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I’ve been very exited about this film ever since I heard of it’s very strange concept.
This new trailer piles on the excitement.
The Playlist calls Joshua Oppenheimer’s film ‘a constantly astounding, terrifying masterpiece’
I love the first sentence of their review: Holy fucking shit.
Errol Morris interviewed by Adam Curtis, it’s a bit slow but it’s worth it for his answer to the last question. I’m currently reading his newish book A Wilderness of Error and it is very disturbing, check it out.
earthquake-weather: The Act of Killing - directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (2012)
New doc within a film on Indonesian Death Squad leaders, re-enacting their killings in scenes they themselves are directing. Looks fascinating, and completely bananas.
Produced by Errol Morris AND Werner Herzog. Damn
“Every now and then a non-‐fiction film comes along that is unlike anything else I have seen: Buñuel’s LAND WITHOUT BREAD, Werner Herzog’s FATA MORGANA, Hara’s THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON. Well, it’s happened again. Here, Joshua Oppenheimer invites unrepentant Indonesian death-‐squad leaders to make fiction films reenacting their violent histories. Their cinematic dreams dissolve into nightmares and then into bitter reality. Like all great documentary, THE ACT OF KILLING demands another way of looking at reality. It is like a hall of mirrors––the so-‐called mise-‐en-‐abyme––where real people become characters in a movie and then jump back into reality again. And it asks the central question: what is real? Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in a Paris Review interview, wrote about reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for he first time, “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.” I have the same feeling with this extraordinary film.”
‐ Errol Morris
Errol Morris has a new book. Make quick with the audiobook Errol.
Pentagram: In 1970, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was accused of the brutal killing of his pregnant wife and two young daughters, a crime he attributed to intruders. He was convicted, but has always maintained his innocence. In A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris presents 20 years of his own investigation into one of America’s most infamous murder cases. Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and his team have designed the book, out September 4, as well as a promotional online trailer and accompanying website.
Errol Morris’ new short film, Team Spirit
OC: released under the auspices of ESPN and the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Morris’ latest short, Team Spirit, looks at a slice of humanity practically made for his feature-length documentaries: sports fans so obsessed that they arrange to express their team affiliation even in death.
Errol Morris calls this the best commercial of all time. He may have a point.
(Source:Twitter)
Here’s my favourite episode of Errol Morris’ First Person series entitled One in a Million Trillion, from 2000. It’s on stripper/bouncer/genius Rick Rosner who happens to be a professional high school student and a professional Who Wants to be a Millionaire? contestant.
-Between 1979 and 1987, using fake ids and disguises he managed to enrol back into the year 12 class of four different schools and redo it.
-After years of practicing he was on the show a few times and finally ended up suing the producers after getting this question wrong:
What capital city is located at the highest altitude above sea level?
A. Mexico City B. Quito
C. Bogotá D. Kathmandu
Errol Morris: I imagine he is a pretty complicated character who doesn’t understand himself that well. He’s in the grip of all this stuff that he cannot control.
Oh and according to Wikipedia he can’t turn left, just like Derek Zoolander.
The NY Times has a short documentary film by Errol Morris on El Wingador, a five-time winner of the Wing Bowl. My favorite line from the film, uttered by an off-camera Morris:
‘Wait a second.That’s cannibalism!’
Though his several wins came early on in the competition’s history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.
(Source:Kottke)
A Brief History Of Time by Errol Morris 1992.
Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every muscle in his body.
“My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,” Hawking said. “Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.”
The doctors gave the young man two and a half years to live. That was in early 1963. Over the next half century, Hawking defied all odds and went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of the era, making major contributions to quantum cosmology and the understanding of black holes. Along the way, the wheelchair-bound Hawking became a cultural icon, a symbol of disembodied intellect and indomitable spirit.
This coming Sunday, 49 years after his grim diagnosis, Hawking will turn 70. A scientific conference in his honor got underway today at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, and will culminate on Sunday with a public symposium, “The State of the Universe,” featuring some of the world’s greatest astronomers and physicists, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne and Saul Perlmutter. You can watch live streaming video of the events at the official website.
To help celebrate, we present Errol Morris’s 1992 film of A Brief History of Time (above), Hawking’s bestselling book. Morris weaves biography in with the science, interviewing members of Hawking’s family–his mother, sister and aunt–along with friends and colleagues, including Roger Penrose, Dennis Sciama and John Archibald Wheeler.
A Brief History of Time was Morris’s first film as a director-for-hire (he was recruited by Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment), which created some difficulties, but Morris was pleased with the outcome. He later said, “It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot.” The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.
(Source:OC)
Errol Morris: ‘We’ve forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world’
Writer and Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art and propaganda in photography. Drawing examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean war, cited in his book Believing is Seeing, he argues we’ve often underplayed the link between photgraphs and the physical world.
(Source:PP)
