Last night, documentary Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) stepped onstage and received this year’s Persistence of Vision Award. He accepted the award, he talked onstage with Professor B. Ruby Rich , he braved two separate Q&A sessions with the audience, and he screened his new film, Standard Operating Procedure.
And he was funny. “The San Francisco International Film Festival,– he mused as he accepted his award from Executive Director Graham Leggat; “it’s like an airport.– Then he recalled how The Thin Blue Line, which played the SFIFF 20 years ago, turned him into an “employed filmmaker– (it was his third feature).
The jokes continued throughout his talk with Professor Rich. When she asked about the curiosity that drives his work, he corrected her, saying it was desperation. When a cell phone went off and Rich asked audience members to turn them off, Morris told everyone to keep them on. He turned that into a running joke through the evening.
But he also got serious. During the first Q&A session, someone asked him to explain what makes a film a documentary (Morris has received some flack for including staged sequences and re-enactments). “You’re making a movie about the world–¦the pursuit of truth. You don’t pursue truth with a list of rules. You pursue it with whatever’s at hand.”
He explained his invention, the interrotron, which allows interviewer and subject to maintain eye contact while looking directly into the camera. His answer was long and rambling, with stories of putting his head against the lens while shooting his first movie and regrets about not patenting the device. “When you see the film, I don’t want you to pay attention to the film. Think about eye lines.–
Morris also told us that he’s not interested in getting his interview subjects to “confess– to anything. “I’m a Jewish boy from Long Island, not a Catholic priest.–
There were less jokes during the second, post-screening Q&A session. That’s appropriate. Standard Operating Procedure is a very serious documentary about Abu Ghraib prison. It asks what drives a decent human being to do horrible things, and suggests that the people tried in the courts and the media weren’t the worst perpetrators. It’s an excellent film, and I’ll tell you more about it when it gets its regular theatrical release.
Part of that second Q&A session concerned the controversies swirling around the film. One such controversy is the fact that he paid his interview subjects. He talked long about that, explaining that the movie would not have been made if he hadn’t done that, and he sees no reason why these payments would effect what they said.
Overall, an evening well spent.
Bayflicks 