KEVIN Macdonald's A Brief History of Errol Morris (the title echoing one of Morris's own films) charts the cult filmmaker's career from the 1970s to the present day, interviewing Morris himself and high-profile collaborators such as Werner Herzog and Phillip Glass.

A gifted but undisciplined student who watched films obsessively - obssession being a key word in the Morris lexicon - Morris's break came when Herzog vowed that if Morris completed a film, he would eat his shoe. Morris made Gates of Heaven (1978), about two pet cemetaries, and Herzog was compelled to fulfil his vow.

After Vernon Florida (1981) - about a Florida community with the highest proportion of self-inflicted amputee insurance claimants - the financially broke Morris worked as a private investigator. This helped him hone his interviewing skills - his approach is basically one of staying quiet and letting the subject indict themselves we are told - and undoubtedly stood him in good stead when it came to making The Thin Blue Line (1988), a reconstruction of a police officer's murder that eventually resulted in a man being saved from death row.

Since then, Morris has enjoyed a high profile, with the likes of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997) and Mr Death (1998) cementing his position as one of world's leading non-fiction film-makers.

Macdonald's film succeeds as a "greatest hits" type introduction. However it fails to provide much insight into what makes Morris tick, beyond the fact that he's a self-confessed obsessive who doesn't see why non-fiction films should have to look a particular way.

Morris only reveals what he wants us to know - he's too astute to fall for the traps that his own subjects walk into - and Macdonald isn't interested in asking any awkward questions. Thus, for instance, the film makes no mention of Morris's comparatively unsuccessful venture into more conventional film-making, The Dark Wind (1991) - a drama about a Native American cop confronting drug smuggling on the reservation - nor does it ask whether Morris's pursuit of National Inquirer type subjects might sometimes mean he veers dangerously close to a mondo or freakshow type approach.

And it could just have been that the press screening was from a dodgy videotape, but the colours were seriously off in the interview segments: Morris and Glass were an unflattering jaundice yellow.

Printer-friendly version