focus of his most recent film, Mr. Death, is a man who is both the designer of humane execution devices and the author of a notorious report that denies the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
“Morris’s work has shocked documentary purists accustomed to the tradition of cinema verité,” notes Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video, who organized the exhibition. “Knowing that truth-telling is always subjective, Morris has refashioned the nonfiction genre into what he calls ‘First-Person Cinema.’ He deploys an array of filmmaking techniques in an effort to create a ‘multi-layered representation of the world’: artificial lighting, stop-action, slow motion, various film and video formats and stocks, reprocessed and degraded imagery, fictive/historical re-enactments, old movie clips, television news footage, dramatic music, computer-generated 3-D models, blue screens, skewed camera angles, extreme close-ups, and even a ‘sewer cam,’ a fiber optic cable used to find obstructions in drains.”
The secret weapon in Morris’s arsenal, however, is the Interrotron, a modified TelePrompTer that projects an image of Morris on a screen placed in front of a camera lens. His interview subjects thus interact with a video image of him while looking directly into the camera. Named by his wife for its “mixture of interview, interrogation, and terror,” the Interrotron allows Morris to raise questions of authorship and the reliability of the narrator, the slipperiness of truth, the fabrication of identity, the uses and abuses of technology, the difference between seeing and knowing, the fragility and resilience of man-made systems of belief, and the ways in which language reveals and conceals.
Errol Morris was organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video. The Department of Film and Video gratefully acknowledges Fourth Floor Productions; Lions Gate Films; Magic Lantern; Independent Film Channel Productions; Scout Productions; New Yorker Films; Ann Petrone; Reid Rosefelt; Amanda Sherwin; and Jennifer Morgerman for their participation in the exhibition.
