Errol Morris Retrospective

Plays Tues-Mon Jan 7-13 at the Varsity

In an inept filmmaker's hands, any story can become as dry as a textbook passage. Too often, documentaries, especially historical ones, merely lecture facts to the audience, rarely digging deeper than the apparent story (A&E's Biography series is one of the worst offenders). But the best documentary filmmakers are explorers as well as craftsmen, intent on exhausting every lead, every reference, that may appear during their research. It is this skill that makes Errol Morris one of the greatest documentary filmmakers in the world.

If Ken Burns and his PBS clan have cornered the market on historical documentaries, Errol Morris can claim obsession and death as his terrain. Each of his films, from Gates of Heaven to The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control, to his latest work, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (featured in a special screening on January 7) explore, on some level, these two themes. The fact that the themes are easily combined -- whether a death creates an obsession, or an obsession leads to death -- gives Morris, in documentaries, more than enough topics to explore. His style, coldly observant but directed with true cinematic flair, hammers home each aspect of his topic in a way that stays with you long after you've forgotten the specifics behind the story.