First Person

August 23, 2005

In short: Errol Morris is the greatest documentary filmmaker in the world. This isn’t really just my opinion, but a general concensus amongst the thirty people that watch documentaries. Errol Morris: First Person is a twenty episode television series, now available on DVD, each episode a short documentary that compares favorably to his legendary feature work.

The quality tends to vary over the twenty episodes, but the very best pieces are riveting. The best episodes cover a serial killer’s wife, a CIA master of disguise, the world’s smartest man, the Unabomber’s pen pal, a giant squid hunter and in the very best episode, Dennis Fitch, the pilot that downed United Airlines flight 232.

It’s not fair to really spoil the stories, as you really need to see the stories unravel before you. Morris uses much less extra footage than his features, so the focus is really on these superintense interviews. Sometimes the subjects are experts, sometimes they are crazyfolk. Morris doesn’t really give it away and is good at letting the subjects hang themselves with their own rope or prove their worth. In one episode, several different people recount a murder, and you can see that people are hiding something, because they can’t stand to stare directly at the interrotron.

If you have netflix I’d say this is required watching, particularly “Leaving Earth,” the aforementioned episode about the pilot on that doomed flight. That hour ranks right up there with “Fog of War,” “Thin Blue Line,” and “Fast Cheap and Out of Control.”

Posted in Idiot Box