ERROL MORRIS
in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber
November 2, 2011
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re all here because you know who Errol Morris is, and
for the last few years, instead of reading long biographies, all the movies they’ve made,
all the books they’ve written, I’ve changed the way of doing it slightly by asking the
guests who come to write a seven-word biography, a tweet of sorts, a haiku if you’d like,
and so Errol Morris sent me these seven words, and he behaved very well, because he
gave me exactly seven words, and with these seven words I’d like to bring him to the
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stage. He wrote: “autodidact, necrophile, voyeur, filmmaker, opinionated writer,” and
finally, “father.” Errol Morris.
(applause)
ERROL MORRIS: Thank you.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A pleasure to have you back here.
ERROL MORRIS: Thank you very much.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Truly a pleasure.
ERROL MORRIS: I’m not sure how fast I can talk, and I don’t have a foreign accent.
(laughter) I hope that will be okay.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, when people ask me where my accent is from I
just tell them it’s affected. I mean, it took years and years to develop. Not easy.
ERROL MORRIS: It’s very, very good.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You like it?
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ERROL MORRIS: I do, yes.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like us to begin, if we could, with an image. I think
that’s quite appropriate given the subject tonight, and I’d like us to pull up the image
number nine.
ERROL MORRIS: Seen it before. What is it?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, what is it? I think that’s a very good way of
beginning, because in a way your book is a long investigation into “what is it?” What is it
that we are seeing? What is it when we open our eyes? What are we seeing, what are you
seeing, why did you choose this image?
ERROL MORRIS: I’m not sure where I first saw that image. It’s in Wittgenstein, it’s in
a philosopher who I read many, many years ago, Norwood Russell Hanson, in a book
Patterns of Discovery. It’s a familiar image from gestalt psychology, the rabbit and the
duck, the fact that the image can be seen at least in two different ways. If you like, the
ambiguity of the image, I would probably add the ambiguity of all images, and, yes, I
believe it also appears in my book.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re right.
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ERROL MORRIS: Because my book, if it’s about anything—and I hope it’s about
something—is about the ambiguity of images, how we interpret them in so many diverse
ways and also an attempt to investigate images, perhaps in a way that is rarely done. It’s
clear to people—if I’m going on at too much length, I can be stopped at any time, just
yell at me. When photography first came into existence in the beginning of the nineteenth
century, people were well aware of the fact that it was connected to reality. If you like,
there was this causal connection between a photographic image and the world in which it
was taken. Nowadays that connection is often lost and what this book tries to do is
reestablish that connection.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Is that what you mean, because I wouldn’t have used that
word myself to describe what you’re attempting for us to do when we look at images is to
see them as ambivalent.
ERROL MORRIS: Yes and no.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you want to leave it at that?
ERROL MORRIS: Well, I should let Paul interpret the images that I discuss probably
than doing it myself. The first essay in this book, Believing is Seeing, I’m talking about a
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conversation with a friend of mine, Ron Rosenbaum, about Susan Sontag’s book On
Regarding the Pain of Others.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number two.
ERROL MORRIS: Uh-oh. This is considered by many people to be the first iconic war
photograph, taken by Roger Fenton in the Crimea outside Sevastopol. It’s known as the
Valley of the Shadow of the Death because of the number of cannonballs that were
lobbed into this gulley. My friend Ron said, “You mean you went all the way to the
Crimea because of your annoyance with one sentence in Susan Sontag?” And I said,
“Well, no it was actually two sentences.” And yes I did go to the Crimea, well I went to
this place in the Crimea, to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as part of my
investigation into this photograph. By the way, I don’t know if anyone is interested. It
turns out that this land is for sale, (laughter) so I kept telling people, this is taking it a
step beyond what I could have ever dreamed. I can imagine reading the Twenty-third
Psalm, but imagine owning (laughter) the Twenty-third Psalm, the Valley of the Shadow
of Death time-shares.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number three.
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ERROL MORRIS: An irresistible idea. By the way, we could perhaps do a deal right
here in this room if anyone is interested. Yeah, there are two photographs. Fenton made a
mistake, I guess you could consider it a mistake. He took two photographs instead of one,
the camera’s mounted on a tripod, and he takes these two photographs which are, for all
intents and purposes, identical, save for the fact that in one of them there are cannonballs
on the road and in the other there are not cannonballs on the road. I call them “Off” and
“On.” This would be “On,” and if you want to see the previous—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Number two.
ERROL MORRIS: Yes, there you go. That would be “Off,” no cannonballs on the road.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And then we can look at five and six, just to give a sense of
the obsessive nature of the book. Five and six.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, the book is obsessive but I am not. (laughter) Make things
absolutely clear. So the claim was that Fenton had posed that second photograph. He had
posed “On,” and so I had this picture of Fenton lugging these cannonballs around in the
landscape and positioning them for whatever reason, but the conclusion was that the
second photograph, the photograph with the balls on the road, “On,” was posed, a posed
photograph, and as we all know, posed photographs are a big no-no. You’re not supposed
to pose photographs. How could he? So all kinds of crazy questions were raised by this
complaint. One writer, a German writer, Ulrich Keller, even suggested that Fenton was
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trying to convince people that he was in great danger by putting the cannonballs on the
road, it was a way of committing a kind of fraud.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We know this because there are letters, right, from the
cameraman who felt that maybe this was the last time he would take a photograph.
ERROL MORRIS: We know that this area was not a really great place to hang out, and
I read all kinds of diaries. This is like an early example of trench warfare. People were
dug in outside of Sepastoval and basically for months on end, people just hurled these
large cannonballs back and forth at each other.
I have one diary that’s not in my book that I adore, guy is writing in this beautiful
handwriting and it breaks off and the handwriting changes. Actually, the beautiful
handwriting is unreadable. The handwriting which is really awkward that follows is
completely legible and he describes how he was working at his diary and a cannonball
came along and blew off his right arm and so after a tourniquet being applied, he
continued on with his left hand.
No, no, this was a dangerous place. Maybe Fenton wasn’t taking these photographs at the
height of the artillery fire. Aside from all this, what interested me is how did Sontag
know all of these things? First of all, how did they know which photograph came first,
how did they know which was posed? Maybe the cannonballs were there and the second
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photograph was posed because the cannonballs were removed, and on and on and on and
on.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Plus, you, you—one of the criticisms you voice against
Sontag’s interpretation is that she discusses all this in a rather cavalier, quick way without
the photograph, without even giving us the possibility of looking at it carefully.
ERROL MORRIS: What I like about photographs, and all the photographs discussed in
this book, is that they’re wormholes into history. Think of them as a time machine. These
two pictures, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, what if I could walk into the picture
itself, look around, and ask myself what am I really looking at, what is really there, what
is the reality that this photograph is in part recording? And that’s what I try to do in each
instance. It’s the mystery of what we’re looking at, if you like, going back to the rabbit
and the duck. The mystery of what is it? I didn’t mention this in the book itself, but I
made a whole movie about the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, and two of the chapters
in this book concern those photographs. And this was another annoyance with the Sontag
book because she had said that the photographs at Abu Ghraib were obvious, that we
could all assume that we knew what we were looking at. Well, I don’t think we can ever
assume that we know what we’re looking at.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You have a strong claim against people who will say that
something is obvious.
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ERROL MORRIS: At least in this instance.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The least obvious thing is what it is obvious.
ERROL MORRIS: Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. So, yes, it’s an attempt to, if
you like, walk into a series of photographs, and examine what are we really looking at?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number eight. In many ways I think
this image, which is also included in your book in one of the chapters is another image
where we think at first we’re looking at something and then we find out that it’s
something else. And I’m particularly interested by that something else not only in terms
of how misleading the first attempt to understand this photograph was, but also what you
have to say about the very person holding up that photograph.
ERROL MORRIS: The photograph he’s holding is perhaps the most widely distributed
photograph in history. I often describe it as the iconic photograph of the Iraq War.
Someone took me to task for it, not my fault, really. A photograph becomes iconic for
many, many, many reasons. And I do believe ten, twenty, thirty years or more out, this
will be the defining photograph of that conflict.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why?
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ERROL MORRIS: An image of torture, resonant in so many ways. To many people it
appears to be a crucifixion scene, it has a kind of religious context, for many people a
symbol of the fall of American exceptionalism, and on and on and on and on, we could
talk about this photograph and its meaning to so many people. People in this country,
people abroad. What’s interesting is how controversial iconic images become, yet often
people don’t really try to investigate the circumstances of how they were produced. One
exception, of course, is the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, which has
been the subject of movies and books, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but usually these
photographs remain mysterious and controversial.
When I saw this picture, which appeared on page one of the New York Times, this is very,
very early on when I started writing for the Times about three years ago. I knew there was
something wrong with it because I was in the middle of making this movie about Abu
Ghraib, and I knew the soldiers who had been present when this photograph had been
taken, the soldiers who had taken many of these photographs, and I knew that the man
who claimed that he was the man on the box was in fact not the man on the box at all.
Why is any of this interesting? I mean, this is a question. Why should we care?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: More than interesting, why is it so urgent and important to
you?
ERROL MORRIS: Because investigating the world, trying to uncover the nature of
reality, seems to be the greatest of all enterprises. I believe it’s at the heart of journalism,
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what really happened, what really occurred, what was there. And these may seem like
very simple kinds of questions, but they seem to me truly important. Yes, it may be these
two photographs taken over a hundred and fifty years ago in a war that people scarcely
remember, but the issues involved in them are really significant issues that affect us as we
speak. It’s really no different a hundred and fifty years later. Also, I’m a connoisseur of
error. I’m fascinated by mistakes and why people make mistakes.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In this particular case, because you haven’t yet quite told
us the riddle here. There is a misattribution.
ERROL MORRIS: You know, the guy claimed he was the man on the box, and he
wasn’t the man on the box. Someone else was. He was, if you like, an imposter, although
he was there during that same period—he was a prisoner at Abu Ghraib—and many
people would say to me, “Well, wasn’t he tortured as well? Why is it so important that
you identify who that man was and you make the point that this was not him?” And my
answer would be the truth is always relevant, and finding out the circumstances of what
we’re looking at. One of the great dangers in photography is that photographs give us that
feeling that we know what we’re looking at. They give us that confidence that there’s no
problem here, when in fact there may be many, many, many kinds of problems. I’m still
not answering your question.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, no, we’re slowly getting in the direction of what I feel
such an urgent plea in your book, which is, well, first of all the experience as I’ve told
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you when we first spoke of reading this book—it’s an illustration of what Calvino talks
about when he talks about festina lente, “take haste slowly,” and you are deeply involved
in us—I mean you grab the bone and won’t let go. You make us look at these images and
analyze them with an attention to detail, an attention actually. You cannot skim this book.
I mean, you can, but the book is an attempt in some very strong way to—as there’s a
movement of slow food, there’s a movement of slow reading, and there’s a movement of
slow seeing, and though the book has as a subtitle “Mysteries of Photography,” it might
as well have been called “The Mysteries of Looking,” and the miracle in some way of
looking and at the same time the difficulty and nearly folly of believing that you might be
able to arrive at some semblance of truth and yet at the same time there is a real attempt
at dispelling the notion that truth in any form or fashion is relative.
ERROL MORRIS: Well, I don’t believe that photographs are either true or false. It
never has made any sense to me. Truth seems to be linguistic, about a relationship of
language to the world, not of a photograph to the world. Also, I believe all photographs
are posed, so if someone tells me that one photograph is more truthful than another
because it was or wasn’t posed, I think that’s very, very close to nonsense talk. When I
first started as a filmmaker, this is a contrarian element in me, to be sure, the dominant
idea about documentary filmmaking, it was this idea of purity, you were supposed to
observe, the so-called fly on the wall, but not interact. You weren’t supposed to touch
anything, “keep your hands off of reality, you can look at it, but you can’t touch it. A
handheld camera, available light. Don’t light anything, that’s also a no-no. And so for my
first film, which was Gates of Heaven, I decided I’ll light every single scene, instead of
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using a lightweight, handheld camera, I’ll use the heaviest equipment I can find, and I’ll
always put it on a tripod. Instead of observing people, I’ll have people talk directly to the
lens of the camera. In other words, take everything that I was told I had to do and chuck
it.
And one of the things that I hated about the idea most of all, call it direct cinema or
cinéma vérité, whatever you want to call it, I don’t really much care. What I hated the
most about it, what seemed to be its deepest and ugliest conceit, was that if you do all of
this, truth will result. That you will produce something that’s inherently truthful, as if you
have this meat grinder with “truth” labeled on the side of it and you grind the stuff up and
truth pops out, somewhat miraculously. Just a moment of reflection should convince you
that this is a really inherently stupid and odious idea.
Truth doesn’t come from any kind of style or method of presentation or production
modality. Truth is a quest. It’s a pursuit of something, and in its pursuit you can use
whatever is available, whatever is on hand. The only goal is to try to find something out
that’s real, nothing else. And so you could see this book, Believing is Seeing, is a
continuation of many of those ideas that started with me when I first began making films
years ago. What am I looking at? What I am looking at when I look at a photograph taken
in the Crimea in 1855? What am I looking at in these Abu Ghraib photographs taken in
Iraq in 2003 or this photograph that appeared in the New York Times in 2006?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What are you looking at when you look at image eleven?
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ERROL MORRIS: This is another example of a mistake the photographer made.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A better example, is that what you said?
ERROL MORRIS: Well, it’s—Arthur Rothstein is one of the FSA photographers
during the Roosevelt administration. Farm Service Administration, produced all of these
great photographers, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, et cetera. Rothstein was asked to
document the drought in the Dakotas, so he went out and he took this picture with this
cow skull and he took actually five others. He moved the cow skull around in various
different positions until he could get the lighting right and the photograph, more than one,
I think two of them appeared in newspapers across the country.
When people became aware that he had taken more than one and that the skull actually
had been moved, he was accused of posing and creating propaganda for the Roosevelt
administration, that the photograph was a fraud and one of the ironies here, you might say
that it’s an irony that’s part of the Fenton photographs as well. Are we saying that there
was no artillery fire in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, that no one was killed by
being hit with a fiery cannonball? Are we saying that there was no drought in the Dakotas
at the time that this picture was taken? In other words, the photographs were telegraphing
not the things which weren’t true, but which were true, and so it raises the question of
what makes them untruthful. If anything.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: If anything and what different levels of what one might call
fakery exists between the first example and this one, here the skull, at one moment, the
chapter you say wasn’t really moved much more than ten feet away.
ERROL MORRIS: That’s an argument I love—it’s not posed if you move it less than
ten feet, where they actually got the figure from is unclear. Nine and a half feet would be
okay, ten and a half feet not so good.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Is there a different level of—how might one say?—of
posing in the valley photograph and in this photograph? What you say in the first chapter
is that, because in a way one of the props for the book is, as you say, the reading, the
careful reading of Susan Sontag’s misreading, which ends up being a correct reading but
for the wrong reasons.
ERROL MORRIS: Something like that.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Something like that. And here, it may be posed, but then
again you say that all photographs in some way are posed.
ERROL MORRIS: I give an example it’s in the book of the photograph that was taken
by Fenton, and I imagine that when he took the photograph that there was an elephant
standing just outside of the frame.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number seven.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, there’s Fenton under that hood, and this is a very, very
famous photograph taken by Fenton. I ask the question what if there was an elephant just
outside of the frame and the elephant was about to cross into the image and Fenton said,
“No, no, no, no. Hold the elephant back, please. I don’t want an elephant in my picture.”
Yes, indeed. So someone intervenes, I’m not sure who, but the elephant is halted just at
the edge of the frame, and prevented from entering the image. My question: isn’t there
always an elephant just outside the frame, if you like? And the answer to my question
isn’t there an elephant always outside the frame is—the answer is yes.
Images by their very nature, they rip a piece out of the fabric of reality, they take a
swatch out of reality, and in doing so you don’t get to see above and below, you don’t get
to see left and right, you just get to see what’s in the frame, and by that very nature,
they’re posed. It’s hard for me to imagine a photograph, even a photograph that’s taken
inadvertently—someone falls over on their camera and hits the shutter—it’s hard for me
to imagine even a photograph taken under those circumstances that isn’t, in fact, posed.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at clip A please.
ERROL MORRIS: I should ask the audience here, don’t you think there’s an elephant
always just outside of the frame? You do, don’t you? I rest my case.
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(film clip from Psycho plays)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: One of the ways in which you described yourself was as a
voyeur and I’m wondering how this short clip speaks to you, this clip from Psycho, and
also the subject of it which, I think, Ed Gein, interests you slightly.
ERROL MORRIS: Oh, Ed Gein interests me much more than slightly. I interviewed Ed
Gein. Ed Gein, by the way, is the murderer that the movie Psycho is based on. This is a
Wisconsin story that goes back to the late fifties. It’s how I met my wife Julia, because I
was in Wisconsin interviewing Ed Gein (laughter) and I told her that I was interviewing
a mass murderer, but I was thinking of you. (laughter) So for me it’s a kind of a love
story.
And I had all of these Ed Gein fantasies, for better or for worse. I actually lived with Ed
Gein’s neighbors in Plainfield, Wisconsin, for a good part of a year, and he was a
necrophile, a grave-robber, cannibal, human taxidermist, he was very famous, the house
of horrors it was discovered where he had created all of these artifacts made out of human
flesh. The first time—I’ll stop this quickly—the first time that I went to Plainfield,
Wisconsin, I drove up from Madison and it was raining and the windshield wipers were
going and they actually had moved the main highway away. It wasn’t the Bates Motel, it
was the Plainfield Motel, but I ended up spending the night there, and for me it was the
perfect Psycho experience.
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Also, it’s at the very beginning of these crazy investigations I’ve spent a good part of my
life involved with. Crazy language that I’ve heard from people, crazy stories. When I first
met Ed Gein, which was at Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupon,
Wisconsin, I had asked the director of the hospital, a Dr. Schubert, whether there was—
from every investigation I’ve ever done, there’s been a favorite line. This is my favorite
line, I think so, from all of the stuff I did with Ed Gein. I asked the director of the
hospital, I said, “Is there any truth to these allegations that Ed is a cannibal?” And he
seemed appalled. He said, “Absolutely not. I discussed that very question with Ed and he
said although he had eaten human flesh many times, it tasted terrible.” (laughter) Make
of that what you will.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Actually, what do you make of it?
ERROL MORRIS: That the director of Central State Hospital, as crazy as Ed might be,
the director of the hospital was even crazier.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I showed that clip of Psycho not only because there’s a
fondness you share for the subject but also because there is a—definitely a framing
device that happens in it. And then you as you were showing—
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ERROL MORRIS: In the motel room, I did try to move a picture to see if there was
something behind, but there’s nothing there, there’s just a wall. It’s very disappointing.
Sorry.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, not at all. I think that’s really important. I mean, the
fact that in some way that what came to my mind when you were saying this. And I
believe you probably did look if there was a hole, in some sense you, part of what is so
powerful about this investigation is the fact that two lines from Susan Sontag can make
you travel, and that you want to go back to that place, to identify—as Rothstein did in the
pictures of the dust bowl and then later with those famous pictures, which I would like to
show thirteen, picture number thirteen, of the father and the son, and then picture number
fourteen, no forgive me, picture number thirteen and picture number twelve.
ERROL MORRIS: That’s a fairly amazing photograph.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think it’s incredible. Can you describe meeting this man
and who he is?
ERROL MORRIS: Well, I never met him. This is a photograph that was taken by
another photographer who had wanted to revisit. I’m not alone in this enterprise of people
going back to various locations, of trying to identify people. Photographs, since they do
connect us to reality in strange ways, and that they persist over time, there’s that
inevitable desire to reconnect with the people in a photograph, to figure out what
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happened to them and who they are today. This is particularly bizarre, I suppose you
could call it bizarre. This is one of the most famous, it’s certainly Rothstein’s most
famous photograph, of a father and two children hunkered down in a dust storm, and that
is one of the children as an adult. It’s not the actual photograph behind him. He had taken
the photograph and he had commissioned a painting, this is a painting of the photograph
that hangs on his living room wall and there he is. Where the photograph actually has
become a defining element in his life and a connection with the past, a connection with
his own history and with his own family. It’s very powerful in that way.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in a way nearly overemphatic. What you say in
several moments at the book is that a photograph can have such power that it nearly
overdetermines the way we view our own past.
ERROL MORRIS: It can define how we view the past, yes.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, I’d like to actually give the audience a sense of
how you describe this moment in the book. “A dust storm can be real or imagined. In one
sense it matters if the dust storm is real. In another all that matters is the image which
extends through time the memory of the storm. In the 1930s it was a plea for help. Now it
is a story of triumph over adversity. We see the father and his two sons hunkered down
heading towards the chicken coop. It is an image that defines the boy, his brother, and his
father. It becomes his connection with the father, who is no longer alive. It’s not just that
day that is captured in the photograph. It is how he has come to see his childhood, and
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how he has come to see an entire era. It brings time forward, but also compresses it,
collapses it into one moment. It is the idea that the photograph captures that endures.”
ERROL MORRIS: Did I write that?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. It’s quite extraordinary to me how ideas and beliefs collect
around a photographic image and how powerful they can become. One of the things that
still fascinates me about the photography, maybe it’s everything, is that attempt to figure
out the connection with the world and then that whole strange phantasmagoria, the world
of beliefs and fantasies surrounding an image, both. It’s what’s really so powerful about
it. And it’s about history, too. You feel the power of history in that image, sort of history
looking over his shoulder, the past, that becomes so defining and so much part of his life.
Yeah, I love that image, I think it’s quite extraordinary.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When you talk about history, you also talk about in the
passage I read, how the image itself changes over time and how at a certain moment it
describes something quite different than what we see in it now.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, it takes on—it takes on a different value, even though the
image remains the same. And even though it’s a painting of an image, we don’t even
have the real image there.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In reading you I was reminding of the preface that Henry
James wrote to The Aspern Papers, where he says, “I delight,” well, I have it here. I shall
read you the exact passage, if you don’t mind.
ERROL MORRIS: No, not at all.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good. He says, “I delight in a palpable, imaginable,
visitable, past. In the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries. The marks and signs of a
world we may reach over to, by making a long arm, we grasp an object at the end of our
own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean so stretching,
we find it firm and continuous.”
ERROL MORRIS: I hope I don’t have to comment on that.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, you don’t at all. But firm and continuous, those two
words, and also the delighting in a visitable, palpable, imaginable past.
ERROL MORRIS: Maybe, I mean that’s the essence of photographs. It occurs to me
just sitting here talking about all of this that it is all about history and our attempt to
reclaim the past. After all, I sort of imagine what people thought when they first could
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take pictures in the 1830s and the 1840s that somehow they had been able to preserve the
past in aspic. It was not forever lost, that it could be retained, and it may be that dream
has proved more elusive than we might like. There is something really amazing about
looking at the Fenton photograph or looking at an Alexander Gardner portrait of Lincoln.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Or at looking at this imagine fifteen if we could.
ERROL MORRIS: Or this image of these three children, this ambertype, as if somehow
we can actually reach out and touch the past. It seems so close, particularly when it’s the
photograph of someone that we have known in life or that is deeply connected to us, as if
somehow time really has been defeated. Which is one of the great dreams, it’s certainly
the great dream for all of us.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And when you say dream, by that you mean fantasy or
unattainable—
ERROL MORRIS: Dream that we can defeat time, time, mortality, you name it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The origin—I mean, I was mentioning Sontag, on your
prompt, how important that essay had been. But in looking at the image we’re looking at
here, three children, and nearly, nearly no record of it, but just enough for you to be able
to tell the story of this image. Nearly no witnesses.
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ERROL MORRIS: Well, there’s an Errol Morris in this story, a nineteenth-century
nefarious Errol Morris. This is a photograph, an ambertype that was found clutched in the
hand of a dead soldier, day one of Gettysburg, a Union soldier. Obviously these were his
three children. No name on the photograph, no identification on the corpse, and the
photograph was a way of reuniting—“reuniting” seems to be the wrong word here—
identifying who that man was who was on a field of battle, finding out the names, the
identity of those three children, and there was a doctor, a kind of quack doctor, Dr. Burns,
who got the ambertype and made it his mission to find the children. Now, you have to
read the book for the whole story, I’m not going to give away the plot here, but it’s
following the thread of a photograph, in this instance, forward in time. If you like, it’s the
flip side of many of the other stories. Dr. Burns, who ends up opening an orphanage,
where these children were eventually trapped. It’s the Dickensian photograph.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Did I hear you say that there’s an Errol Morris in this
story?
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, there’s Dr. Burns, the nasty Dr. Burns, who makes it his goal
to—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But I heard something else, and this may be because I want
to hear it, which would go to a very important point in the book, which is that so much of
what we see, as it were, insofar that we’re looking carefully, is determined by what we
think and what we know in advance and in some way you are trying to make us, to use a
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24
phrase I’ve always loved of Kierkegaard, where he says that the goal is to arrive at
immediacy after reflection, and in some way you’re trying, attempting, for us to do that
again and again and again and in some way when I heard you say there’s an Errol Morris,
I was also thinking of the origin of the book which you describe in a moving prologue
which is that in fact the book may have been started under the sign of a lost father, of a
father you didn’t know, and in some way photography, some photos you see of you as a
young boy, or of you and your father, who you do not remember, photography is a way of
bringing back, bringing back from the other side—
ERROL MORRIS: Again, yes and no. For me many, many photographs of my father
who I have no memory of, my father died when I was two years old, that feeling of
connection with him. I know what he looks like from these many photographs that I grew
up with, but do I really know him? I would say a feeling of connection and also a feeling
of mystery.
I should say about these three children, who were identified, the soldier’s name was
revealed as Amos Humiston, and I follow it forward, in the same sense you saw that man
standing in front of the photograph taken when he was a little boy with his father, I take
this story from 1865, 1864 through to the present time.
It turns out one of Amos Humiston’s relatives turned out to be a great expert on Mayan
hieroglyphs. He was one of the first people to decipher Mayan language. It’s my
optimistic note in the book, very near the end of my interview with him and very near the
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25
end of the book, he reveals that a mistake had been made in the calculations about the end
of the world—I know that this is on everybody’s mind here—and as it turns out that the
world is not going to end in the next twelve to eighteen months. We have at least eighteen
or nineteen years ahead of us.
(uneasy laughter)
ERROL MORRIS: For me it was an enormous relief.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At one moment a while back you said, speaking of your
own father through these images that you have, do you know him, and obviously you lost
him so early that you didn’t, but in a way it serves as a model for a lot of the book and for
some of your documentaries, which is, you know, how—how do we get to know people?
When we see them, when we hear them talking, how do we get to have them say
something that will reveal the truth and can we get to them?
ERROL MORRIS: That was one of my true annoyances with Ms. Sontag. To me there
are all kinds of mysteries, really fascinating mysteries. There’s the mystery of what
actually happened, that kind of thing. I spent two or three years investigating a murder in
Dallas, Texas. Got the guy who had been falsely accused and convicted of the murder, I
got him out of prison and got the real killer to confess, something that I am very proud of.
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Yeah, there’s the mystery of what really happened, but to me there’s an even deeper and
greater mystery, it’s the greatest mystery of all. It’s the mystery of what’s inside of other
people’s heads, and what people are thinking. When people—I should say when Susan
Sontag looked at these two Fenton photographs and then sort of imagined what Fenton
was thinking and why the photographs were taken and if they were posed, it was assumed
they were posed, why he posed them, and so on and so forth. It seemed to short-circuit
something that was really, really, really interesting, the process that we go through trying
to figure out what other people are thinking, what’s inside their heads and there is of
course that mystery.
I look at this picture, it’s quite an amazing photograph. I first saw it, I would have known
nothing about this story. I was reading Drew Faust, she is now the president of Harvard,
her book This Republic of Suffering, this really extraordinary book, and the Humiston
story was mentioned in passing, and as usual I decided to dig in, but, yes, it’s the mystery
of who are those three children, what are their names, how they fit into the world. And
then there’s a story about the inner lives of these people and yes, I guess this is also,
you’ve brought this to my attention, the story of how this photograph influenced and
changed their lives, and how their lives in many ways became defined by this
photograph.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, I mentioned earlier on the palpable past, and in
thinking about the way you go about trying, it’s an attempt, and you say it in the book, an
attempt that may be doomed but in more than one way we have to make sure to try again
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27
and again and again to be in pursuit of the truth and in pursuit of—have a shard of hope
in some way that we might be able to understand people’s thoughts.
ERROL MORRIS: The important thing to remember is that it’s all doomed. Even
though my Mayan expert moved up the date for the end of the world by a couple of
decades or so, he only postponed the inevitable.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know that reminds me of one of my favorite lines of
Kafka, who said, “There is hope, but not for us.”
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There is—in reading what I would call not the search for
lost time but in some way the search for geographical space, a search in some way to
retrieve a past, through photographs like that and to understand other human beings who
may be very distant from us, I was reminded of a play that Büchner wrote, when he was
twenty-three years old, just before dying, just after he wrote a dissertation on the nervous
system of fish, which I’ve always loved, this notion that the author of Woyzeck wrote a
dissertation on the nervous system of fish. He wrote in Danton’s Death. Danton said,
“Your lips have eyes,” and Danton says to Julie, “We know very little about each other.
We’re all thick-skinned, we reach for each other, but it’s all in vain, we just rub the rough
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28
leather off, we are very lonely.” And Julie says to Danton, “You know me, Danton,” to
which he replies, “Yes, whatever knowing means. You have dark eyes and curly hair and
a nice complexion, and you always say to me ‘Dear George,’” but he points to her
forehead and eyes, “but there, what’s behind that? No. Our senses are too coarse. Know
each other?” I’d like us to look at clip number three, please.
ROBERT MCNAMARA in The Fog of War: “I don’t fault Truman for dropping the
nuclear bomb. The U.S.-Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all of human
history. Kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one could criticize is that the
human race prior to that time and today has not really grappled with what are—I’ll call it
the rules of war. Was there a rule then that you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t
burn to death a hundred thousand civilians in a night? LeMay said, if we’d lost the war
we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I,
were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be
thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not
immoral if you win?”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How did you get him to say that?
(laughter)
ERROL MORRIS: Well, that’s a loaded kind of question. I don’t know if I get anybody
to say anything. I may provide some kind of opportunity for people to say things. This is
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29
so strange because I ended up spending quite a bit of time with Robert S. McNamara, for
which I am truly grateful, extraordinary man, an extraordinary opportunity for me. He
never really agreed to making a movie with me, it just kind of happened. He came very
close to canceling our first interview. He told me he would give me ten or fifteen
minutes. He ended up staying for over two hours and then coming back the following
day.
There’s an element of fortuity in all of this. That Sunday the New York Times Magazine
had run an article about Bob Kerrey, then president of the New School, Congressional
Medal of Honor Winner and the suggestion that he was a war criminal and McNamara, I
can’t even remember exactly how this happened, in truth. I think I brought it up, and we
started talking about the article. And McNamara said, “You know, it was unfair. Bob
Kerrey should never have been accused of being a war criminal. If anyone was a war
criminal, it was me.” And then I got him in the chair so I could start interviewing
immediately and this remark that was shown occurred probably in the first ten minutes of
the interview, it was very, very, very early on.
And we ended up actually going to the international criminal court in the Hague. Fog of
War was shown to the International Criminal Court and McNamara and I were onstage
answering questions, so very, very surreal. I’m very lucky by the way because as a
connoisseur of the surreal I’ve gotten a whole number of these surreal experiences under
my belt.
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30
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You pursue them, though.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, kinda. (laughter) So after this meeting we go down and
we’re talking to the archivist and librarian of the court and then McNamara says, he’s
showing him these statutes concerning war crimes. McNamara says, “You know, I wish
these statutes had been on the books in the 1960s when I was secretary of defense. And
the archivist looked at him and said, “Sir, they were.”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In the passage we saw why did you choose to have a voiceover at the end, to have his voice speaking and for us just to see—I shouldn’t say just—
but to see his face.
ERROL MORRIS: My cameraman said he was really disappointed in himself, because
it’s the cheesiest thing you can do when you’re photographing someone, you think that
it’s a pregnant moment so you move in very slowly as if to milk the moment for all its
worth, but he did do it and McNamara just sat there and I knew that phrase would fit
perfectly in that space, so I used it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’ve written about interviewing.
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. Well, interviewing is endlessly fascinating to me.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: To me as well.
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31
ERROL MORRIS: Have you ever done one?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, never. It’s a pursuit.
ERROL MORRIS: No, it’s a—I sometimes think of it as a kind of human relationship
in a laboratory setting. This is a laboratory setting of sorts.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, not quite the way you do the interviews, which you
do in a very specific way, with the camera set in a specific way.
ERROL MORRIS: Well, I have two cameras. I have my Interrotron, my interviewing
machine.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your wife came up with that term.
ERROL MORRIS: Julia named it because she liked the name in particular it contained
the word interview and terror both. McNamara’s the only person who’s ever objected to
the thing. When I asked him to sit down he said, “What’s that?” I said, “Well, that’s my
Interrotron, that’s my interviewing machine, sir.” And he said, “I don’t care what it is, I
don’t like it.” So I just motioned him to sit down and he never said anything about it ever
again, lucky for me.
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That line, by the way, when I was doing all this work on the death penalty, involving the
death penalty in Texas I had an occasion to visit the death chamber. It’s now been moved,
but it was in Walls in those days, a prison just inside the city of Huntsville, Texas, but
this is honest to God the truth, I always think of this line, when the condemned was
brought into the death chamber and was shown the electric chair, the warden would say, I
guess this was standardized, “please have a seat.” Now, I would always think of the line,
“No thanks, I’d rather stand.”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In an essay of yours which was delivered as a
commencement speech at Berkeley, an essay I really like enormously, about in a sense
trying to encourage the young students to think carefully and clearly about the
importance of journalism. You say, “Investigative journalism. I have often wondered why
we need the phrase ‘investigative journalism.’ Isn’t all journalism supposed to be
investigative? Isn’t journalism without the investigative element little more than gossip
and isn’t there enough gossip already?” And then later on you say something that is even
more important to me. You say, “There’s no correct way of pursuing the truth. You just
have to pursue it in the best way you know how. And this brings me to the central
problem of journalism. We often do not realize that history is perishable. It depends on
evidence,” it depends on what you and I have spoken a little bit about, “it depends on
clues. There are countless stories where evidence is lost, corrupted, or hidden and hence
our attempts to reassemble a picture of reality are doomed at best.
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“It has become fashionable nowadays to speak of subjectivity or the relativity of truth. I
find such talk ridiculous at best. Let’s go back to Randall Dale Adams. He found himself
within days of being executed in Old Sparky, the electric chair in Walls Unit, Huntsville,
Texas. There is nothing postmodern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being
and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you, you the young journalist of tomorrow,
being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn’t commit. Would you take
comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn’t make any difference whether you
are guilty or innocent? That there is no truth? ‘I think you’re guilty.’ ‘I think you’re
innocent.’ ‘Can’t we work it out?’ Well, the answer is, no, we can’t. There are facts.
There is a world in which such things happen, and the journalist’s job is to figure out
what those things are. Anything less is giving up the most important task around—
separating truth from illusion, truth from fantasy, truth from wishful thinking.” It’s
extraordinary.
ERROL MORRIS: I should stop talking. I think I write a lot better than I actually talk.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in a way the—your book is a long investigation into
how do we attempt in various, with various movements, to get closer while knowing that
it’s nearly impossible, to attain that truth.
ERROL MORRIS: Strive to figure things out, sometimes you’re successful, sometimes
you’re not. I suppose I shouldn’t be hawking a future book but I’ll do it anyway. I’m
trying to finish another book about a murder case that has obsessed me for over twenty
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34
years. I even visited the crime scene with my wife one Christmas morning. (laughter)
And told her, “Never say I don’t take you anyplace.”
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That was an improvement from Ed Gein, I suppose.
Maybe.
ERROL MORRIS: Maybe. But this is the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. It involves a
man convicted some forty years ago, well, he was convicted in federal court in 1979, the
murders occurred in 1970 and became quite famous, infamous, however you would
describe them. Janet Malcolm wrote a book involving this case called The Journalist and
the Murderer, a book called Fatal Vision, a TV movie, et cetera et cetera et cetera. The
case has really interested me for a whole number of reasons. I tried unsuccessfully to
make a movie about it and now that I suddenly realize I can write. I couldn’t write for
years, I had writers’ block, I couldn’t write anything. That’s going to be my self-help
book. From Writers’ Block to Graphomania in Two Easy Weeks. Why this case? Is—I
was fortunate enough to work on a case where there was closure. Every investigator, and
I’m an investigator at heart, in fact I worked as a private investigator for a number of
years, it’s the dream of getting closure, of actually, you know, getting the real killer to
confess, or showing that the fall guy didn’t do it, getting him out of prison. So, yeah,
that’s great, that’s fantastic.
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But what about cases that are recalcitrant, where you can’t work it out, they resist
closure? To me the most famous example, the example that everybody knows about, is
the assassination of JFK, where fifty years later the books get longer and longer. You
know, they started off being a couple hundred pages, now they’re a couple of thousand of
pages, people going through the evidence, arguing endlessly about the case, interpretation
of details. It has descended into a kind of strange morass. Why is that? What is it about a
certain kind of case that instead of closure we get this kind of excursion into some strange
unresolved world? There’s a line from Edgar Allan Poe, maybe my favorite writer,
certainly close to it. One of my favorite lines from the short story is “William Wilson,”
it’s his doppelgänger story, and Poe writes, “he was seeking”—this is the great line—
“seeking an oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Say that again?
ERROL MORRIS: “Seeking an oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.” Love the
line, for many, many, many reasons. Maybe because I feel it kind of personally and my
interpretation of it is that we’re surrounded on all sides by error, confusion, false belief,
seeking some kind of bedrock that you can sort of claim in this sea of uncertainty. And so
my book is called A Wilderness of Error and it is about investigating a murder, but I like
to think that it’s different from any other crime or true crime book that I’ve ever seen, at
least I hope it is. Why not make the hyperbolic claim? This is a good place for it, no?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s not a bad place for it.
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ERROL MORRIS: Not a bad place. That it does something different in the sense that it
obsessively—I think I can use that word—it obsessively goes through certain details,
asking ourselves what we can say we know and what we can say we don’t know about
this case. It takes you into the bowels of a murder investigation.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A line that I’ve always loved of Aby Warburg, where he
says that God is in the details.
ERROL MORRIS: He’s somewhere, maybe if he’s anywhere, maybe the details. I
guess the question is which details.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your approach in this particular book is precisely to pay, I
think, obsessive attention, meaning looking at a detail that is overlooked, paying attention
to something that may not have been paid attention to enough, and, in part, I think the
book is a manifesto, a real manifesto, for paying attention. It is never, it is never enough.
ERROL MORRIS: You gave me this essay by Carlo Ginzburg to read on clues, which
by the way I thank you for.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re very welcome, and you told me, when I told you to
read it, “Please! I love homework.”
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ERROL MORRIS: No, I love homework assignments, and it was fantastic. Go back to
this mess of photographs that you’ve been shown. Why do I like doing this? I’m sure that
we’ve all had the experience of you pick up a biography or you pick up a history, say a
history of World War I, or the Civil War, whatever. I pick up a biography and I ask
myself, “why am I reading about this person’s maternal grandparents? I don’t want to
know anything about them, maybe I should skip to page 197.” What a photograph does—
same thing with a history of war, you’re reading about the antecedents of the conflict, this
that, and the other thing, you’re being slowly marched progressively through a history of
this war. What photographs do is they short-circuit all of that, it’s another interesting
phenomenon. All of a sudden I look at that picture of the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
I’m right in the middle of that war, I’m in the middle of that war in some God-forsaken
place, a very specific place, a very specific time, and it allows me to write a story among
other things about that conflict, completely different from what I would have written if I
were just looking at it from afar. You know, it allows us to enter history at the level of the
particular rather than the general. That’s another amazing thing about them.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You use the word short-circuit, but it’s also there is no
short cut. You use that term again and again. You can’t—
ERROL MORRIS: It’s a different way. It’s a different way into history and here’s
another conceit, I believe, that’s at the heart of the book. By scrutinizing minutiae, or
what you would consider to be irrelevant details, you’re getting a much deeper
understanding of the whole.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Errol Morris, thank you very much. (applause)
(audio ends here)
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