Like many others in our class, I have absolutely been captivated by the idea of portraying reality in films. I can vaguely remember when I was younger and a teacher told us that history is written by whoever wins, and is therefore always biased. “What?” I thought to myself. “Then how can we ever know what truly happened? If only there were cameras that captured everything so that we could go and find out.” Well, as a graduating senior in college, I have finally fully realized that even that would not be enough. And it is not simply because film, like writing or other modes of art, is prejudiced in its portrayals of an event, that filmmakers control what scenes get cut in order to create an overall impression on the audience. Even the most neutral of directors, who strive to equally represent both sides of an argument, are still leaving the question up for debate among their viewers, each of whom will walk away with a different interpretation of what the film was about, their own understanding of reality.
But in watching Errol Morris’s famed “don’t call them documentaries” non-fiction, I feel that the issue becomes not so much, “what is real” so much as it is “what is truth.” Film scholars supportive of the realism movement, such as Kracauer and Bazin, support the idea that film should record and reveal physical reality, the latter championing narratives which “respect the actual qualities and duration of the event in preference to the artificial, abstract, or dramatic duration favored in classical montage” (143). Clearly Morris does not do this—in films such as The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and The Fog of War he is not even present for the event central to the movie, causing him to controversially use reenactments (if its completely factual, there can’t be acting; such scenes give way to the creators interpretation of events; etc.). Littlegreenghouls discusses this in his blog, Documenting…kind of, which can be found here. In Mr. Death, which tells the story of Fred A. Leuchter, the man famous for denying the Holocaust after finding no traces of cyanide where the gas chambers should have been, Morris shows footage taken when Leuchter actually took his samples from Auschwitz, but these segments are limited to Morris’s subjective editing selections and therefore would not fall under what Bazin would consider to be “reality.” By such a definition even films such as Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control are not really reality because they find their entire meaning through Morris’s poignant editing and juxtaposition of clips and not through the individual interviews themselves. Arnheim would be pleased to see that, at least through Errol Morris, film has not found its way “to the victory of wax museum ideals over creative art” (168), and yet within that creativity Morris is still able to touch on truths that transcend the subjective physical world.
All of Morris’s films seem to do this—question what people see empirically as fact and show the beauty of faith in the beyond. We can say with scientific certainty that a pet is dead, but who really knows what happens to its soul? We can look at serendipitous events in our lives and say, “that just happened,” but who can without a doubt affirm that the unexpected isn’t really God? We can examine all the scientific evidence in a murder investigation and proclaim that we have the right killer, but how can we then explain incarcerating the wrong man? Are these all differences in perspective? Is Errol Morris now playing with the same ideas cinematic realists/anti-realists struggled with before him, only now he is applying these standards of reality to the abstract, transient world rather than to the physical? I think he is. But let us explore a different Errol Morris film in order to have…a fresh perspective (this is a class assignment, after all, though it’s easy enough to forget with all the fun we’ll be having!).
At first I thought I would watch Morris’s award winning film, The Fog of War, but after making it through about 45 minutes of it I remembered that I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War, Vietnam, and national defense in general. Though this film is not so much about that as it is about the life of Robert McNamara, some understanding of history is necessary to fully appreciate it. Thus I set about watching Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., which through the awesomeness of the internet is available in its entirety online:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=654178281151939378#
This film is much more up my alley, as well as being incredibly intriguing. It goes beyond looking at the Holocaust and trying to prove whether it really happened or not and seeks to understand the mind of the man who got that line of thinking moving. It constantly reiterates the themes of perception and knowing, not only through the interview monologues but through the camera and images as well. Lets take a look.
Just to whet our appetites, let’s examine the opening credits to the movie: Blue lightening is flashing against a black screen. Having never seen this movie before but knowing that it was about an electric chair expert, this makes perfectly logical sense. But then that lightening begins to illuminate things in the background… mechanical things, metallic tubes and wires with currents zipping through them. We start to get a feeling reminiscent of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control where life and the non-human are intimately linked, like a stray bolt will kindle a spark of life into one of these industrial beasts. But the lightning begins to show more: an enormous pen, birdcage-like, attached to even larger electrodes, all of it raised above the ground, suspended in the darkness. And in that cage, as the light skims by, we can see perched there the unmistakable, lumpy silhouette of Mr. Death himself.
Well, hey! Wait a minute…What’s he doing in there? He’s supposed to be building these machines, not be in them. And why is it so big? Well reader, I shall tell you. Or at least, I shall tell you what I think it means. Morris wants us to understand something about lumpy Leuchter: this man’s desire to be more, to be a part of something big and make a name for himself, ended up destroying him. His reputation as a “scientist” creating execution technology and his arrogance that grew because of it caused him to create a beast that was bigger than himself, something that could swallow him whole. The last explosions of light before the camera cuts to the “real” beginning of the movie are quite telling: rather than being just strips of glow, as before, these bursts are rounder and intersecting, making a pattern that almost looks like we are viewing the scene from binoculars. So you see, we have now become the observers who are trying to understand the caged Leuchter, who by the end of the frame in re-enveloped in darkness with only the cage illuminated. Watch it—it looks better as a whole.
Just look at the first shot of the movie, after the intro sequence:
We see Leuchter’s eyes, looking through his glasses, looking into a rearview mirror, which is then captured through the camera lens and observed through our eyes… how much more could a filmmaker possibly emphasize the significance that perception will play in this film? Eyes also represent a sort of intimacy with another person—the ability to see their soul, their motivations, the heart of who they are underneath and beyond their actions. This is precisely Morris’s goal in the film: his intent was to attempt to discover who Fred A. Leuchter was, not to make a statement on the factuality of the Holocaust; he wants to look through Leuchter’s eyes.
The cut immediately following this shot is one of Leuchter’s hands, a motif which will continue throughout the movie: he is in control, he is driving the car, activating the electrocution machines, chipping away samples. Thus, within the first three minutes of the film, we can already see Morris’s perspective shining through his art: Leuchter presents a boggling, controversial case, one from which the truth cannot be easily elucidated. But Morris wants to extract the truth about Leuchter while still making clear that he does not see him as a sympathetic, blameless character. Notice, too, that these first two shots are made in black and white, but with the most grey objects being those that are a part of Leuchter’s body—his face and hand. This serves to highlight the ambiguity surrounding Leuchter’s person throughout the film and is further set apart by the fact that the scenes immediately preceding and succeeding it are in color.
Morris continues to play with his perception of Leuchter through his use of reenactments. One of the most remarkable of these includes the scene where Leuchter visits the diner where he meets his future wife. We rarely see the actor Leuchter’s face, a key sign that this is an interpretation of reality rather than an actual event unfolding (we see the same thing in The Thin Blue Line). But in an attempt to express how lost and insignificant Leuchter’s character is, Morris shows his shadow projected on the wall and his face reflected in his coffee, upside down and distorted by its ripples. Rather than showing Leuchter seeing a clear, accurate reflection of himself, which would indicate a sense of self-knowing and understanding, he looks at a vague and deformed self. When there is a mirrored reflection, it shows continual replications of his image, repeated over and over, making you question which image is real and which are the copies. The distortion of Leuchter’s image is then echoed later in the film when Leuchter is stealing a ground sample from one of the chambers in Auschwitz: he reaches his hand into a puddle, scoops up a fistful of the muddy dirt, and then looks at himself in the waves his motion leaves behind. The last time we see this reflection is towards the end of the film: Leuchter is again drinking coffee, his face hazily reflected in the television screen across the room. While the image is not inverted, the next cut shows the footage of Leuchter’s trip to Auschwitz on the same screen, creating an intimate connection between who he was then and who he is now. The sad irony of this confusion, of course, is that Leuchter hopes (at least from Morris’s perspective), that the notoriety that will come with his work at Auschwitz will give him an identity, a way for him to become more than just an obscure executioner. It worked, but made him infamous, not beloved. His identity is now even more uncertain than ever: is he just a dumb simpleton, convinced by his own flawed science? Does he know that he is wrong, but refuses to admit it because of the fame it has brought him? Having lost his career and his wife over his stance, the revisionists are really the only people he has left. Morris said in an interview “What happens if you really need to be loved and the only people who will love you are Nazis?” (Singer). Is that why maintains that his findings are true while everyone else around him can clearly see that they are false? We may never know. But regardless of whichever stance observers take, the fact remains that their opinion depends on rests on their perspective.
While Morris wants to focus the attention of the film on Leuchter’s psychology, he does not ignore the issue of the holocaust. In fact, the final version of the film includes more information and interviews to this end than Morris original wanted or thought was necessary. A review by Mark Singer relates how when Morris shared an early version of the film at Harvard, some of the students were so convinced by Leuchter’s sincerity that they actually believed his logic—that the holocaust didn’t exist. Because of this, he added more content to make his personal perspective even more distinctly clear. The complete content of that interview can be located here: http://www.errolmorris.com/content/profile/singer_executioner.html
One thing I found particularly interesting concerning the concept of empirical knowledge and the holocaust is how Morris sometimes splits the screen between old, black and white photos taken at Auschwitz during World War II and current images of the same locations, shot in color and devoid of any human subjects. The distinction between the two images, juxtaposed against each other, is eerie. The gray scale, haunted faces of the now dead prisoners contrasts against the verdant new life that has grown there, making it all the more astonishing that something so heinous happened there. But the modern color image has another affect, too: it serves to highlight the multiple views that have arisen concerning the holocaust as opposed to the stark, objective, black and white reality of the earlier images.
I can’t help but remember Jonathan Crary’s work in Modernizing Vision in which he discusses optics and the way people understand reality through the sensation of vision. He looks at the break in the understanding of sight between when the camera obscura was popular and the 1820’s and 30’s. In the former era, the camera obscura provided “an apparatus that guaranteed access to an objective truth about the world. It assumed importance as a model both for observation of empirical phenomena and for reflexive introspection and self-observation” (208). The latter, more modern version assumes that vision is subjective to the viewer: “The issue was not just how does one know what is real, but that new forms of the real were being fabricated and a new truth about the capacities of a human subject was being articulated in these terms” (213). For a more insightful look at the Crary-Morris connection, check out ccpant’s blog, here. Similarly, for forty years nobody questioned the holocaust: everyone looked at the evidence and concluded the same thing, as if they were looking through the pinhole of the camera obscura. Thanks to the philosophies of Zundel and Leuchter, though, an entirely new way of understanding has revealed itself.
While Morris more than likely did not have the camera obscura in mind while making this film, there are certain images that seem to call it to mind: the inverted, wavy reflection of Leuchter in the coffee and water, or the peephole and windows on some of the doors at Auschwitz that the camera tracks in on before emerging and showing what is on the other side. It makes it seem as if Morris is trying to say that there should be only one way of understanding Auschwitz, and that though Leuchter is a puzzling character, the man also never questions himself or his own logic, so through his own eyes he might see his logic as empirical fact.
What is intriguing about both Crary and Arhnheim is that they both are concerned about the human element in film: Crary notes that each individual will have their own personal vision, their body as an extension of their eyes, in which knowledge hinges on subjective reality. Arnheim, somewhat conversely yet somewhat in agreement, fears that the camera is “related to the position of a mere mechanical recording machine” (168), and that it will destroy the ability for artistic creations through cinematography. In Mr. Death, the focus is the same: mechanics and science verses the human element. Leuchter’s mechanical creations are what at first give him his livelihood and are also what provide him with the opportunity to travel to Auschwitz in the first place. However, it is also this increasing notoriety for his death machines that make him overconfident in his abilities, that make him believe that he is fully qualified to analyze the concentration camp ruins and determine whether gas chambers could have existed there, even without reading any of the historical documents or knowing how the camp had been changed in the past 40 years.
The ironic relationship between human and machine, life and death, manifests itself earlier in the film as well when Leuchter is discussing his designs for more humane executions. His focus is to improve the machines, and yet in order to do so he actually removes the human element from the equation: by having a machine inject a prisoner rather than a prison guard, or by creating a mat that absorbs the prisoner’s excrement he discharges while being killed rather than having a guard clean it, the people who continue living no longer have to face as intimately the reality of what is happening—that somebody is dying.
Even at Auschwitz, one of the points revisionist theorists have is that there are no bricks on the site where the crematoriums supposedly are. Yet as the specialist shows us, they were probably used to build the nearby farm houses… The deaths at Auschwitz led to life for the neighboring farmers, which led to the death of the “myth” of the holocaust for revisionists.
The most ironic instance of all, though, can be found in the legend of the electric chair. Leuchter shares at the end of the film that there was a myth that children who sat in the electric chair (mainly kids of the workers), would die by it later, as was the actual case with one worker’s son. Leuchter thinks that he has defied this legend by not having died… The poor man doesn’t see all the parts of himself that have died because of sitting in that chair—the death of his marriage, the death of his business and career, the death of his social standing in society, and, perhaps most important of all, the death of his ability to understand reason and look beyond himself and his pride to find truth.
Frank Leuchter is a nice, simple man—he reminds me of an unintentionally more sinister version of Ray Mendez, the mole rat guy from Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (a movie which also deals with the dichotomous relationship between man and his creations). But ultimately, his trouble, and the problem this movie focuses on, is his and our ability to perceive. Remember the opening credit sequence I mentioned before, about the lightning flashes that looked like binoculars around Leuchter’s cage? In a way, they also look a bit like his glasses… by us observing him, we are now able to see how he perceives himself.
As a parting note, let me leave you with these eerie words, uttered when Leuchter stooped down into a hole at Auschwitz to steal a sample…
“Do you really want to go down in that hole?” –Cinematographer
“Not sure if the whole thing is gonna come down on me…” –Leuchter
Don’t descend back into the cave, friends. It’s possible you will still be seeing shadows when you come back out.
