Monthly Archives
July 2009 (4)
June 2009 (6)
April 2009 (1)
 Subscribe to this blog's feed
|
The Fog of War
By Brian Carpenter on July 12, 2009 9:09 AM
In 2003 Cambridge-based filmmaker Errol Morris released his film "The Fog of War", which turned out to be one of the most important documentaries of recent years, if only to shed light on the wars Robert McNamara helped orchestrate. This includes behind-the-scenes conversations about LeMay's firebombings of Japan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and before that, served under Curtis LeMay during WWII. He died last week at the age of 93.
I found Morris's treatment of the material to be moving and informative and I keep coming back to this film. I saw this film in the theater on its release and some time later ran into Morris with his son at Rodney's Bookstore in Central Square. I wasn't sure it was him. But I approached him anyway and asked him "Are you Errol Morris?" He seemed genuinely surprised anyone would recognize him. I told him I had just seen the film and was really moved by it and thanked him for it.
I've been following Errol Morris's work ever since I saw "The Thin Blue Line". I was particularly intrigued by his "first-person" interview techniques and I asked him about the Interrotron, which is a camera he built specifically to allow his interview subjects to look directly at him while also looking directly into the camera lens, thus appearing to speak to the viewer directly. I was just trying to figure out how it worked because I had been interviewing people for a documentary of my own and trying to capture that. (As he explained, on films prior to the advent of the Interrotron, he sat as close to the lens as possible, even if he had to sit in front of the camera operator.)
At the time of the release of "The Fog of War" the U.S. was deep into the Iraq War with W. and everything McNamara was saying could just as easily been said about what we were going through in 2003. I watched the film again this weekend on DVD and found it to be just as exciting as it was then, which is remarkable for the fact that the only person featured is McNamara. But the editing of the archival footage combined with Philip Glass's incredible score and McNamara's accounts of what happened makes for a riveting documentary.
Morris won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for this film. Well deserved. Highly recommended.
Recommended links:
A conversation with Robert McNamara and Errol Morris on "The Fog of War"
Op-Ed in last week's New York Times
0 Comments
|
Leave a comment